Create a Retro Wave Looping Background in After Effects | Motion Graphics Tips

hey guys Charles Jagger with premium beat.com and this tutorial we're gonna create a retro wave background loop entirely in after-effects with no third party plugins let's go ahead and preview the finished effect [Music] now Before we jump in if you guys want to follow along you can download the free project file from the blog post of a link for that in the description the project file includes a few extra assets and some bonus scenes you can explore as well alright let's jump over to After Effects now and start out by creating the looping floor grid that's so common with these retro wave scenes alright so let's create a new composition I'm just gonna name this main scene and for the preset here I'm gonna select the HDTV 1080p 24 frames per second and for the duration I have it be 4 seconds and 5 frames so the loops gonna be 4 seconds on a few extra frames in here just in case I need to put a keyframe a little bit further down the line and let's go ahead and click OK and as I mention we're going to start by creating the grid so I'm just gonna right click here I'm gonna go to new and select solid and I'm going to name this floor and for the width and the height actually want it to be 1080 by 1080 so perfectly Square and we can just leave it at black and I'm gonna click OK I'm going to turn on transparency down here just we can kind of see that against the black background and what we want to do now is make this 3d someone have that layer selected and check on the 3d checkbox there and I'm gonna select the rotation tool up here we're gonna rotate this on the x-axis I'm gonna hold shift and that'll just snap that there so it's perfectly horizontal and now let's go ahead and hit p on the keyboard with that layer selected that'll bring up the position so we can see where we can place this in 3d space just to make this exact like the example loop I'm gonna move down here we're gonna have it at 960 and then the next value over we're gonna do eleven hundred and sixty two that'll move that down and then on the z-axis go ahead and put that at 4356 now let's go ahead and s on the keyboard and it's gonna bring up the scale what we're gonna do is in front of dragged us and scale this up so it kind of completely covers that floor area so I'm gonna put this at something like 744 now just make sure we can't see those edges where it cuts off there for the floor so it's just outside of the composition so it's perfect for what we need and now with that floor layer selected I'm gonna hit ctrl D command D on a Mac and I'm actually gonna duplicate that so now we have two copies and this is because we'll come back to this a little bit later one of these copies we will go ahead and pre-compose that actually be the grid so with that selected come here to layer and come down to precompose then we're gonna name this grid and we want to select to move all attributes into a new composition go ahead and click OK and now let's go and double click into that grid composition and now it's going to select a floor layer and we're gonna go to the effect we're coming out to generate and grid that's gonna add that grid now I can go ahead and turn off that transparency there's now we can actually see the grid on-screen and now to actually animate this grid let's apply the offset effect so come back up here to effect we're gonna come out to distort you're gonna see the effect offset you can see as I offset this that's actually gonna animate the grid so when that control Z to undo that so let's move to the very beginning of this composition let's create a keyframe here for shift Center to it's gonna be at 540 by 540 let's move all the way down here I'm gonna move down to the 4 second mark in order to get this to loop properly we need this value here basically shift in values of 540 that just makes that really simple and what I did for the original example was on the second value down here at the four second marks go ahead and type in 2160 and now if we go ahead and scroll through here we will see this will loop if we want to double check that just set the out point right at four seconds and go ahead and hit 0 on the numeric keypad and that will do a ram preview and you can ensure that this will loop now we can see that is looping seamlessly and now let's add some color to this grid so I'm gonna right click up here and go to new solid we'll just call this grad this is gonna be what we apply our gradient to we go ahead and select to make this comp size and click OK now with that solid still selected we're coming to effect come down here to generate and we're gonna select gradient ramp and I'm gonna have this top color be blue and this bottom color it'd be more of a pinkish color I'm gonna move that gradient layer below the floor we're gonna come over here to track mat and we're gonna select luma matte so now we can see how that's kind of matted on to that grid and I'm gonna come here on the gradient ramp layer with that layer still selected on the y-axis here I'm just gonna pull this down you're gonna see I just make sure give that right around that grid level there so we're really seeing that full gradient colors come through here you can see where that point is so I just wanna have that point just above basically where the end of that grid is and you can adjust this to taste depending on what you're wanting to create well let's jump back over to our main scene and I'm gonna go ahead and toggle off the transparency here as well so now what we want to do we have the grid composition selected we need to duplicate that two more times to give us three copies so I'm gonna hit control D twice there again command E on a Mac now we have three different copies on this bottom copy let's go ahead and solo this really quickly we're gonna apply the effect then under blur gonna apply a Gaussian blur and I'm gonna set this to be about forty you know just see this gonna kind of give us a little bit almost like kind of like a glow effect it's gonna be underneath the initial grid go ahead and check on repeat the edge pixels now we go ahead and unsolo that so we can't notice two inch of a difference if we zoom in here really close you kind of see a little bit of a haze around this grid on these two upper copies we're gonna set those to be add so I'll set that one to add and this one to add as well now just really kind of help punch up the brightness kind of give it more of like an inner glow effect on that grid now let's start creating the looping stars animations in the far distance of the background and the first thing we need to do for this I'm gonna right click again outside here and create another solid will name it stars make sure its comp size and go and click OK and I'm gonna move this down to the very bottom of everything here even below the floor let's go ahead and solo this for the time being and we need to apply the effect fractal noise so I'm cover to effect come down here to noise and we're gonna select fractal noise basically we want to do is add a lot of contrast to this and make this kind of emulate stars so we're gonna do here is go over to contrast and I'm gonna change this to be 880 and then for the brightness we're gonna set this to negative 280 and then come down to the complexity we're gonna bump this up to 20 let's come down here finally under the sub settings and under sub influence percentage let's go ahead and change this to be 124 so now you can see we're really getting a starry atmosphere based from this fractal noise now we want to loop this in a nice way we can do that pretty quickly is using the offset effect again so let's come back up here to effect and then distort we're go to offset now you can see if I go ahead and shift this here on the y-axis we're seeing basically we're kind of getting a seamless loop here we can use with the offset effect somebody ctrl Z to undo that so they and this is at 540 so let's move over to the very beginning I'm actually gonna have this start on this one at 0 so I'm going to put that at 0 so it's at the very top you can see let's go ahead and add a keyframe for the shift Center too and move down here directly at 4 seconds and we're gonna bring this down to 1080 so now it should be the very bottom and these frames should look identical we can see here if I drag this through and just to double-check this will just set the out point here at right at 4 seconds hit zero on the numeric keypad and we can do a Ram preview and see if this loop seamlessly and that is looping seamlessly it looks good really quickly if you do want the stars actually move in the opposite direction just reverse those two key frame values that put in for the offset and it will loop in the opposite direction now we can go ahead and unsolo this now and we can see the stars and they're moving but they're kind of looking very flat one-dimensional and if you want to kind of emulate something that looks more like a kind of a spherical shape as they're kind of going past what we can do is we can apply the optics compensation effect to the star so with the stars layer selected come here to effect come down to this Stewart we're gonna find optics compensation and it's a pretty cool trick we can do with this so we want to check on reverse lens distortion we want to check the field of view here to be at 95 and you're gonna see now how it kind of punches that up again even a justice you can kind of see what it's doing there so gonna leave that 95 and as we scroll through here we kind of can see it almost makes these stars around the outer edges move a little bit faster it kind of gives it more of like a spherical appearance it's a nice way you can kind of trick this to make it look a little bit more like a rounded you know global shape now let's go ahead and create the centerpiece for our background loop and that's gonna be the iconic 80s style Sun so to start with the sun's go ahead and create another solid so I'm just gonna right click here go to new solid will name it Sun and for this one we want it to be 1080 by 1080 so perfectly square go ahead and click OK and we can solo this for the time being as well let's start by applying a gradient ramp to this we're go to effect generate and gradient ramp and let's have the top color be orange and the bottom color be a purple color click OK now let's go over to the masking tool and with our Sun still selected we're gonna select the ellipse tool I'm just gonna double click on that and then we'll automatically create a perfectly circle mask here for our Sun this is a little bit big we wouldn't unsolo this it's a little bit large so I'm actually going to hit s with that layer selected for scale I'm gonna scale this down I think somewhere around probably like 63 should work pretty good for this and to give the Sun a little bit more life so it's not quite as static let's add some lion animations that will animate from the horizon on top of the Sun now in order to do that we need to actually create a matte effect so it's gonna actually have a matte loop that'll affect the Sun and we're gonna come here to our project it's going to create a new composition here we're gonna call this matte it'll be 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames per second for the duration I want to bump this up just a little bit so we have little more wiggle room here I'm gonna set this at 10 seconds and going to click OK and this is gonna be a luma matte so it's gonna have black and white values so first went to right-click we're gonna do a new solid and this will just be our white background so I'll just call this white BG make sure it's comp size and for the color I'll just make sure it's solid white and click OK now let's create another solid we're just gonna call this black bar this will be the animated black bar that goes through here go ahead and change the color of this to be solid black and click OK now the first thing I want to do is I'm gonna grab this bottom middle point of the black solid I'm gonna pull it up so you can see we're kind of rescaling this and I want to set this to be right about this size here so about as big as the black bar just gonna be and now what I want to do is I want to snap this I'm gonna move it down here the very bottom off-screen so if I click on it now hold cunny or that top point we can actually snap it here you'll see at the bottom it'll snap to the bottom of that white background layer let's go and hit P on the keyboard for position we're gonna create a keyframe for that there and we're gonna move down to seconds so find the two second mark here and I'm just gonna bring this up and snap it to the middle right there so now this should be animating over two seconds and I also should mention really quickly if yours is not snapping like this just make sure you have snapping checked on right here at the top and After Effects so now we have this animation going just as we like it now we need to adjust the scale or animate the scale as well so it disappears when it gets up here to the middle so we're gonna do here is I'm gonna hit S on the keyboard for scale it's going to create a keyframe there where it is right there then right down here is a two second mark we basically want to have this becoming visible so just scale it down where it basically becomes invisible now after we set that second keyframe if we go ahead and scroll through here we should see it rise up then it kind of gets smaller and smaller and rising it gets here in the middle it dissolves away so what we want to do with this black bar now with it selected we need to pre compose this so come up here to layer and come down to pre-compose we'll just name this black bar animation and make sure you move all that treats into a new composition and click ok now let's double click in that black bar animation composition and all we need to do in here is just right click and go to composition settings and we want to change this duration for this one to be right at two seconds so I'm gonna type in 2 seconds and one trim this off even at the end there so it's two seconds exactly put and click OK let's jump back over to our matte composition so now we can see we have this composition for the black bar animation and it ends right there at two seconds now we want this to continue to lose throughout because again our original loop is going to be four seconds long and this is only a two-second animation so this gets a little bit complicated but try to follow with me here I'll keep it as simple as possible what we need to do here is we need to right-click on this black bar animation and we're gonna come up to time and select enable time remapping and now we have that time remap going on here we're gonna see we have this little stopwatch hold alt and click on that stopwatch I'm just going to basically bring up the expressions and you're gonna see this little circle with a triangle here for the expression language menu click that come over to property and now we want to select the loop out type and then it's going to say cycle number keyframes at 0 so go ahead and click that and then I'll add that expression just click away from it now and in theory if that worked correctly we go ahead and scroll through here and we will see this animation continue to loop and so that's perfect for what we need now obviously we only have one bar animating right here um we'd like to have basically four of these going at the same time so we're going to need to duplicate and offset this a little bit so what we're gonna do with our black bar animation selected I'm gonna go ahead and hit control D three times command D again on the Mac to make four different copies of that black bar animation now they're all perfectly lined up as it is right now so again if I scroll through here they're all basically in the same position so I'm gonna show all the keyframes for this just so we can have a point of reference so I'm gonna hold shift and select all of these I'm just going to hit you on the keyboard and that'll show us those keyframes they're just we can kind of see where these are being offset at and so what I want to do is offset each of these by half a second so this bottom one we can leave as is and so it's like the second one here we're gonna move over to half a second so 12 frames I'm just going to pull this over so that it starts right there at that half second mark now let's move over to one second and the next copy above it we'll move it down and then let's move over to a second and a half and we'll grab that top copy and move it over so now these are all kind of staggered like this and this is perfect if we move further down we'll see it's looping seamlessly now the way we want it but at the very beginning this doesn't look correct because they're all kind of coming on-screen so just move over to the two second mark and we're gonna hold shift we're gonna select all the black bar and and with all of those selected hold alt front bracket and that will basically cut all those you can see the word they all start at the same place you can still see these keyframes here to kind of give you an idea that everything is still in the right position and now we just want to click on one of these we're going to drag them all over so they start right there together and in theory if that's all correct this will perfectly loop and just to test this go ahead and set the out point here and I'm go ahead and Ram preview this to see if this is all looping correctly and now it is so that's working perfectly again just make sure that these keyframes you can see that is kind of a visual reference how they're offset there this is the most complicated part of the tutorial so hopefully just bear with me on this one but now we've got that completed let's jump back over to our main scene let's go ahead and drag in the Matt composition and place it above the Sun layer here in our main comp and what we do with the Sun selected come over here to track Matt we're gonna set this to be luma matte and so now if we go ahead and select our matte layer hit s for scale and I'm gonna scale this down a little bit we don't want to clip the Sun off at the top there but it's okay if we clip at the bottom because the bottom of the Sun is covered up by that floor grid so I'm gonna bring this down a little bit and we can go ahead and click on the mat hold it shift and I'm just gonna drag it up just so again you can see where it's gonna clip at the bottom there so just make sure that's below the floor you just want to clip off the top there so now if we go ahead and scroll through here we can see we getting the bars animating on the Sun and I'm going to ramp prove this to make sure everything is still looping perfectly so I've got the out point directly at four seconds here I'm gonna hit zero on the numeric keypad to see if we got a seamless loop and this looks perfect everything is looping seamlessly here now another thing we can do for the Sun is a taillight sweep just kind of accents it really nicely so I'm gonna select the Sun layer coming up here to effect go down to generate we're gonna select the CC light sweep I'm gonna set the sweep width here to be 100 so it's a little bit bigger and the intensity will bump that up to 50 now what we want to do is we need to position this let's come back over to the very beginning of our compass position and select the position of the sweep and move it all the way off the edge so you can't see it and for the center we go ahead and create a keyframe there now let's move over to four seconds exactly and just make sure this goes all the way across the Sun over the other side and it's completely disappeared and in theory there we should now have a loop with that as well it's been go ahead and scroll through and check that to make sure it is looping so that's how easy that is to add and one thing is optional but I have included it with the project file is an image of kind of some low polygon mountains I have it's coming to the project file here and under extras we have some mountains I'm just like this mountains too I'm gonna drag this in I'm gonna place it directly behind the floor layer but in front of the Sun so now we can see those mountains and if I go ahead and click and hold shift I can move them up and down here just for the position and remove them down a little bit so just kind of right there at the horizon line now if you wanted to create your own shapes if you have another image that you want to use with some trees or something like that definitely feel free to use your own images here make it your own if you want to change the color of these mountains one that you can do is with them select it come over to effect an undercut correction go ahead and select the hue and saturation then all you need to do is adjust the master hue here you can see that will actually change the colors of the mountains actually like them at that teal color so I'm going to delete that effect let's add a little bit of a glow to them so with the mountains slightly cover to effect come down here to stylize and we're gonna select glow now I just want to punch these up a little bit so if threshold I'm gonna set it at 15% for the radius I'll set that to be 36% and then for the intensity I'll bump that up from one to two point three so again just kind of give us a little bit more of a retro glow on those mountains now right now everything looks a little too clean on our retro wave background so let's add a VHS look on top of everything so to give us that VHS look let's first is right-clicking to a new adjustment layer I'm gonna make sure this is above everything else in the composition I'm just go ahead and hit enter and name is VHS and with that layer selected let's go ahead and add the effect lumetri color so go to color correction we're gonna select let me treat color there's several options in here so let's start with the basic correction so I'm gonna set the contrast here to be 55 and for the whites I'm gonna set this to be negative 55 now let's move down here to the creative options here and I'll close off the basic correction so if we're faded film I'm gonna set the set 30 for the sharpen I want to say this at negative 70 so it's effectively gonna kind of blur everything together there and then for the vibrance I'm gonna set that to be a negative 30 as well now it's going to close up the creative options and under the curves options here we can offset these a little bit to kinda just muddy up the colors so I'm gonna start with the luma curve what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring it down a little bit click it at the top bring it down and just move it back over so it kind of lines up to everything so it's kind of clipping there as a top now for the green curve I'm actually gonna move it over a little bit so kind of getting a little bit of a yellowish color tone on everything and then for the blue curve I'm gonna bring it down a little bit again you can feel free to do this any way you want to kind of create your own look this is what I typically do for a VHS style look it's going to close up the curves options finalized come out heard have been yet and under the amount here I'm gonna add a little bit of a vignette maybe said this is it like negative one so we're getting some nice vignetting here on the edges so you can already see if I toggle this on and off what a difference that's making here to kind of give us that retro vibe now we can muddy up the colors a little bit by using the channel blur effect so again what the adjustment layer still selected we cover to effect and we're gonna go to blur we're gonna select the channel blur and I wanna change the blur dimension here to just be vertical and for the red blurriness I'm gonna set it to be 22 you can see how that's gonna kind of blur and fringe the colors there a little bit it's going to add a second copy of the channel blur effect it's going to effect blur channel blur and now this one we're gonna change to just be horizontal and on the red blurriness I'm gonna this is like 10 and then on the blue blurriness we'll bump this up to be within like 14 and something that's also pretty common on VHS looks is it has a little bit of an over sharpened it's blurry but it's almost like it's over sharpened at the same time and so in order to create that effect we're gonna use an unsharp mask so comfort - effect and then again under blur we're gonna select the unsharp mask effect let's bump up the amount here to be 100 and then under the radius this is really gonna make it pop I'm gonna set this at 12 now you can see how that's really kind of over sharpened but again it's not super clear with the clarity we're gonna give me a nice retro look on this finally just to top it all off let's give it a little bit of a VHS shake so I'm gonna right click here and do a new adjustment layer and we'll just go ahead and name this shake and with that layer selected we're gonna apply the effect distort transform and what we want to do here is under the scale I'm gonna set this to be 101 so it's gonna scale it up just a little bit that way we don't get any black edges when this kind of does the wiggle and then for the anchor point hold alt and click on that stopwatch option click on a Mac on that stopwatch for the anchor point and it's gonna pop up down here what we're gonna do is we're gonna type in wiggle and then open parentheses seven then we're gonna do a comma and then three and then close parentheses so again that's gonna be seven times per second it's gonna move three pixels so we can just click away from that now and now if we couldn't kind of scroll through here we'll see we're getting a little of a subtle shake on everything here so again I'm gonna do a quick Ram preview with that ending right at four seconds just to make sure this is seamless alright guys hopefully you enjoy creating this retro wave background loop and as I mentioned before make sure you download the project file which includes a few assets and some bonus scenes even some that I'm not showing on here just so it'll be a surprise and as always check out all the other tutorials we have from other creators on the premium beat Channel and I'll catch you guys on the next one

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 74,487

Keywords: After Effects, Retro Wave, Synthwave, Chill hop, Retro After Effects, After Effects Animation, AE tuts, tutorials, 3d animation, 2d animation

Id: ifrRytSc0Lk

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020