Fully Animated Gradient Texture in After Effects

this video was sponsored by Skillshare the online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more they've been generous enough to give a free two month premium membership to the first 500 viewers to sign up using the link down in the description thank you to Skillshare for keeping Moe Bock's alive and let's get into the video hey what's going on guys unlike for Moe Bock's and we're back with another video this time looking at this sort of radiant Sun looking thing I don't know it looks kind of crazy but it uses a gradient uses some displacement maps and stuff like that to kind of give a pretty cool effect in this example it looks like a Sun because we're using red and yellow but you'll see here that if you change the colors it could look totally different so we're just going to jump in here to after-effects and you'll see here that we have step one step two step three and step four already set up here if you want to download this project file you can over on our patreon and you could follow along but I'm going to leave these here so that way we could reference them but also if you download the project file you can see them as well so let's go ahead and get started by creating a new composition and I'm gonna name this tutorial and I'm gonna change the composition size to 1920 by 1080 so I'm just gonna go ahead and hit OK and kind of rearrange my workspace here and I'm gonna start by creating a new shape layer and I'm gonna use a rectangle that size is about right we don't really need to be too particular here but we do want to do is make sure it's set up into the center of the composition and I'm gonna move the anchor point to the bottom by using this tool by mount mograph called motion v2 if you don't have it you could press Y on the keyboard and move the anchor point to the bottom and I'm going to drag this layer up top and set a position keyframe and set a scale keyframe now one thing I didn't note here is that this composition is ten seconds long that's how long I'd like it to be it kind of helps if you follow along and that general narrative because as we start pre composing these things we're going to be messing with different composition links and this kind of creates a seamless link and I've already tested it so I'm going to go to the end here and I'm going to move this down and I'm gonna uncheck this little chain icon and I'm gonna set this one to zero so with this chain icon does is basically unlinked the x and y coordinates of the scale so you can see here that this is going to just slowly move down ever so slightly analysis way down it's going to shrink and I'm just gonna select all of these layers and I'm going to add a little bit of smoothing here with this mount mograph tool if you don't have it you can go into the graph editor and try to copy this graph for both the scale and the position and that just kind of makes it look a little bit more dynamic next things up I'm actually going to add a fill to this just like it easily change the colors later just like that and now I'm going to pre compose this by hitting ctrl shift C ctrl shift C let's try that again ctrl shift C you have the layer selected ctrl shift C and move all attributes to the new composition so now I have just this one layer going up and down and I'm going to duplicate this 5 times 1 2 3 4 5 so now I have 6 distinct layers and I'm going to offset them each by 2 seconds so I want to make this a seamless loop so I'm now going to trim this comp down into four seconds so I'm just going to go to four seconds in it and on the keyboard and just move this over one more frame and I'm gonna select all of these and move them until the top layer ends as soon as the composition ends and you'll see here that now this is kind of gonna be looping for us which is perfect I'm actually going to just pre-compose this again ctrl shift C and move all attributes layer which is perfect and now I am going to start making things look crazy so I'm going to start by creating a layer new null object and a layer new adjustment layer I'm gonna move the pre-comp between the two and for the null object I'm gonna add a slider controller and on the pre-comp I'm gonna add something called an HLS color balance strike that over now holding alt I'm going to select the hue and I'm going to type an expression here I'm gonna say index x this slider control value and so basically what that means is as I change this slider control I'm going to change the hue but what it also means is the hue will change depending on the layer number the index so the index of this layer here is to the index of this layer is 1 so since I have an adjustment layer on top I'm gonna actually do a parentheses around here and do index -1 because that'll fix any effects that this index that this adjustment layer will have on the colors so now I can just duplicate this like I don't know a bunch of times I'm gonna create 8 layers so one two three four five six seven eight and I did that by hitting ctrl D and I am going to offset these layers by approximately five frames so if you remember we're running at 25 frames per second and so this is approximately a fifth of a second that these are going to be delayed off of okay so that looks pretty crazy there so I need to actually just select all of these layers and just kind of move them over and then I'm also going to trim this comp down to two seconds now by hitting it on the keyboard and just moving that over and I'm gonna have to move this over until this loops pretty seamlessly which it looks like it's looping pretty seamlessly right now so the reason why the colors haven't changed is because the slider control on this is set to zero so if I set this to something like five you can see here now that we get that beautiful gradient so I might have to duplicate this a few more times basically I want there to be no gaps so I'm gonna hit control Z until I see all the beginnings of my layers again and I'm just gonna select all of these hit and hit control D and drag them below and move them over and I need to go back to my slider control and set that to five and we almost don't have a gap so instead of creating even more layers I'm just going to go into this layer here and adjust kind of these key frames because these key frames is what all of the layers are kind of basing themselves off of so I'm just gonna reset this a little bit I'm just gonna change it it's just slightly adjusted and so now let's see if we get away with so it looks like we got rid of the those lines there so again I'm going to move this down to two seconds and I'm going to select all of these layers and just move them over and we may have too many layers now but it's not really that big of a deal but while I'm here I should probably hit ctrl s to save my composition and I'm just gonna close these other pre comes out because I don't think I'm gonna need them anymore so that's what we have and I'm not gonna lie to you this is not that nice on your RAM but if I have 64 gigs of RAM so for me it's not not a problem but we are duplicating a lot of layers here so just an FYI so now I'm going to pre compose these again by hitting ctrl shift C and now we're going to start adding our cool effects so the whole point of making these like abstract loops is you start by making a cool pattern and a cool looping pattern and then what you do from there is you is you add effects on top of that and that kind of transitions that into something really interesting so it's a little bit hard to explain but the effects that I'm gonna put place on this well it totally different if this bass is different and so it's really cool is that you could change the base and you create something totally different and unique so for this composition I'm gonna make it actually eight seconds and here's the reason being is that this thing so it started from being just ten seconds long but since there's now there's so many layers it's so much more kind of effective there's so many more kind of craziness going on so what I do what I like to do is actually remap the time so if I right click and go to time and enable time remapping at two seconds which we remember from our previous comp made it loop properly I'm just gonna set a keyframe and I'm going to delete the last keyframe and I'm gonna move this over all the way to eight seconds so basically I'm taking the first two seconds and I'm just making it last much longer let me actually go into this layer here and on this adjustment layer that's what I forgot to do is add my fast box blur I'm gonna repeat on edge pixels and I'm just gonna blur this up just a little bit so now when I come back into here you see I get this gradient so I could have made this in many different ways and I'm sure there's a lot easier ways to do it a lot more CPU intently less CPU intensive ways of doing this this was kind of a roundabout way of getting here but basically when you're going through these like abstract designs oftentimes you're experimenting with different things and sometimes it doesn't just come by you know hey I want to do this one thing let me find the most efficient way of doing it I think that if I did this you know again and again and again I would find more efficient ways of making a gradient that looks like this but what I wouldn't have would be something that was you know so customized underneath the hood it just so happens that on this effect it looks better when this is blurred so before we go any further I need to tell you about Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more including classes on After Effects and cinema 4d I happen to like these which were created by some of the best teachers from our community but there are hundreds more like this one on other topics like this one on productivity which I could definitely benefit from what's great about Skillshare is that it's also more affordable than most other learning platforms out there as the annual subscription is actually less than $10 a month Skillshare was generous enough to offer the first 500 people a two month free trial when they sign up using the link in the description the premium membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts working in their fields so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love so what are you waiting for sign up and be sure to let us know which classes you found most useful by sharing them in the comments down below so now I'm going to add some effects here to make it look like it does in the final composition the first is Wave warp and so wave works really interesting because there's actually different wave types here and for this one I use smooth noise because I think that it works the best and I changed this wave height to like something like 400 which creates really crazy up-and-down waves and then the wave width - maybe like 180 and then I offset the direction and no I leave the direction at 90 but then I changed the wave speed to zero and you know you can change the phase of there if you want but anti-aliasing is set too high and then the other effect that I add on here is called turbulent displace which is a fairly common effect and I set this amount to some around 200 the size about 75 and I increase the complexity to you know something like 10 so that is right there kind of what you're now recognizing from the original piece of the video so I'm going to set this to high as well judging from what kind of effects it has it doesn't look like it makes that big of an effect so I'm gonna set it to leave that to low and let's see what this one does so it looks like that doesn't change much either so I'm gonna set them both to low actually I think that'll save some CPU cycles so let's see what this looks like all right one way to make this a little bit more interesting is changing the evolution on this turbulent displacement so I'm going to go into the evolution options and click the cycle evolution and set a keyframe for the evolution at the beginning and go to the end and set a keyframe for one full circle and what we're gonna get is we're gonna get something that is a lot more dynamic and interesting okay so we're almost there so now we're going to look for an effect called CCE sphere drop this on top and we're gonna just change some of the lighting conditions here I'm gonna change the light intensity to zero and bring up the ambient temperature and then bring up the radius so I'm going to set this composition size by changing the composition down to a thousand by 1000 because I want to share this on Instagram and I'm gonna bring the radius down a little bit so now we get something that looks really similar to what our kind of video or our kind of step for was our final step on the what you saw in the beginning so we did a lot of things here to make sure the colors looked interesting but what you will notice here is that if we go into some of these deeper layers back to this original one with this color we could do some interesting things so when I select this tutorial layer and I hit this little lock icon it will actually lock this here so I can open up this composition and change the colors and you could see that how it affects that composition so blue tends to look a little crazy that blue looks a little bit better see green probably something crazy orange probably really similar to what we had let's go back to this kind of blue and let me show you another thing that we did that you might not remember on this null object we set the the gradient here to be based on the index layer as well as this slider so I can increase this slider and increase the kind of difference between each layers colors so you can get something that looks really interesting like this purple and blue and then again if you go back to the original and you change the color to let's say purple then you get even different colors I experimented with this by just cranking this up like really high and you get kind of like a cool rainbow effect this could be really interesting if you're doing a video where let's say you want to like say yeah this planets composition is you know iron and water and this and that and this kind of is a cool spectrophotometer reading of kind of a planet colors you notice here at the bottom there's a little bit of clipping so I'm just gonna hit control Z and just kind of back up to let's say this coloration here because I think that this looks interesting and I'm gonna run with this one for this final composition and I'm just gonna kind of close up these again and I'm gonna add a layer new solid and I'm just gonna make kind of an off black background add a layer new adjustment layer on top and add noise set this to like eight so we had some cool noise to this and then you know I mean you can you can go crazy now and do other interesting things like add some some light bursts let me add that add the noise on top this is a little bit more interesting if the coloration that you chose at the beginning was let's say red or maybe an orange and then your offset was maybe set to five because now that kind of looks like a Sun there's a lot of clipping here going on and obviously you can mess with some of the settings to get a different clipping effect but that's kind of interesting it kind of looks sort of like a Sun but I'm just gonna hit control Z and just jump back to without that light burst because I think that this just looks really interesting as is and I'm gonna go ahead and just render this out anyways guys thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please be sure to follow the link down in the description to our patreon account where you can download this project file or for the link to Skillshare anyways guys thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 34,679

Keywords: mobox, after effects, tutorial, vfx, motion graphics, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, film making, animated background, abstract after effects, motion graphics beginners, ae, beginner after effects tutorial, animated background loop, loop animation, animated loop video, video loop, motion background, loop, gradient animation, texture animation, aniamted textures, software, vfx tutorial, tricks, after effects for beginners

Id: bAlNA9JTjV4

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019