Gradient Controller - After Effects Tutorial

hey what's going on guys I'm Mike from mo box graphics comm and I'm going to be showing you in this graph Astoria how to get granular control over independent layers to easily adjust scale in this example scale in other examples you could use this you can do color but basically I'm there's been tutorials online on how to do this they're a little bit different actually they're pretty different and they use some different effects but I'm using the one from his guys named Dan from motion scripts calm he is a he's an expression master I see him referenced all the time online I found him from creative cow comm or.net but anyways I'll link this down in the description he uses this this this this expression which is sample image on these arrows right so this is his little tutorial and basically he took shows you how to how to find the color of the background at the position where the arrow is and then change the color of the arrow to that color I'm not going to be doing color I'm going to be doing scale but it's the similar you know similar type idea he's got the the code down here as well as a really good description on exactly how it works again this is a built-in function of After Effects sample image and you can go ahead and read this I highly recommend it you will learn a lot especially for motion script comm and this guy named Dan so all credit goes to Dan but I will be adjusting this script a little bit too for my needs because I don't need color so again I need like I need color but I'll show you what I mean in a second so we're just going to open up After Effects here I've just asked a square composition you can make yours whatever you want I'm not going to be going into super detail on this because you should know how to do a lot of the things that I'm showing you like centering up anchor points of stuff you don't you should know this by now so I'm just going to hold shift and kind of create a a ellipse I'm just going to set up the anchor point here throughout this tutorial I will be using this motion script from mount mograph it's really great I use it all the time I highly recommend it if you don't have it you know you can set up the anchor point and there in any way that you that you desire so obviously as you know there's two ways to adjust scale or of layer 1 is scale and the other one is in here in in size so my scale is going to be controlled by a separate layer it's going to be kind of like all of my all of my little circles will be controlled by a single gradient right so I'm going to need a way to control the size of them globally without having that I mean what if my gradient scales them down too much and I want to be bigger if they're locked away in us in an expression then it's going to be kind of a nightmare so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to go layer new null object and I'm just going to rename this to size control and basically I'm just going to while holding alt click on this size parameter and that will allow me to add an expression and I'm just going to let's see actually what I need to do first probably is add a slider control so I'm just going to search my effects and presets for slider control place that on to these size control and I'm just going to grab this pick whip from the expression under size that I got I'm just going to slide it up to slider so obviously went to 0 because the slider controls at zero but I'm just going to increase that so okay so now we have a way to control the size of these without having to mess with the script that we're going to create in a second so I'm just going to create a new background layer new solid I'm going to make it white hit OK and I'm going to drag a beneath and I'm going to rename this to gradient so coming in here I'm just going to search for ramp and this will pull up gradient ramp I'm just going to drag this onto the background here and I'm just going to show you kind of first thing about how this thing works so I'm going to open this up close these I don't really need to see those and I'm going to find scale in here I'm just going to hold alt and click scale so let me open up my script that I need to remember and so what I'm going to do here is I am going to add an effect here not an effect I'm going to add an expression here so again this is based on dance but i did adjust it a little bit so i'm going to do x equals so this comp so basically I'm going to say hey check out look in this composition for this layer gradient yours might be name different but again I'm pointing to this layer alternatively I could just highlight this and go to gradient and then I'm going to search not search but I'm just going to type sample image parentheses transform dot position so again I'm saying look at this composition look at this layer gradient layer now to that layer I'm going to be using a sample image the first parameter of this sample image is position so I'm saying look at the position of my sample of my shape layer one so look at the position of the current layer at this pixel size so one pixel by one pixel I'm going to divide that by two to get half a pixel by half pixel true and time so I need this time and I'm going to close that off but now what I'm going to do is this is my additional aspect is I'm going to just turn that to zero in brackets press enter do 100 times X comma X and bracket and it does not work so let's see okay there is clearly okay I spoke position wrong there so position was spelt wrong okay so now with this little shape I could drag this around here and it's basically pulling the dark level of the background so when this is all the way at the bottom right we're approaching one the we're approaching as white as you can get that's a scale of 100% because it's 100% white and if I drag this to the top it approaches zero percent scale so zero percent white which is exactly what I want so let me see just drag this down here so I'm just kind of to illustrate a little bit a little bit more I'm just going to create a text layer 8 so you could put whatever you want I'm just going to open this up and adjust the source text holding alt and I'm just going to copy in part of the expression and paste it in and you'll see here you need to scale this down because it's so much but this is all of the information we're getting from the color we're getting a four piece of for the size for array with with different colors here so if this gradient was actually like I don't know red and blue you'll see that the colors you know you're getting all aspects all four pieces of the color on that position but again since we're black and white we will have just you know they're all the same because it's there's no color piece of this so that's the information I'm getting from this what I'm doing here is I'm turning this into a string and then I'm using that number and for my X and my Y and I'm multiplying it by 100 because this is only 55 I need this to be 50 so that's kind of how this expression works okay so I'm just going to do that I'm going to select this gradient and I'm going to turn when I turn the effect of the gradient off so I could kind of deal with my shapes and create a grid here so dragging this into the corner here I'm going to use my size control and since this is white this is my base color so I'm just going to select a good size actually I'm just making the overall size my standard size using my slider control on my size controller so what I'm also going to do is to create a new layer layer new solid I'm going to search for grid and it just is just going to generate a grid for me on top and I'm going to change the color to black while I'm here I should probably let's see make it so I can adjust this a little bit more I'm just going to adjust this until I think that it's a good enough grid that looks fine and I'm just using this basically as a template so bringing my transparency down on my shape which I should probably rename to just dot I'm going to rename this to grid I won't need the grid later on but just locking those two layer so I don't actually grab them I'm just going to start centering these up so I'm just going to duplicate these all the way across and then duplicate them down you could do a polka dot type thing in in Illustrator but the problem is is that all the scripts that I just added I'm duplicating those so they're all being baked into these layers and also this size control controls all of them as well so that's kind of the benefit of doing it by hand it does take a lot longer to do the dots I did mess with some some use of CC ball action to get my grid but again you just don't really get the granular you just don't really get the granular control that that you're looking for because each ball is attached to the same layer and the scale of that layer would be adjust and not the scale of the ball so that's kind of the downside of doing it that way and so therefore it won't work so once these are all here I'm just going to duplicate these down and you know depending on you know the importance of this you may want to make this more perfect than I am but I'm just duplicating these down here and while I'm here I'm going to note that this is a very layer heavy effect and therefore it will slow down after effects so make sure you're saving it all the time and I don't know which tutorial this is I think it's tutorial 57 I think but it could be wrong so anyways just going to keep going here controlled D there we are actually I'm just going to delete this bottom layer because we don't need those and I'm just going to come down here to this grid and now I can get rid of my grid I don't really need it anymore okay so now have a polka dot layer here perfect I have my gradient which is also perfect and I'm going to need let's see I'm going to need a background layer so this gradient here I'm just going to duplicate it and I'm going to rename this to background I'm going to bring this beneath the gradient and I'm just going to delete the gradient ramp on that layer because I don't need a gradient ramp on the background so now lets me show you what this does boom when I click on that gradient you'll see that the closer it is to black the smaller it is and what's great about this is I can actually make that gradient invisible and you know it still works so the way you would animate this so I'm just going to select this gradient layer control shift C let me go move all attributes to new composition and it died and the reason why it died is because I'm going to rename this to just gradient because it does not know where that gradient layer went there you go because again these all reference a layer called gradient but that layer is gone so I'm just going to open this here and actually now that I think about it I probably don't really need this gradient ramp any longer what I'm actually going to be doing is I'm going to create a circle and it's going to drag this out and set up the Anchor Point and then Center it in the composition if I can figure out how to use my align tool now I'm just going to increase the radius of the stroke make the fills zero and I'm going to add a blur Gaussian blur I'm actually going to do fast blur because it's a little bit quicker I'm just going to increase the blur on that and what this basically black blur does is one it will allow this to scale gradually and the black won't be so black so it will be so tiny right so to control the size here if I open this back up and make that layer invisible you'll see I might think those are too small so I could actually open this up and decrease the transparency and that will adjust the scale so transparency of this adjusts this the scale level if i duplicate this make it really dark they get really tiny so I'm just going to bring the opacity down and opening this here I'm just going to go into contents ellipse so what do I need I need transform no I need size so I'm just going to set a size keyframe I'm not holding alt there's no need to hold alt when I do that I just control Z that away so to size keyframe set this to zero and then go to three seconds and bring that all the way out and I can kind of add some smoothing to this just like that and I could duplicate this layer and kind of move them over and I can change the transparency here kind of curious what happens when we get a couple of these kind of overlapping and then when I come back into this comp you'll see that we are going to have a very slow composition so I'm just going to save this again and I'm going to hit play and you'll see there that you get really really cool control over like a radial scaling and I think that it just looks really awesome it doesn't have to be circular right I mean this could come from anywhere I mean this could be a a linear wipe I mean it could be I'm just using radial like a radial effect but I don't know this just I think just looks really awesome and I don't know why but it just does to me so anyways guys I hope you did enjoy this video if you did please give this video a like subscribe and check out other videos on this channel anyway guys thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 174,781

Keywords: after effects radial scale tutorial, after effects scale gradient tutorial, advanced scale ae, scale controller after effects, radial scale after effects, scale gradient tutorial, how to scale layers in after effects, how to scale in ae, scale, after effects gradient tutorial, how to scale objects in ae, scale after effects, ae scale tutorial, scale ae, tutorial, after effects tutorial, motion graphics, mobox, after effects, mograph, Gradient Controller - After Effects Tutorial

Id: 1UaZNcVobhg

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2017