Grid Experiment Tutorial

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to take a look at recreating this grid effect right inside of After Effects so let's go and take a look at what we're going to be creating alright so pretty cool let's go ahead and get started now originally this design was actually created as a pitch for this company called LinkedIn basically it's a way to keep in touch with your professional friends through the process of sending non-stop spam messages to you so it's really cool really clever so I had this idea to create this title and the network represents all the connections and stuff like that but instead of sending everyone a video we would send a single frame of the animation one day at a time and then after you know a few months they could put it together and they could watch it but unfortunately the LinkedIn guys weren't a big fan they frankly they wanted to send more emails and I wasn't enough for them so anyways alright let's go ahead and get started create a new composition we'll make this ten seconds long and we'll call this the grid and hit OK so the first thing I want to do is create the basic grid design and the way we're going to do that and create a new solid and we'll call this grid and then let's come over to the effects and presets and type in lightning and here we have advanced lightning we'll drop that out here now we have a cool bolt of lightning but instead of using it to create lightning we're going to go ahead and play around with the settings and try to create some kind of futuristic grid so let's change the lightning tie - bouncy and this just kind of creates a little bit more wild noise let's jump into the glow settings and just turn this down so that we could just see the main pattern now it's a little bit chaotic so let's go down to the expert settings and we'll turn the complexity down to about two and that's going to simplify this so then let's turn the turbulence back up so we'll set that to ten and that's the max value here so now we're starting to create something that's a little bit more interesting so let's move the position it's like some kind of wild spider perfect and let's take a look at a few these settings so we have forking we can also decay the effects so kind of make it dry up basically so let's turn on the decay main core and that way we can kind of fade this whole thing out so let's set this to about 0.15 and then we can play with the minimum fork distance so the higher the value the less forking and the lower the value the more forking so let's turn the fork strength up a bit so this is looking pretty good we can move this around and see a few different patterns we can play with a conductivity state and this will also kind of change the the overall look here so pretty fast easy way to kind of give us a bunch of different looks and then we can quickly go to the minimum distance crank that up to just kind of lower the detail so this is the basic idea of how we're going to set this up now let's go and animate the decay so we'll set a keyframe hit U and we'll set this up as high as we can so whatever that value is but unfortunately it's not very linear it's not very smooth so let's go to the track editor the graph editor and we can hit f9 or do the Bezier curve and we just want to create a really really sharp drop off into the next keyframe so really really fast drop off and that should help smooth out the animation one of the things that we're going to create is this digital growth and what it is is just some various patterns of this lightening growing out in a pattern so what I want to do is sort of try to recreate this let's take our grid lightening and pre compose it so control shift c or pre compose at the bottom there and we'll move all the attributes and we'll call this digital growth and hit okay then we'll change the color to i don't know blue and let's double click on the digital growth and now what i want to do is first i'm going to just take this and move it over so we want to size it down and we hit u we can see our keyframe so maybe move it a little closer together here so what i want to do is set the transfer mode to screen and then duplicate the layer so edit duplicate and what I can do is I can just change the conductivity state and there I've created a brand new instance so I'm going to offset the layer now and the idea is as the other growth finishes we want the secondary growth to begin so this one goes and the next one and maybe whatever pattern it's growing out towards we can sort of grow it that way so let's duplicate it again play with the settings here kind of creates a cool kind of directional growth we can also play around with the look of this so another thing I always like to talk about is experimentation and you know a lot of this is basically experimentation just playing around with it coming up with different looks so if you're watching a tutorial and you're curious what might happen if you do this or if I did that well just pause the tutorial for a second and start playing around just kind of save your project you know save a copy so that you can have an experiment project and you know what happens when you change the complexity to three you know do you get a different pattern and then you change the you know the settings and that looks you know like a completely different sort of digital grid but it's definitely cool as well so so having some time to experiment is really critical when you're using After Effects and you know we try to make tutorials that show you broad possibilities but definitely feel free to just take a moment and start experimenting so that's cool so we'll move this over here you know and also play around with the size of these we don't want them up to all be the the same size we want to kind of feel like it's very random so here we'll duplicate it change the conductivity State sit here maybe move these all down and touch and you can also play with the you know the core radius you can play around picking that up a bit as well as the core drain this will actually fill it up in in a kind of a different way this is essentially what I did with those other digital columns so let's go and create a black solid called this background and hit OK and we'll drag this down to the bottom and then we're going to do a new adjustment layer so what I want to do is create some various dots and there's a really cool effect it's called CC star let's see starburst and you would never think to look for this effect but it's quite interesting so let's throw it onto this adjustment layer and let's set the scatter and the speed to zero and what it does is creates these cool dots and these dots will follow the pattern of whatever is beneath it so let's say we set the transfer mode to screen well now we've got the dots on top now there's one trick that we need to do and that is the channel solid composite effect set this to black and that will fix the Alpha and the holes around the edges but what we can do is play around with a grid spacing maybe change the size of these dots and we can even use a curves adjustment to brighten them up but it's just kind of a cool way to add some random detail then if we play around with the scatter effect we can actually offset them to being slightly various positions and such let's go ahead and create another adjustment layer and we'll see another cool effect so let's say I want to add somewhat of a grid effect on top of this like a basic math grid effect but I want it to grow as our design grows so here's well do will type in mosaic and we'll throw this on here and this is a pretty fun effect so turn on sharp colors and turn up the blocks so this is like for blurring out you know faces of people who aren't supposed to be in your video or you know anonymous tipsters so it's an interesting effect but what we're actually going to use if we're actually been shut those sharp colors off we're going to use it to create some edges so type in find edges and invert that and so now we have a little bit of a pattern here so look at as it grows on and then we can screen it back on top of our final design and if we hit T we can lower its opacity so this way we create just kind of an interesting grid but instead of making it a square I actually want it to be rotated so here's what we're going to do I'm going to choose effect distort transform it's on the list so we can just type it in here transform so what I'll do is I'll take the transform and put it before the mosaic effect and set the rotation to about 45 degrees and you can see our pattern kind of rotates a little bit then if we take another transform put it after the find edges we can set it to negative 45 degrees and so now we have a pattern that is diamond shaped and if we go back into the mosaic we can tweak the size of the boxes to create a different effect so now we'll set it to screen and now we have a cool kind of diamond pattern which I would say this makes it about 45% more futuristic we can also play around with the block size so the smaller the blocks the larger the grid area and you know that'll help create some various looks let's do like 75 by 75 and the comps not square so let's stretch that a bit and let's just lower the opacity here just for a more subtle effect nice and then we can add some colorization so another adjustment layer with a glow turn up the radius a bit and then we could do curves adjustment we could just do bring the red channel down blue channel up a bit maybe the green channel up a bit so that's pretty much the basic idea and then we can pre render this so we could say just go to the end of this animation hit n add this to the render queue and say render off a QuickTime movie and then re-import it so that we can actually just use the pattern so just a little bit easier to work with a quicktime instead of having to render the comp multiple times okay now we can speed this up by just going into the animation and bringing these keyframes a little bit closer together but I think this will work for now let's go back to our grid comp and let's take our digital growth and we'll just turn it off for the moment all right so now we need to create our three dimensional grid one of the cool things about the advanced lightening effect is that it is affected by the layers alpha so in this case we have an alpha Channel and then we can copy our lightening effect and paste it so let's come in here to our first grid that we created take that lightning copy edit copy and jump back over here to our title template which we will make red and let's choose edit paste so here is the animation let's hit U and remove the keyframe so we'll just unclick that and it will be static so there's this option called composite on original we click that and now it's rendering on top of our original now if we look closely it's not interacting our alpha channel however there's an option called alpha obstacle and as we crank that up we can actually see that the Lightning is affected by the alpha channel so this is quite cool and probably a fun thing that you could do all sorts of stuff with so let's use this so we'll take it we'll hit control D duplicate it let's put a copy over here let's hit control D but another copy over here and maybe just one more up in this direction or maybe two more let's see I feel like this one's not it's not conducting enough for me I think the conductivity probably needs to be more nevermind anyway let's see maybe we could play around with some of the settings as well and even move some of our other copies around and not that I don't think this is okay I just want to make sure that later on when we duplicate the copies that we're getting enough variation on our title design this is looking pretty good now another thing that we're going to do to this particular copy is we'll take these we'll hit control a collapse them and we could add more copies and stuff and even play around with you know the decay so that some of them are shorter etc what I want to do is add another effect so we'll go ahead collapse this and we'll type in tint and we'll take the tint effect and put it before the lightening and let's set the white color to black and so what this does is creates just an outline of just the electrical stuff and we might even come over here and type in turbulent displace and throw this maybe before the tint as well and this is basically an effect that creates kind of wild Distortion now in this case it's before the advanced lightening so if we were to put it afterwards it would do something like that but I'm actually going to put it before and it's just going to displace our text but we're going to do it very subtly so let's take this turn the size down to like 20 and the amount down as well so just a bit now let's turn the tint back on now the idea is that if we adjust the evolution we can actually change all of the lightning effects below it because essentially we're changing the Alpha Channel and therefore the Lightning effects have to be updated now we can also go into each of these and play around with the conductivity state to give it some more variation as well now let's be careful that the size is relatively small and we don't want to have too much intensity on this effect all right so here is our basic copy of our title so what I want to do is hit f4 set it as a 3d layer set the transfer mode to screen and then I'm going to duplicate the layer and then we'll play around with the turbulent offset and then we'll take this copy and push it back in z space so we'll just push it back a touch and let's create a camera as well be like thirty five-millimeter hit OK and if we hit C we could take the unified camera tool and if we click in here we can start to see a little bit of dimensionality now it's looking a little bit too repetitive so let's play around with some of the settings so what we could do is just go through change the conductivity state or a couple of the copies until we see something a little bit more unique so that's looking pretty good and then let's duplicate that copy and ctrl D and maybe push that back in some z space change the turbulent displace and that's also going to change the silhouette of the grid so that it's not perfectly clear what the words say we want to sort of reveal that at the very end so again we'll go through tweak some of the conductivity States here all right now let's come back to this for a second let me duplicate the top layer and I'm going to right click there now let's come back to the original copy the title template and hit ctrl D let's take this and let's remove all of the effects so we could choose effect removal and that way we just have our original grid again and I'm going to take that copy bring it to the top of the stack change the color to yellow and we'll move it forward in z space just a touch so that way we have just a little bit of depth and variation here alright so we've got the basic idea here we can start playing around with our front title now what we could do is we can actually set this to something like normal and that way it's not translucent we could also duplicate the copy here the yellow copy and maybe do a find edges and maybe set this version invert it and set this version to screen and maybe push this back so this way we're starting to create sort of a wireframe shell if you will and put that below and it just starts creating some weird you know dimensionality that is somewhat abstract but helps to recreate the final form so let's do a quick colorization and kind of see where we're at and what else we need to do so let's create a black solid for the background I could just copy the other one but and what you're going to do and we'll create a new solid let's do something like which I don't even think it matters so let's set it to screen and do a ellipse and maybe just F bring up the mask settings turn up the feathering out kind of feather that out of it there we go and then we'll create a new adjustment layer and we'll call this color correction so hit return CC and let's come over here and type in tint this is why I didn't matter because we're about to desaturate anyway and the welded curves and here we want to play around with a so and we also want to do a glow so we'll take the glow effect maybe before that set it to screen and turn up the radius of it all right so on the curves effect we want to start playing around with this and what I might do is turn on the depth of field for the camera so hit a a turn depth of field on and crank up the aperture a bit and that's going to create a much more interesting look and definitely a much more organic look but we can actually use this to help kind of get a sense for the overall look now the background grid effects are a little bit bright so I might take just the bottom four copies right here hit T and lower the opacity to maybe 90% a little less 78 and that way our title grid is actually a little bit brighter and maybe bring the focus point forward a touch there we go and by the way you have some different iris control inside of cs6 you could do some things like Pentagon's they're a little bit slower but you could create some different looking out-of-focus elements which definitely look a little bit nicer and you can just set it to the higher quality when you're ready to render at the end all right so about this colorization so we'll go back to the color correction go to the green Channel let's turn the green up a bit and also the blue Channel let's crank that up as well and maybe just create a contrast curve a reverse contrast curve like this and then bring this down a touch now let's go to the RGB and drop that down as well all right so we've got the basic color correction going here and things are looking pretty good now we want to start adding more of that fine detail so one thing that we could do actually is take the camera hit AAA and zoom it out just a little bit maybe down to a thousand and that'll just pull off the camera a touch we could probably turn off the depth of field one quick way to do that is just turn off this draft 3d setting and that makes things a little bit nicer to just go back and forth now I want the grid title to transition in so we're going to type in grid wipe so its transition effect CC grid wipe let's drop that on to our top title and this basically is a cool little transition so we'll turn the completion up till it's completely covered and move that keyframe over the beginning and then open all the way up so very nice and again we can use the screen transfer mode as well maybe we can even duplicate a copy set this to multiply push it back in z space a bit maybe even offset the transition and just create some slight variations to it so definitely can have some fun with that alright so that's the basic idea of the transition but now we want to add some more detail to the grid pattern so we'll come over here to our pre-rendered digital growth and let's just drag it out into our calm so let's just put a little bit of it behind the title so beneath the yellow and the red and let's set the transfer mode to screen and so here's our kind of main pattern we'll scale it down a touch okay and we'll take another copy say the five copy set it to screen as well and maybe take one more copy screen and scale it down a touch now this copy what we could do let's make sure all these layers are 3d so head f4 and turn on the 3d layer switch there we go and we'll take that last copy and let's move it forward in z space maybe put up a little higher so that way it just has a little more depth here so the idea now is how do we create more out-of-focus elements up close well what we'll do is duplicate a copy bring it forward maybe off-screen and touch and then we'll duplicate another copy push it back scale it up move it off-screen all right so now we can see we're just kind of creating a vast kind of field of different layers and now if we turn our depth of field back on you can see we've created a much more interesting pattern with that background out of focus element with the foreground out-of-focus element and as I said before we can go into the depth of field switch it and get a slightly nicer looking pattern to this out-of-focus stuff so pretty cool I think one of the things you really want to do is make sure you have different levels of detail so that's having stuff that's small and large and just you know play around with duplicate copies and stuff and move the camera you can start to see the depth here we go starting to get the idea here alright so this is the basic idea of the tutorial and go ahead feel free to experiment with all of the different settings alright well I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial be sure to follow us on Twitter check out the website we've got some great stuff happening on the blog and of course check out our great Video Copilot products element 3d a really cool plugin for doing other 3d type of stuff inside of After Effects alright I'm Andrew Kramer thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 887,711

Keywords: andrew kramer, videocopilot.net, after effects

Id: 0vXiKSvc_O0

Length: 28min 22sec (1702 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 19 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/oicaptainslow]

I knew this is what that effect was from haha, Andrew Kramer is a boss.

[u/besaph]

Thanks for sharing this!!!

[u/mikbob]

Can I have the link to his entropy video, I can't seem to find it anywhere.

[u/JDill2]

This is an incredible, thanks for sharing!