How to Create an Infinite Background in Adobe After Effects CC

hey yo everybody W masters here and today I'll be showing you how to create an infinite background in Adobe After Effects in different background is a background that will repeat infinitely over time it's gonna repeat this motion as long as we want this motion to repeat we can go an hour two hours two days in in time in the composition here and it'll keep doing this animation over and over and over again and so this is what we're gonna be creating a it's a really really fun effect so let's get started the first thing we need to do is we need to go ahead and create ourselves a new composition I just have this composition created here called final but we can go ahead and actually create our own and work from there so I'm just gonna go to a file or a composition new composition and we'll just name this one final two and then we're gonna go ahead and make sure this is a 1920 by 1080 P so it's just a 1080 composition rate like so what we want to do is want to take our trees and drag them in or whatever asset we're doing here so I'm gonna go ahead and take this and drag it in and we're gonna make some big trees this time let's put one there and then I can either hit ctrl D or ctrl C V just to duplicate them and I'm just going to create a couple of them like so and there we go right like that works perfectly fine so now we're gonna take these three we're gonna right-click and we're going to hit pre compose so make sure you select all three of them right click and then go to pre compose and then we're gonna name this one tree layer right like this and you'll see that we have now this pre composition called tree layer within here what we wanna do is want to jump inside so we're in Final and we want it or final two and we want to jump inside the tree layer so we're gonna double click to go inside the tree layer and now you'll see that we have our three Clips again and then we're going to right click on this and we're gonna pre compose them one more time and this will makes sense in one second so what I can now do is just name this one tree frame make sure that's different and then so what we've created is we've created this frame so now they're all grouped together and then this layer that we can put a bunch of different frames together on so we're going to go up to composition composition settings and then into the width and the type parameters right here with the width we're gonna go up to 50 160 and the reason I chose this is this is three times the 1920 so what we have right here is a standard 1080p aspect ratio we don't want to do is I'm gonna change this to three times that to give us more frames we can do four times we do five times the more you do the more sort of freedom you have whenever you're creating the the effect and that'll make a sense a little bit later as well but for right now what we're gonna do is we're just gonna create three of them fifty one sixty and you'll notice right here now we have this really really long composition and once this with this composition we can take these frames and we can put them inside of this composition and sort of create this overarching frame and layer which we're then going to animate now the importance of a loop and that's what we're doing with this infinite background is we're creating a loop the importance of a loop so that it doesn't look like a loop or so that doesn't jump or chop is to make sure the beginning and the in frame look exactly the same so if we divide this into three separate frames the beginning the end and in the middle we need to make sure that the beginning and the end are exactly the same therefore whenever it duplicates it looks like that this is just a continuation of this and we can actually make it go around in circles flawlessly so what we're going to do is going to take this layer we want to put it here I'm gonna duplicate it and put another one at the end to take this layer and put it over here is pretty simple you can drag it over and find whatever technique you like to sort of line it up to the very end over here but since I'm not doing any more sort of effects on this what I actually like to do is go down to the transform the Anchor Point put the anchor point at zero and that's going to go ahead and align it with the left side and then that'll also change the way that we decision so that our position will be relative to the left side of this frame and if I type in zero here as well what we get is it lined up perfectly along the left frame then we can hit control D to create a new one of these control CV or room or also copy and paste duplicate C layer and then for this I'm gonna take the anchor point I'm gonna make it 1920 and what that's going to do is it's going to align it to the right side here and then now our position we can go 5160 and it'll put it on the right the reason we're gonna do this is because the anchor point changes it'll put it on the right side and then now we're going to go ahead and change the position so that it's at the very right edge so since this this composition is 550 160 long we can take the zero to be the left side and 50 160 to be the right side so if we just align those two we get this now for the final part in the center what we need to do is make sure that we don't accidentally sort of overwrite any of this we don't want these two to blend with one another so what we're gonna do is I'm just gonna actually drag in like a single tree asset right here drag it up to be pretty decently big and just sort of have this like center piece going right here and so now what we've have is this this little background that we can we can work with and we can animate and remember like I said if we make this longer we get sort of more room to work with here now we're gonna go into the back into final two and we'll see that you have the tree layer sitting right here now you'll notice that if we go to the very front right here and then go all the way to the back they look exactly the same and so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna keep looping this over and over and over again so we're gonna go into the transform down here into the transform effect go to the very beginning of this we're gonna turn on the keyframe marker and we're gonna make sure it's lined up on the left edge over here so what we can do is just drag it over so it works you can also use the anchor point trick if you want to make sure it's lined up perfectly but this doesn't need to be as precise so I'm just gonna move it over like so looks good right there and then now I'm gonna move forward about one second so I'm gonna move it over just about one second let's zoom this in because this is actually really really large move it over to about one second right there and then we're just gonna take this and drag it all the way over I'm holding the shift key here while I'm dragging to make sure that it goes perfectly straight we don't want it to go up and then jump and then up and then jump every time it loops so if we hold the shift it'll make this a perfectly straight line it'll make the animation perfectly straight as well so what we're gonna do now is go and I just like to turn on the motion blur sort of shows you the motion of the assets as they move and so now we have this sort of simple animation the next step is going to make this loop indefinitely and this is actually really really easy to do if we hold the Alt key and click on the position marker right here we can then type in a little expression and this is just an expression you get to memorize there's nothing like special about this is just something you memorize and you learn or you write down as a little cheat sheet and that is loop out and then we're going to type in cycle here make sure that it is loop out and then the beginning of these parentheses and then in quotes cycle and then at the very end it will be a semicolon this is JavaScript but javascript that talks specifically to Adobe After Effects and with that what it does is it takes all the keyframes and then it loops it out over time so I could have a thousand different keyframes of motion in here and right when it gets to the end it's gonna copy and paste those over time indefinitely so what we get is we get this right here and you'll notice you cannot see the seam it does not look like there's any jump or cut at any point in this and that's because if we go right here to the very very beginning right when we get to the end frame it looks like the beginning frame so watch watch this edge and watch that edge if when I go to the next one it jumps over and it actually moves forward by one and so it looks like it's just a continuation of motion and that is what creates our loop and again like I was saying you can make this as long as you want as long as you make the first frame and the back frame exactly the same you could have you know an entire landscape something that would take you know 12 or 15 seconds to loop through and then loop it back across that again and you'll get that neat little effect and we can add as many different layers as we want to this sort of final one we can create a tree layer we could create a mountain layer in the background you know something moving just slightly slower in the background we could tray it create a really fast front layer of bushes all you have to do is just adjust the timing of them so if we wanted to create a mountain layer and made it really really long we could do something like this where they move really slowly in the background but since the beginning in it are the same it'll just look like it's looping again and if we wanted to make it really really quick we can bring it in like this and now it looks like you're just flying by it a really really space but that is how you create an infinite background in Adobe After Effects really really fun effect and it has some really neat applications with an animation thanks Ivan for joining me if you have any questions or comments go and dome in the comment section below or on our website at Adobe masters at net if you want to see more videos similar this one go that subscribe button and make a video every other day on Adobe related products and it's enough time guys see ya

Channel: AdobeMasters

Views: 107,123

Keywords: Adobe Tutorial, Adobe Lesson, Adobe Education, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe CC Lesson, Adobe CC Tutorial, Adobe Fun, Adobe Learning, Infinite Background, After Effects Infinite Background, Infinite After Effects, Background Animation, After Effects Background Animation, After Effects Expression, After Effects Infinite Expression

Id: mQZRuViuT_w

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018