How To Create Gradients Like A PRO In After Effects

let's stop your gradients from looking like this and instead make them a bit more interesting like this you see after effect's buil ingredient tool is okay but there's a few techniques I want to share with you that will not only improve your skill set but also make your work look 10 times better so let's get to it so in After Effects I'm going to go ahead and create a new composition and this is going to be 1920 by 1080 and we'll just set it to 10 seconds obviously you can vary duration here or size and do it completely to what you want and I'm going to go ahead and create a new Circle as this is going to be my base object now you can use any object here I just think a circle works really nice so I'm going to go up and press the circle tool up here and I'm going to hold control and shift while I click in the center of my screen and this will create a nice even Circle and then I'm going to press control alt and home to Center my anle point then control home to Center my circle now you'll see I've actually been doing a bit of gradient test in here but we don't want this and we don't want a stroke on it either so I'm just going to set my stroke width to zero and on my fill I'm just going to click the fill button and change it to solid color now you can make this to any color you want I'm going to stick with this kind of purpley pink color I think that works quite nice and I know I can add some nice highlights to this now I'm just going to go ahead and create a new composition so going to press control and n and we're just going to call this rectangles and then we're going to change the width and height 1920 by 1920 so we get a nice Square comp I'm just going to go ahead and select my rectangle tool up here and draw in some rectangles into my scene now I want these all different sizers and they can be on the same shape player or different shape players however you prefer to work I'm just going to do them on different shape players and I'm going to change the fill of each one as I kind of go through now I'd also recommend just making these slightly varied insides so we get a bit of variation in this as well and you'll see why in just a moment so I'm going to add some different col colors into this that I think will complement my original Pink and I'm just going to go ahead and keep drawing a few more rectangles on the shape layers okay so once you have your rectangles uh built out similar to what I you'll notice they all different colors all different sizes I'm not going to name them just for ease but feel free to name them if you want to I don't think it's very important uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and duplicate all of these by selecting them all and pressing contrl D on my keyboard and I'm going to bring these to the top while they're all highlighted just clicking and dragging one of them and then I'm just going to slide them over so my end goes to where my start is and then I'm going to go ahead and create a null with either layer new and null object or you can do control Al shift and Y which is a shortcut and I'm just going to PA in all of these by selecting them all and dragging the pi whip to my null and I'll just call this control and I'm going to go ahead and create a positional key frame by pressing the stopwatch here and pressing p on my keyboard to bring up position and I'm going to go across to 2 seconds and in here I'm just going to type minus 1920 so we want to go the opposite direction so we plus 1920 I always get them mixed up and something's not aligned here but it's not a major issue if you want it to Loop you can play with this I think my alignment's out and my maths perhaps I would need to go here instead that gives us a looping color set which is kind of what I want I'll leave the direction for now but obviously you can play with the direction and and change that as much as you want to I'm just going to quickly size that rectangle up to close that Gap as well now we have this animated we want to go back to our main comp and bring this rectangle comp uh into our ball and I'm just going to change my track mat here to set to the ball and now we just kind of have this going on definitely isn't what we want so I'm going to go ahead and add a Goran blur here now this what's just popped up is video co-pilot's FX console it just makes searching for plugins much easier it's a free Plugin or you can go up to your effects window effects tab up here or your effects window here and again type in Gan blur then I'm just going to go ahead and add this to my precom going to change the blur to 350 so it gets really really soft and now if we hit play you'll see we get this kind of blending colors that we kind of have and it gives a nice gradient effect now we can rotate this just by pressing r on our keyboard to bring up a rotation and just rotate that slightly so we get slightly diagonal instead and then to this rectangle I'm going to go ahead and add the Bulge effect as well now all this is going to do is make it look a bit more rounded and a bit more circular so I'm just going to increase my uh horizontal and vertical radius to kind of fit the ball a bit and then we can increase the Bulge height a bit as well just to give us a slightly different look maybe I'll set that to four and we can also change the taper radius too and obviously feel free to play around with these settings and it will give you a different look but now we get more of a rounded kind of kind of gradient going on rather than it was flat before you can see uh it begins to round it and obviously adding that bulge gives us just a bit of circular so it actually looks like a ball rather than just a flat object now we're going to go ahead and create another comp to go along with our rectangles so contrl and N again I'll leave this square and I'll just call this circles this time as you've probably guessed I'm going to go ahead and use my ellips and create a circle just randomly in my comp and feel free to change the color as well maybe I'll get some oranges or yellows in here and see how that looks obviously you can play with the colors right up till the end it doesn't really matter now to this layer I'm going to go ahead and on my ad here see that on your layer panel or up at the top there you can go ahead and add a repeater to this and I'm just going to change the number of copies to maybe about nine and on my transform I just want to add some rotation to this and we'll get some random rotation going on and we can get some random scale in there as well and maybe because it's all centering around this Anchor Point I'll just move it over but we want to go ahead and animate this to make it look miles better so I'm going to go to my Anchor Point in my repeater settings going to all click the stopwatch and type in wiggle and open parenthesis going to do 0.2 comma 50 and that will just add some really subtle uh movement to these to these circles now as you can tell I'm kind of in need of a new pc with how long it takes to run preview a few circles but these are just floating around and you can change the speed of this just by increasing this 2 number if you want to or change how much it's moving by increasing the second number so the second number will just change how much it moves and the first number will change the speed of which it moves so if you want something a bit faster you can increase that as well I'm going to leave it to 0.2 and maybe I'll actually up it to maybe 200 instead we get a bit more variation in there and you can see them all moving around so I'm going to go back to my main comp again and in my project tab I now have the circles I'm going to drag this into my uh tab here I'm just going to scale this down a tad so it kind of fits more into the circle by pressing s on my keyboard to bring the scale parameters and I'm going to mat that to the ball as well under the track mat tab I'm going to go back to my rectangles and under my effect controls I'm just going to copy both of these by selecting them both pressing control C and then pasting that into my circles and now we get some more interesting things things going on actually on reflection I don't really like the uh yellow we've got going on so I'm just going to change this to maybe a purple color to get a bit more interes in there and kind of like lights been simulated around our ball now we're going to uh create another light source in this and this is going to be essentially like our Rim lightting photography so we're going to dupe the ball and we're going to add that on and at the top here I need to turn this layer back on just going to go to our Circle ellipse tool here and we need to create some masks so I'm going to go to my tool creates mask instead of creating a new shape player and this is important to do when using shape players and I'm just going to create a new circle in my comp here and I kind of want that a bit bigger than my circle I'm going to press V on my keyboard to switch to my move cursor going to just double select this mask and I kind of want to create like a little highlight so we get that moon shape I'm going to set my mask to subtract instead so it takes away from so now we have this kind of look and it gives us that kind of Half Moon Cresent like a highlight is hitting it going to go ahead and change this uh fill color to white and then again I'm going to add another Goran blur and we're just going to blur that out once more so maybe I'll bring that up to about 50 see how that looks and you'll notice it's being cut off by our shap player but we're going to mat it to our ball once more anyway and then I'm going to unsolo that and you can see the kind of look we've got going on again feel free to play around with the colors but you'll notice everything is animating and that light's not moving so it looks quite strange so what we're going to do is bring up the rotation Properties by pressing r on our keyboard with that layer selected going to alt click the rotation parameter and we're just going to type in time times 36 so asterisk is a times there now if we hit play we have this kind of cool moving ball look and you get this little light rotating around as well now you might think that's a little slow compared to how everything else is moving uh so what I'm going to do is maybe increase that to 60 and all you need to do is just change the uh times there and just change the value in that now you'll notice we're having things move across and then they're stopping and that's because we didn't time REM map our original rectangles so what we need to do is go to where we key framed it which I believe was about 2 seconds and I'm just going to trim this comp by pressing n on my keyboard I'm going to press control shift and X to trim that to only two seconds and go back to my main comp by pressing tab on my keyboard bringing up my flow chart and now with this rectangles uh selected I'm going to hit contrl alt and T and that will bring up my timer map now the weird thing is with Tim REM map is it glitches on our end point so I need to go back one frame and create a new key frame and delete the end one now on this Tim REM map I'm going to O click the stopwatch and type in Loop out and you'll see it come up and it's capital O and you can just have empty parentheses but now this will just continue to play and it will Loop through and we have a more fluid motion going on and of course them circles are maybe too pink so you can't actually see them not all over of the yellow but we can always go in and change all the rectangles and circles and all that kind of stuff so now I'm going to select all of these layers and pre-compose those by pressing contrl shift and c and I'm just going to call this ball going to hit enter and we need to maybe Jazz this up a little cuz it's still looking a bit plain going to right click my ball layer go to layer Styles and add an inner glow just going to bring down this tab here and change the color to something a bit more interesting let's get kind of like a deep orangey red in there perhaps and we can size this up to really see what's going on and you can see it coming in on the edges there just change my resolution can see it hitting these edges you could always change the opacity or the blend mode as well if you want to kind of change around and play with that not loving the pink hint there perhaps a purple when we mix the orange in on overlay or we could add some blues in and get some real gradients going perhaps a dark blue looks quite nice dark purple and then I'm going to duplicate this layer this ball pre comp by pressing contrl and D on my keyboard and this one we can rename to ball bevel going to go down onto my layer Styles I'm going to turn off that in a glow and then I'm going to right click layer Styles and bevel and emboss I'm going to open this up and just change these settings in here so let's adjust our size let's really Crank that up to see what's going on and I'm just going to solo this layer by pressing this button here I can kind of see what's going on let's really Crank that so it kind of covers the whole ball so maximum of 250 um we can soften that off as well and just bring that up to make it a little softer and obviously we want to change this light and dark color that's going on so again let's make them match our uh scene a bit better maybe we'll have kind of like a light yellow or an orange orang and then change the blacks to more like a purple blue tone something around there blue is looking kind of cool bit of light blue in there get a rainbow going on and then I'm going to go ahead and change my mode to Overlay instead and press t on my keyboard and maybe just bring this down to about 90% I'm just going to unsolo that and now we get this real wild mix of colors going on it's full on Rainbow at the minute then I'm just going to dupe the ball layer one more time and bring this to the top set this to Overlay again and we're going to add an effect called CC glass I'm just going to go down to my Surface and light here and you'll notice we get this really cool kind of iridescent look almost uh with the CC glass on and we can just play with these settings as much as we like and feel free to play with the height and the light and all that kind of good stuff really change how it looks so let's me bring that down and then I want to go ahead and map this to my original ball layer so we lose the outer edge and you can see the difference we've got going on really affects that kind of outer edge here and you'll notice it gives us a bit more of a defined circular look obviously we can reduce this opacity as well if you're not a huge lover or you don't like CC glass and now if you hit play we have this really awesome iridescent ball look that I absolutely love and you've probably seen in a lot of animations recently now gradients really are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making your work look good and there's a few more simple techniques that you can use to really transform the look of your work so you can go ahead and watch this video next where I'll show you exactly what those techniques are

Channel: Motion By Scott

Views: 25,566

Keywords: after effects tutorial, adobe after effects tutorial, after effects, after effects tutorials, gradients, layer styles after effects, motionbyscott, learn after effects, how to use after effects, easy after effects techniques, learn motion design, motion design tutorial, motion design tips, motion graphics tutorial, quick after effects tips, after effects animation, after effects workflow, advanced after effects, adobe after effects, after effects tips, how to animate

Id: nvDJn5AyOCw

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024