How to Make a Seamless Looping Background in After Effects

hey guys Charles the premium beat and in this tutorial I want to show you an easy way to create seamless background loop animations in After Effects and we're gonna create these backgrounds basically by utilizing two built-in effects and After Effects and the effects are CC repet I'll and offset at the animal to show you guys a few other effects you can add to these animations if you want to create even more abstract background loops I also have the After Effects project file I'm gonna be using available on the blog post so check for that link in the description alright guys let's go ahead and jump over to After Effects [Music] [Music] first thing we need to do is create a new composition I'll just go ahead and name this mein kampf now with this to be a 1080p at 24 frames per second composition will have a duration be 8 seconds just couldn't click OK now we need to create our first initial background tile one of the patterns that we're gonna have repeating and looping so I'm gonna come here and click on to create another composition and we'll just call this background comp and for this one I want the height and the width to be 200 by 200 again I'll have the frame rate be 24 frames per second and 8 seconds long go and click OK so now we have this little small tile here and I'm going to create these sprinkles looking backdrop as you saw in some of the examples but you can create all kinds of different backgrounds with this to loop and I'll show some of those a little bit later so I'm just gonna right click here let's do a new solid I'll have this be a solid white solid make sure it's comp size click OK now let's create another solid to add those sprinkles to so just right click again new solid and I'll just call this sprinkles the color for this really doesn't matter but it's going changes to a different color so we can kind of see the difference because we're gonna actually cover this with a stroke effect now with that layer selected and let's like the pin tool up here we'll make sure red obj is checked off I'm gonna create my first sprinkle line on this so you can see I just create a master I'm gonna click on the solid layer again here and it's like the selection tool to make sure that mask is deselected and we want to apply an effect this to kind of create that sprinkle effect so again with the solid selected let's come here to effect we're coming down to generate and Stroke now we can see we got a line here on that mask and that's what we want we're gonna create quite a few different masks on this I want to make sure this is set on all masks right there just go ahead and check that on and if for the color make sure you have this be black and then for the paint style I'll go ahead and change this to be on transparent so now we can kind of see that black line on the white background I'm gonna make the brush size a little bit bigger set it to 4 and then we'll crank the brush hardness all the way up to a hundred so now I just need to create a few more of those sprinkles on here that'll kind of make a nice seamless pattern and we can adjust this more later I'll show you how we're gonna do that so I'm just gonna select on the pin tool again and I'll just create another sprinkle and just click on the solid when I want to go ahead and end that line I'll do a couple more of these I'll probably speed this up alright so now we have several sprinkles here on this background tile I recommend keeping them somewhere close to the same length they don't have to be exact about all means so let's jump back over to our main composition and then in the project panel and drag and drop in that background comp so now we have that tile and the first thing we need to do is apply the effect CC repet I'll so with it selected come here to effect coming out here to stylize then we're gonna select CC repet I'll and you'll see what this will do it repeats the pattern here so if I go ahead on this expand right just drag this over you can see how it's just kind of tiling the sprinkles and I'm gonna set each of these here to 2000 I'm just hitting tab on each one of those to toggle down to the next one and the tiling I'm gonna leave it on the default with repeat but you see we get a pretty good seamless pattern here and we might be able to obviously tell where some of the tiling is because we just created it but with the other objects we're gonna add in front of this looping and animating you won't be nearly as noticeable if you do want to adjust your background though just come over here back to your background comp and you can just like one of these sprinkles maybe move it around or rotate your feeling around them jump back over you'll see it refresh on your main comp and we can add some movement to this too so I'm gonna select that background cop layer again let's come up here to the effect I'm gonna go to distort and select offset and this will actually allow us to move around that tiling pattern here just by shifting the center around and you can see the default is set to 100 by 100 on the X and the y now for the y-axis for simplicity I'm gonna set this at 0 just so we're not starting at 100 that might shift things around here on the screen as we can see what I want to do is have the current time indicator right at the beginning let's go ahead and put a keyframe there for the shift center too now we know our original tile is 200 by 200 so we want to make sure we key frame this by number that's evenly divided by 200 so for example 600 so I'm gonna move down here to the four second mark that'll be how long I create this loop for and I can just hit in here that'll move the work area over I'm actually have to snap it over a little bit more so it's perfectly on the four second mark I usually have my timeline when I'm creating loop be a little bit longer just makes a little bit easier when it kind of shuffling around key frames but for the sake of this entire loop animation we're gonna create I'm gonna have it be four seconds long so out here at the four second mark let's go ahead and type in 600 here for the y-axis and when I do that we won't see any change that's a good sign that means it is looping seamlessly if I go ahead and drag this through we're gonna see we were nagging some movement on this because we move that down 600 pixels so we've already created a background here with a looping animation now let's go ahead and add some other objects on this that are gonna be animating and looping as well so to do that let's go back to our main project panel let's create a new composition we're gonna have this be our group one composition and I want this one to be 400 by 400 again 24 frames per second and eight seconds long go ahead and click OK now I want to add four different objects into here at least areas for four objects and an easy way we can kind of do this and see the different areas for each of these it's just kind of create some guide layers so I'm gonna right click here let's do a new solid and I'll just call this guide and I want this to be 200 by 200 and we'll go ahead and change the color to something kind of in a gray area here and go ahead and click OK now you can see we've got this in the center but I want to put this in each of the quadrants here of this composition and an easy way we can align this is with the align tab so I'm gonna go over to the window and you're gonna see a line that'll open up this window temporarily and we can align this up so what that layer selected I'm just gonna come over here I'm gonna put a line to the left and then let's align this to the top and now we have this perfectly at the top left and I'm gonna come down here to this solid I'm gonna right click and you can see the option just like guide layer you'll see this little icon here on the layer and this basically just means it's only gonna be used as a guide and when we add this to our main composition and this layer actually won't be visible and again that's exactly what we want so now with that selected I'm gonna go ahead and hit ctrl D command E on a Mac to duplicate that layer and I can move this one now I'm gonna put it on the right hand side and then at the top as well now we can see that there so I'm going to ctrl D to duplicate that again and let's go ahead and align that new layer with the bottom here so that's on the bottom and see that one more time ctrl D command D on the Mac and let's align that bottom layer down to the left so now we have four different layers and one thing that'll make it a little bit easier obviously for us to tell where each of these are is if I change the color of two of these so this top one selected here I'm coming to layer and then solid settings and let's just make this more of a white color so we can see that and I'll do that with this one here as well so now we can see each of the four quadrants we have here so the premise that with this is we want to create shapes and they need to stay inside of the general area of where each of these are this will make a lot more sense when we kind of get everything done and we're using it for that repeating pattern so let's just start by creating a few of those 90s style shapes and we're gonna do that with a shape layer so I'm gonna select the pin tool here I'm gonna right-click let's do a new shape layer and we won't see anything appear but we'll see we have it selected here I'm just going to click and draw kind of those squiggly M shaped lines once I've got that created I can select the selection tool I'm gonna reposition some of these points now for you it may look a little different than this I'm actually looking see we have the fill and the stroke up here if your fill is turned on you can just click on the fill name and it'll pop up the fill option so yours may look something like this where you have this extra color in here just click on that fill options name and then select none over here click OK and then for the stroke you can click that you can select different ones I'm just gonna use the solid color and then if you click on the color here you can change that we'll leave it kind of as that teal color for now and then you can adjust the stroke size right here as well and what's also cool is because this is a shape layer I'm gonna come out here I'm just gonna toggle this down you can see we have the option to add different things you could even add some of this is off the screen but you could select this round corners if you wanted to round the corners off on your stroke there's other effects you can do like taper the line and stuff like that I'm going to hit control Z to undo that actually want these sharp points I think that looks a little bit more of the 90s style we're going for now let's go ahead and create another shape I'm gonna create a circle down here directly below the first shape I created so I'm gonna right click into a new shape layer and almost select the ellipse tool up here I'll just drag I'm gonna hold the ctrl and shift to create a perfect circle I'll go ahead and reposition this with the selection tool try to Center that up a little bit and we can change the color of this if you want to I've got a second I want to paste little pink there I think it looks pretty good it might increase the stroke a little bit I actually want this to be kind of a half circle so with that shape layer selected down here with the add options I'm gonna select rim paths which is just off the screen there if I toggle this down you can see we have the starting in and I'm just going to set this to start at 50% so we now we have kind of a half circle now another thing we can do to make these shapes a little more dynamic is give them a little bit of movement for the loop so if I come down here to about 4 seconds just gonna hit in on the keyboard and close the work area off there right at 4 seconds so let's add a little bit of rotation at each of these shapes we just wanna make sure they end at exactly the same place they started so I'll go ahead and demonstrate this so I've got this first shape layer selected and the anchor points located right here in the center of the actual composition so let's go ahead and reposition that and a quick way to do that is with the shape layer selected just kind of here to layer then transform it's like center anchor point and layer content that'll move it closer to the center I'm gonna do that same thing with the half circle it's a layer transform and then Center anchor point alright so I'm gonna select the squiggly line we've got there then I'm gonna hit R on the keyboard for rotation I want to create a keyframe right there at the beginning then come all the way down here to the 4 second mark and create another keyframe there again so it begins and ends at the same place then here in the middle I can offset it to a little bit different access there on the rotation so we can go ahead and see this do a quick Ram preview can see what's happening now we can see how that's looping now I'm actually gonna click out here on the keyframes and drag to highlight all of them and I'm going to ctrl click on the first one that's gonna give us those round keyframes believe they're called roaming keyframes just kind of smoothes out that animation a little bit I'm gonna do that same thing with this half circle go ahead and speed this up now you can see I've done the same thing with that half circle we have it at the very beginning rotates a little bit and it's in the same spot here at the very end the main thing you want to watch with this it's okay if the shapes kind of cross over these lines but you don't want them to get cut off by the edge of the composition because then they'll get clips in the actual background loop let's jump back over to our main composition let's drag and drop in Group one now we can see we don't have those guide layers showing up if we go ahead and scroll through this we're gonna see the shapes are moving and we have a loop and we need two more shapes over here and a quick and easy way so we don't have to recreate all those guide layers just select Group one here and then come up here to edit then come down to duplicate so now we have group two let's go ahead and double click in that composition to open it up and so we need to create two more shapes we need to add them to this right-hand side the top and the bottom and I'm going to delete our original shapes that we created on the left hand side and I'll just go ahead and speed this up me creating two more shapes that are gonna be on this right-hand side and I'm gonna add that same kind of rotation looping movement to them as well all right so now you can see the two new shapes I created and I've added those keyframes there for the rotation so they're looping we just have them here on the right hand side so let's jump back over to the main composition let's drag and drop in group two so now we have all four of our shapes in here now we just need to repeat that process of applying CC prepa tile and offset so go ahead and select Group one let's apply CC Revit also effect and then stylize CC Revit I'll and let's expand on all sides at mm so now we can see that pattern repeated everywhere and let's do the same thing for group two so select that stylize and then CC repet I'll and then mm for each of these as well so now we can see a pattern of our shapes on here now we need to apply the offset animation so I'll select Group one the effect and then distort I'll select offset and on the y-axis go ahead and start at zero there to keep things simple and now with our group compositions again the size is 400 by 400 so we need to make sure the in value we use is divisible by 400 evenly so for this first one here let's go ahead and do a keyframe at the very beginning at zero here for the y-axis let's move all the way to the four second mark let's go ahead and make this be 800 since that is divisible evenly by 400 Napa code and scroll this we can see how those shapes are moving now right now they're moving evenly with the background but I'll show you a little trick we can do that'll fix that let's go in select group to also apply the offset effect so effect and then offset and for this one that's going to zero out the y-axis make sure at the very beginning with the current time indicator do a keyframe there at zero and then here at the four second mark a little different let's actually do negative 400 so they're moving in the opposite direction at a slower rate so we can scroll through here and see that so what we can do to improve the look of this I'm gonna select group to hit R for rotation we're gonna type in 45 degrees and you'll see how it rotates the Revit I'll and the offset let's do that same thing with Group one so with it's like you just hit R for rotation I'm gonna type in 45 degrees you could rotate yours at a different degree amount if you want to I find 45 degrees looks pretty appealing so now it's go ahead and do a quick Ram preview and see how this loops so now you can start to see how we've created our looping background here just using a cc repet I'll and the offset effect with some simple shapes and that added rotation on the shapes I mean I think Phil just helps kind of add a little more dimension to everything now another cool thing you can do is actually apply effects directly here to these group compositions so if I wanted to add a little more of a 90s look to this it's like we need a little bit of a drop shadow happening here so on Group one let's come up here to effect and then perspective let's select drop shadow now increase the opacity here all the way to 100 and let's increase the distance there a little bit so it looks pretty good and just cuz I won't have these settings be exactly the same I'll just like that drop shadow hit ctrl Z command Z on a Mac come over here to group two and just ctrl V to paste that now you can see how that will actually stick to those shapes as well so it's pretty cool definitely more of a 90s style look and with our sprinkles if you want to change the color of those because everything we've created here is really procedural let's go back over to our background composition and we can quickly change the color of the sprinkles that are in the background there we could do like a hot pink we can jump back over to the main comp now we can see how that's already updated something else you can do is also apply a grid effect if you wanted to so let's go and do a new solid which have it be black just call it grid so let's apply the grid effect it's gotta effect here and believe it's under generate and grid and I want to turn off the visibility these other layers we can just see that grid so now we can see that here you could adjust the size but if you wanted to I'm gonna leave it at the default jumping over to our main composition we're gonna see that grid automatically seamlessly tiles because of the CCP reptile effect and the offset it's actually moving back there too if I just go ahead and ran preview this we can see it so that's another background type you could create as well and again you can rotate the background the same way we did our group layers so if I select that background composition hit R for rotation you can see I can actually rotate that as well and that will continue to kind of do that offset and loop now before I end this tutorial I want to show you a few other examples of kind of cool effects you can do with the same technique so you can see I've created another 90 style background here in the same way we did the other one but what these groups have actually applied a glow effect on top of layer so you can see i can turn that on and off this is a nice way to kind of create a neon style look and you can experiment with other various effects on these different group layers let me jump over this next composition which is that same video just rendered out so i've got this background already rendered just so it works really quickly one effect i really like using is the CC Khiladi effect so I'm gonna right click here do a new adjustment layer let's go up here to effect and then stylize and we have CC collegia there's kind of like a kaleidoscope you can see how it really gives us this abstract look and you can adjust this with the rotation and the mirroring but you can just leave it on the default and because we've already created a seamless loop this pattern will automatically loops we're gonna do a Ram preview of this so it's a really cool way to create kind of more abstract looping backgrounds all from that original composition we created you're just applying this single effect on top of it another thing we can create it's kind of more of a macro looking realistic lens loop so if I come over to this other example I have my background loop with CC Clady I already applied to it what I've done is I've just made that layer 3d so I'll just check this on and then for the rotation on the x-axis I'm gonna sentence to 90 degrees you see now it's perfectly flat here in our composition so let's go ahead and create a new camera I'm gonna have this be at 200 millimetres go ahead click OK I'm gonna hit C on the keyboard just orbit around this and I'm gonna hit C again here to zoom in on that so we're just kind of want to look at this kind of an angle and what we can do here is on the camera I'm just gonna hit AAA and we have the depth of field options I'm just gonna check that on and it may turn everything quite blurry but we can adjust the focus distance here so I'm just gonna toggle this around till this looks like it's in focus you can hold shift if you want it to move a little quicker that looks pretty good right there I can adjust the aperture I'm actually gonna bring that down a little bit maybe somewhere around 30 we can refine that but I really want to increase the blur level now you can see it's a little bit sensitive when you fine-tune it but we're getting kind of this macro lens looking blur and we can see our loop if we just have this in right here at 4 seconds this should give us a perfect loop so I'll just go ahead and Ram preview this if you guys want a deeper dive into some of these compositions just make sure you download the project file because these will be available inside of that alright guys hope you enjoyed this tutorial and picked up a few tips for making backgrounds also I use the same method for this tutorial to create the backgrounds for the freebie retro pack we have available on the premium beat blog so check that free pack out if you haven't and includes some really cool retro wave assets now we'll catch you guys on the next one

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 50,970

Keywords: PB, PremiumBeat, Looping Background, Animation, After Effects, After Effects tips, Loop in After Effects

Id: lsu6sxFP7d0

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020