How To Make Animated Textures From ANYTHING (After Effects Tutorial)

today i'm going to show you how to turn this into this or this or anything else you can imagine using just your phone and the world around you [Music] i'm splitting this video up into three parts and all the time stamps are available so you can skip to whichever part you need all right let's get into it [Music] textures are literally everywhere both inside and outside so i went to a local park for this video to capture some spots that i like but i also got some watercolor paper from a store um just to show that you can do it with anything okay so what do you look for when trying to find a good texture one of the main things is finding flat lighting so either overcast or just in shadows because if it is in the sun when you capture that texture that sunlight is going to be part of that texture and maybe that's something you want for general use textures i try and look for flat lighting or under some shadows it helps to have an idea in mind but honestly with the range of what you can capture just going out and exploring is a fantastic method and that's really it so let's move on to the next step we're not the computer and we're going to jump into after effects to start processing these textures so what we have here is just a concrete wall uh that i took from outside in a composition that's 4000 by 3000 and the same frame rate as my main animation which we'll get to later what we're aiming to do is make a base texture that we can then use to drive a few other textures from that we're gonna make some light spots dark spots and then a neutral gray that we can use to layer up our animation but for now let's just focus on the bass here so when i pull up effects for this um i'm going to be using a free plugin from video copilot called fx console i recommend it for everyone to get it's just an easier way of pulling effects but it's the exact same as just searching in the effects and presets panel over here so i'm going to pull up cc power pin and we're going to actually turn off the effect and bring the corners in to the edge of the concrete now when we turn this back on it's going to stretch it even more but if we check unstretch it pulls those corners to the edge of our composition and we now have a full unstretched texture we could call it a day here but i actually want to add a couple more effects that give us a little bit more control on the look of the texture here so the first one i'm gonna throw on is a tint effect and this just makes it black and white but we can actually control the saturation using the slider here and then the second one is the main one here it's gonna be levels and this allows us to control the histogram for the brightness and darkness values of the actual texture so i'm going to bring in the little arrows over here to increase the range give it a little bit more contrast and i think this is pretty good to call our base so what we're going to do next is now use this base composition to make those other textures i mentioned before so i'm going to drag this into a new comp and we'll call this light dots and i'm going to apply another levels effect on top of the base but instead of changing the actual lightness and darkness to add more contrast we're going to bring the left one all the way to the right until it crunches in here so we just get some white speckles from this and as i look at this this is actually a great example um for using one more effect in instances like this where uh i think the speckles are too large they're too much like chunky here so we're gonna reset the levels here and throw on an invert effect that'll just invert the colors if i drag this before the levels and we bring it over to the right we're now getting some smaller speckles which i think fits better the look i'm going for so we now have our base and we have our light dots as well so i'm going to duplicate the light dots and call this one dark dots i'm going to start working on our third one here all i'm going to do now is just bring the levels all the way over to the other side and we get the exact same texture just now with some dark dots instead and this will work really well for what we're going for later and then finally using our base layer we're going to make a neutral gray texture so i'm going to drag this into a composition and call this neutral now before i get into actually making it neutral gray i want to explain why so if i pull up this composition this is just a photo i took last year but i'm going to explain using a gray solid here and all this is is just a middle gray 50 solid now if we apply any of these blend modes here from the middle so we'll go with overlay here nothing happens nothing changes and that's because middle gray is considered zero using the contrast blend modes anything below middle gray or above middle gray will change the image according to its lightness value so i'm going to set this back to normal and turn on the effects that i have here and all i have here is just seven stripes with different brightness values this being middle gray this being white and this being black so if we turn on overlay again you'll see it's actually brightening the brights over here and darkening the darks over here so we saw it one more time the black is making the darks darker and the white over here is making the whites and the bright parts brighter and if you focus on the middle strip you'll notice again it's not changing it at all so if we were to just use our texture as is it would cause a lot of contrast so let's actually bring in the base texture and throw on overlay and see what happens now this could be a look that you're going for but for our animation this is definitely too strong and so with that in mind if we come back to our concrete neutral if we throw on another levels on this one but instead bring this slider closer to the middle somewhere like this something a lot more neutral and we bring this into our dog example we'll bring this in delete this old one and turn on overlay you'll see it's a lot more subtle it just adds some of that grunge texture in and those are our four textures that we can then use to build out our texture animation [Music] all right jumping back into our concrete project file i have the textures text animation loaded up and we're going to start compositing together all those textures that we made before so i'm going to bring in the base the dark dots light dots and the neutral and just drag them on top here i'm going to turn everything off right here and bring the base below let's scale this one up a little bit so it fits the edges and i'm going to throw on another levels here and you could probably start getting an idea here that levels is a great way to control you could also use curves um i just find levels the most intuitive i'm gonna bring the gamma slider in the middle closer to the right get a little bit darker and then pull the white down to sort of a darker gray this makes it a much more subtle background concrete texture next let's do our light dots i'll bring this right here turn this on i'm going to set this to screen and then scale this much larger to somewhere like that now i wouldn't worry about resolution because these are going to be animated and they're little accent elements so you don't actually notice if it's a little lower resolution it shouldn't cause an issue i'm actually going to switch this to add which is in the same group just as a slightly different effect and lower the opacity to something like 60 we're going to do the same thing here with the dark dots let's turn this on but instead of the additive blending modes we're going to do the darkening blending mode so i'm going to throw on multiply here and then scale this up a lot as well and you can see it has these dark dots over here on our white texture these will definitely be less noticeable but they will help the actual uh animation i'll scale this to about the same size okay perfect and then finally is the overlay the neutral i'm gonna scale this up and just like before we'll set this to overlay you can mess with some of these other ones too like soft light um if you actually hit shift plus it'll toggle through different blend modes but i think i'm just going to leave it on overlay for now all right let's solo the light dots layer we're going to animate this so if we pull up the position and the rotation and i add a keyframe for both and move forward one frame i'm gonna start moving it around in different ways so i'll rotate it a bit i just hit w to pull up the rotation key i'm just dragging it around i think that's pretty good move forward one frame do the same thing a little bit of rotation and we're just going for some variety on the position and rotation so it looks completely different we don't want too much of the same look across each of the frames so it looks a lot more random i think that's pretty good um i think that's probably enough variety i'm gonna go forward one more frame and actually copy and paste the first two keyframes just ctrl c ctrl v and this will help so it loops perfectly all we need to do now is just select all of them and use alt on windows or option on a mac hold it down and then click and drag the last keyframe and stretch it out and what i'm going for here is because i have my animation in 25 fps i'm gonna go for a multiple of that which is five frames and so i'll just drag it out here and you can see that we have one on the beginning and then the fifth frame tenth fifteenth and so on now if i hit play you're gonna see it's sliding around it doesn't look very good so to fix this all we need to do is just select both right click and click toggle hold keyframes and what it'll do is prevent the animation it'll just show the keyframe positions and then the last thing we need to do here is just alt or option click the stopwatch here and type in a super simple expression just loop out like that and it'll just take the keyframes and loop them out for all eternity and we're going to copy and paste this same one to rotation if we hit play you should see that it loops over and over and we have our animated texture so what i'm going to do now is copy these exact same keyframes to our dark dots and our neutral just paste them if i hit u to pull up the keyframes you'll see they're all the exact same and if i sold these as well you'll see that they're all animating the same which obviously we don't want because the textures are stacking on each other and that's not the look we're going for so all we need to do here is just shift them over a couple keyframes each so that they're not the same when we hit play you'll see we get some good variety this will look best when we actually turn on our other textures so we hit play we get some nice overlay texture you can see that light variation from the overlay as well as the dark dots and the light dots that we made before now there's a couple more things we can do to tie together our animation with the textures um if we zoom in really close we can see it's nice and crisp here which looks okay but it doesn't really blend with the grungier textures so we're gonna make it a little bit more imperfect i have a couple things that i like doing usually to help that the first being a way of roughening the edges i'm gonna throw in a turbulent displace and leave the amount at 50 but bring the size way down to two you'll see it gives it kind of like this rough edge uh look and there's a lot of different ways to do this i think for this video that's probably enough maybe increase the amount to 65 get it really really rough here so that looks good i'm then gonna throw on a glow now i normally use a plug-in called optical glow which gives a really nice fall off on the light but it is a paid plug-in so i'm going to show how to do this a similar look with the default glow plug-in so delete this and i'm just going to bring in the default after effects glow i have some settings that i want to plug in on a few of these the idea is we're going to make a close glow a medium glow and a large glow to give it kind of that similar natural light fall off um the first one we're going to do 20 and 0.2 then i'm going to duplicate 100 and 0.5 and then the last one we're going to do 350 and 1.5 and it gives it a similar glow look it's not exactly the same but you can tweak the amount to whatever you like the last thing i'm going to do is just change the blend mode of the actual animation to add it'll blend in that light a little bit when we hit play we can see it looks really nice and i actually think that these dark spots are much too distracting and even the light spots too so i'm gonna go in here and lower the opacity even more on the light dots maybe down to 40 and bring the dark dots down to maybe 35 or something we want something definitely more subtle honestly changing to a different one in this group might come up with a cool effect we'll just do color burn um one of the main points is just experimentation is your best friend i don't have exact blend modes in mind that i want to use all the time so just toggling through and messing with it is really the best way to find a good look here so we have a nice solid foundation here i think we're almost done there's just a couple more things that we can add to really tie this all together and sell this kind of grungy texture look a few things i'm going to add here i'm going to throw on a posterize time effect on our actual animation layer and we'll set it to half of the frame rate so i'm at 25 i'm going to set it to 12 and a half when we hit play we get much more of a choppy animation that's more reminiscent of stop-motion or a little bit grungier it's kind of like texture in the actual motion which helps a lot with this and then i'm going to make a white solid here just call this white make it like this what we're doing here is just adding a really simple vignette so if we type in cc vignette it comes up with a default vignette here let me increase the amount to 200 set it to multiply and what we can do here if we want to change the shape is just actually just stretch the layer a little bit to uh to something we like i think that's pretty good maybe even crank it a little bit to 250. so we get kind of this nice vignetting around the edges helps focus on the actual texture animation i think i want to put this over the bottom texture so we're not actually covering our nice textures here and the last thing i'm going to do is just make an adjustment layer here so i'm hitting ctrl alt y or command option y on mac and i'm going to bring in a simple transform effect i'm going to scale it up just a little bit to 101 and then i'm going to alt click the position right here to bring up the expression down here and we're going to do two things we're going to do a posterize time and this will make it choppy to whatever frame rate we set so i'm doing five the same as before with the keyframes just because it's a nice multiple of 25 you could do six you could do eight whatever you like it's just up to you with the experimentation and how fast you want it to animate and then i'm going to hit enter for another line i'm going to add a wiggle expression going really fast so 200 and just a few pixels would do something like four and so when we hit play we get this really nice sort of randomized jitter that's reminiscent of old film or old stop motion where the camera wasn't perfectly placed and it helps sell kind of this grungy texture bouncing around look and just for reference if i were to take out this posterize timeline and just have it wiggle every single frame it would be much too extreme if you look here it's shaking way too much maybe that's the look you're going for but for me i like a little bit more subtle on that shake and that's pretty much it for this one i mean this is essentially my workflow when it comes to adding texture and bringing together my animations with the textures around it so here are some of the final products i made using just the textures that i found outside pretty cool and that's all there really is to it if you want to download these textures i put a link in the description and you're welcome to use them in any project you like make sure to subscribe if you like this kind of content and let me know what you want to see next okay see ya [Music]

Channel: Skymography

Views: 15,237

Keywords: animation, motion graphics, animator, after effects, design, designer, tutorial, how to, make textures, textures from anything, animated textures

Id: Y_sgKsGOB1I

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022