Make Rolling Clouds of Smoke/Dust in After Effects (No Plugins)

hey hey here at the motion mill i'm going to show you how to make a very quick and easy rolling cloud of smoke fog dust and so on without any plug-ins create a new composition with your desired dimensions right away select the pen tool pick your fill color here hold alt and click on the stroke here a few times to disable it with the pen tool make a few curves in your composition and complete the shape outside the comp window don't worry too much about how it looks go to your effects and presets tab and search for a fractal noise add it to your shape and lower the contrast to something between 30 and 50. you'll want the complexity to be at least 10 it doesn't look much different now but complexity comes in for other effects lower the opacity to something between 60 and 75 and set your blending mode either to screen or multiply depending on if you want the cloud to be bright or dark to make the fractal field be constantly changing hold alt and click the stopwatch next to evolution in the text box that pops up type time asterisk 500 or just use whatever number you want the speed to be more is faster now open the transform tab under fractal noise and alt-click offset turbulence in the text box that pops up type in a bracket followed by time asterisk with any number and a comma followed by time asterisk with any number then close the brackets the first number will represent the horizontal movement of the displacement and the second number represents the vertical movement if you want one of these to not move set the corresponding number to zero we're done with the fractal noise for now search for turbulent displace and add it to your layer raise the amount between 70 and 120 and lower the size to something between 10 and 25 but you could adjust these to be however you want your cloud to be shaped like raise the complexity slightly and then alt-click the stopwatch next to offset turbulence instead of retyping the brackets from earlier we could select and copy the brackets from the fractal noise and paste them into the turbulent displaced text box so they move at the same pace now to go search for a fast box blur and add it to the layer make sure it's above both the turbulent displace and fractal noise effects the more you raise the blur radius the more your cloud should grow longer and blurrier i set mine to around 90. if you blur a lot with a colorful cloud you might start noticing banding lines in your cloud one way to get rid of this is to increase your bits per channel with this button here and changing it in this tab here another way is adding an adjustment layer searching for noise to add to it and putting it at just one percent finally to give your cloud more dynamic movement you can open the path tab under your shape and add some keyframes on the keyframe spots select the layer and move your strokes how you see fit copy your first keyframe put it at the end i'll click the stopwatch and input this little fella into the text this will make the movement loop i'll leave it in the description for you to copy and paste you could also select all the keyframes and press f9 to make them ease into each other you can make some final touches with the tint and curves effects and then set your layer to screen to have it blend in better with other layers now you have your rolling cloud if you think it turned out well you could use it again by selecting all your effects clicking animation and then save animation preset you could apply it by selecting another layer and clicking animation apply animation preset if you found this tutorial helpful let me know and be on the lookout for more here in the motion mill

Channel: Motion Mill

Views: 21,812

Keywords: After Effects, Adobe, Motion Mill, Animation, Motion Graphics, tutorial, easy, beginner, editing, keyframe, tricks, technique, motion, computer, sprite, mario, video games, fast, under, convert, change, smoke, fog, dust, cloud, sand, no plugin, no plugins, Red Giant, Trapcode, rolling, clouds

Id: nC5M77jeXCc

Length: 3min 45sec (225 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020