Minimax & Long Shadows | Effects of After Effects

[Music] mini max can be found under the channel category so i'm just going to grab that and apply it to my logo and while i try to keep these videos as short as possible this one is going to be a little bit longer because in the second half of the video i'm going to show you how to use this effect to make a fake 3d extrusion that renders really quickly and if we take a look at the after effects user guide the adobe explanation of the minimax effects is that it assigns each channel of a pixel the minimum or maximum value for that channel found within a specified radius which is kind of hard to wrap your head around but this next line this effect can be used to enlarge or reduce a matte that's a pretty simplified way of thinking of this effect so let's take a look at the controls the operation is defaulted to set to maximum and i have a radius control if i turn that up you can see that the yellow color is kind of bleeding into the green colors and the reason this is happening is because the yellow pixel values have a higher number value than the darker green pixels so the maximum operation is being applied meaning the brighter pixels are taking over and it's increasing those pixels of values into the lesser value pixels around it and we're looking currently at the color channel but we could change this to alpha and color and when i do that not only are those pixels going to bleed into each other's color but it's also going to look at the alpha channel and increase that outwards in the maximum operation as well this is where increasing the size of the mat comes into play so this is kind of cool because it's preserving the edge colors while increasing the matte and it's kind of blocky this is similar to what the simple matte choker does if i apply that really quickly simple choker and just reverse this matte out backwards you see how it's expanding the matte but we're not getting those colors preserved and it's much softer so it's just an alternate way of creating that matte expansion but you can change the channel to any one of these if we only wanted the alpha then we've got that exact same look as the simple choker it's just nice to have that extra control we also have the ability to change the direction and this is why it's a little more blocky because it's going horizontally and vertically scanning the entire image and producing that matte but i could change this to just horizontal and then we're only going to expand it out in that direction or just vertical i'll set that back to horizontal and vertical and turn this down a little bit and then let's change the operation from maximum to minimum my layer disappears because this is just going to go in the opposite direction instead of expanding the mat it's decreasing the matter choking the matte and i could change that back to color and you can see what that does it's basically the opposite is what we had before we also have the options for minimum the maximum which is a little bit weird if i change this to alpha and color again it's really hard to wrap your head around what's going on here and we could even change it to maximum then minimum and again it's just weird i honestly have never found a use case for these but that doesn't mean that there isn't a use case i typically just keep it to either minimum or maximum to increase or decrease my mat size the last option we have here is don't shrink edges which won't be apparent on this logo because the bounds of the layer are not the edges of the artwork so to demonstrate i'm just going to make a new solid 500 by 500 white solid and i'm going to add that mini max effect change my channel to alpha and color and change the operation to minimum and that way we're going to shrink our matte if i say don't shrink edges it's going to do just that it won't shrink the outer edges of our layer if i add in a mask really quickly right in the middle and change the mask to punch a hole in the middle by setting it to subtract then you can see it's eating away at that mat and that don't shrink edge's checkbox is preserving the outside of the layer from being shrunk so it's just a way to preserve that outside edge now one really fun and effective use of this effect is for creating a long shadow and i'm not going to take any credit for this i originally found this on a tutorial from 2016 from the channel lunar studios go check out their channel this is extremely useful but i'm just going to really quickly show you how to recreate it so i'll turn minimax on keep the operation maximum the channel to alpha and color and then change the direction to just vertical so we have this kind of smeary vertical stretch version of our layer and just to make this easier to see i'm going to add a fill effect to the top of my effect stack and change it to black and then i'm going to add a transform effect right at the bottom and i'm going to rename this by clicking on that effect and pressing enter and saying transform extrusion shift and what i want to do is link the position specifically the y position value to this radius value through expressions and it's really simple to do i'm just going to double click on that position value to bring it up down here and then i'm going to expand minimax so i can see that radius value as well and i'll just alt click or option click on a mac on that stopwatch to add an expression press delete to get rid of what after effects generated and then start an array which is just an open square bracket to start and then use the expression pick whip to select the first value the x position from the transform effect after effects fills in the expression code that we need to target that then i'm just going to press comma and then grab that expression pick whip again and select the radius value from the minimax effect and let go again after effects fills in the expressions to target that property and then finish this off with a closing square bracket that's all i have to do click off and now what happens is when i shift around this radius value the layer is also being moved using this transform effect which essentially allows me to have an extrusion control but it's shifting it up off the screen and i don't really like that so what i need to do is just add in one more bit to this expression so i'm going to go back into it by clicking on that text going just after that comma and then grabbing my expression pick whip and select that y position value for the transform effect after effects will automatically fill in that code one more time and all i need to do is add a plus right after that so that it adds the radius of the minimax effect to the already existing value for that y position if i apply that my layer is going to shift back to the center of the comp and if i adjust that radius now my layer stays right where it was and we just have this extrusion control basically using minimax but it's only going straight up and down what if we want to rotate it a little bit well that's actually really easy too i'm just going to grab another instance of transform and move it just before the minimax effect and then i'll just adjust the rotation so let's just rotate it back a little bit like this and then i'll rename this transform rotation 1 duplicate that effect one more time with controller command d and then move that to after the minimax effect and before the extrusion shift now we're not there yet but if i double click on the rotation property on that effect expand this up one more time there's my rotation two i'll collapse these other effects so they don't clutter things up and i'll expand the transform rotation one as well all i want to do is take the rotation from the second instance grab the property pick whip and link it to the rotation from the first transform rotation so just click and drag to apply that and then expand this out and make one modification to this expression which is just adding a minus at the start of this expression i'll apply that and then take a look it's now extruding down into the left and it's shifting my layer around so i think all i need to do is bring up those effects and grab that second rotation and drag it all the way to the bottom and that jumped back so now when i adjust that radius there we go that's locked in place again what's great now though is because we linked the second rotation to the first one if i go to that transform rotation and adjust the rotation control you can see how it's now shifting that rotation around but i obviously don't want this to be just black i want to see the original logo back on top of everything so what i'll do is add a cc composite effect just double click on that and what this effect does is literally takes the original unaffected layer and re-composites it by default in front of everything else i just want to make sure i uncheck rgb only so we get the entire full unaffected version of that layer and now i have this fake 3d version of my logo but what's really cool about this is i don't have to make that extrusion a solid color i could delete that fill effect and then say add a curves effect put that at the very top and then just darken this a little bit by dropping those highlights and now i'm kind of getting a shaded version of my logo with that extrusion by zooming nice and close you can see it's very clean because of the way that the minimax effect works and if i adjust this it's very quick to render even if this is animated it's very quick and snappy so using that radius i can control the extrusion and using the rotation i can change the angle of it so that's everything there is to minimax and a really fun application of the effect hey thanks for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then check out the other ones here on my youtube channel and if you like my teaching style then definitely check out my longer form content on skillshare and school of motion and if you want to support more tutorials like this one check out my patreon you can find links for all that stuff in the description of this video you

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 15,287

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: ibfYiy--9Hs

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021