Top Animated Backgrounds (After Effects Tutorial)

in today's tutorial we're going to be looking at a couple of different ways of creating animated backgrounds so without further Ado let's hop straight into off the effects where I have a 1920 x 1080 composition setup actually I have four of them cuz we're going to be creating four different backgrounds all animated and super sick we are going to be starting out with the first one which is a gradient background very similar to the one in my previous video that a couple of you were asking about so I figured I'd cover that cuz it's a pretty cool little technique with a little bit of extra sauce on top to make it look super sick so we are going to start out by creating a new solid so just command Y and we are going to make sure that it is black we want it to be just pitch black and we'll name this background next up we want to use our shape tool and we'll be using an ellipse so make sure you have an ellipse selected you can always click and hold to choose between the different shapes and we want to make sure there's no stroke on it and then we want to change the fill and we're going to do different layers of grates until white so we are going to choose a fairly dark gray and this one will work pretty good 52 52 52 for the hex code hit okay zoom out a little bit if need to and then just hold shift while clicking and dragging to create a perfect circle and we'll just place it somewhere right about here looks pretty good and then we are going to create another one and this time we want to make it a little bit lighter so just pick a lighter color this 94 94 94 works pretty good and again click and drag while holding shift and you want to make these two different sizes and kind of put them on each side but we'll animate it pretty easily so we just want to kind of lay out where some darks and lights are going to be to mess around with it next step is to add our very bright bright and we can just do a fully white color or just a slight off white if you want to do and this time we just want it to be kind of an accent color so we'll just create a small circle and for this particular shape I don't want it to be a perfect circle I'll just want to draw a somewhat ellipse type looking thing and put it somewhere around the center this is pretty good now we can get to the animating and it's super simple we're just going to use it expression to drive all of this which makes it a lot easier on us and easy to get some random results I'm going to hit U to hide everything and then I'm just going to select my first layer hit P to bring up the position and then I'm going to alt click the position stopwatch and we're going to add a wiggle expression and then we're going to type 1 comma 1,000 and that's just going to give it a little bit of movement everywhere and just randomize it a little bit which is perfect for the look that we're going for now we can right click on the position parameter where we added the expression copy expression only and then select the two other layers and then simply paste it onto those layers and it will automatically apply that expression to the position now we have all three layers animated going crazy from there we're going to add an adjustment layer and we are going to add a false box blur you can use Goran blur as well false box blur is just a little bit quicker increase the iterations to six that's just going to make the blur look a little bit nicer it's essentially just the quality of the blur and then we're just going to scale it up until we get something that looks pretty cool and blob looking type of thing so this looks pretty sick now we can also add a turbulent displace to this and we'll just add it before the blur and we can hide the blur for now and then we can increase the amount a good bit to get some pretty wonky looking shapes play with the size until you get something that looks pretty cool the values will depend on the size of your circles and what you're kind of going for you just want to make sure you don't have any background showing turn on the fast box play again and now we have something that looks kind of like this super random and crazy you can see we get a lot of little details so you can always increase the size if you want more larger slower looking blobs increased blur radius if you want them more blurry just depends on the look you want now the next step is the fun bit we are going to scale the background up just a little bit just so it covers a little bit of the edges and then we're going to take all these layers and pre-compose them by holding shift command C and we're just going to name this background gradient pre and we are going to add an adjustment layer and now this does use a plug-in that is paid there is an affiliate Link in the description if you want it but I just thought this this looked super cool and it just gives it a nice little bit of characteristics but we're going to bring up FX console and we are going to add what is called flies eyes circles and that's going to create that texture that you see in the gradient that just makes it look like clouds or like a pillow almost looks super sweet I don't know exactly how it works I just know it looks sick and now if you play that back you can see how the circle's kind of highlighted in a super interesting way with the gradients and it just makes it look just very unique next up we are going to add a bit of a cur to our main background so just add that to the precom and then we can go in and play around with the values to get uh the look that we really want kind of Drive some of these so that looks pretty good we've got something pretty ominous now we are going to add another adjustment layer and we are going to add vignette to it CC vignette that's just going to vignette the corners a little bit you can always adjust that however much you want but I just think it looks pretty sick another layer which is this time just going to be a solid by hitting command Y and then we are going to name this green and make sure that we have midle gray selected so 80 80 80 hit enter to bring that up and then we're going to add add grain to it and select whichever preset you want change the final output and increase the size to something like 1.5 and then we'll add a tint effect to it just to make sure that is monochromatic and again we'll pre-comp this shift command C and we'll name this grain pre and move all attributes into the new composition and then we're going to set the blending mode to something like overlay and that's just going to give us some really nice texture in there and just make it stand out a little bit more that is pretty much all for creating this if you want to Overlay something let's say you have a bit of text so we'll just put text right here and scale it up in its current state it might be a little bit distracting what I like to do is above the adjustment layers I'll just add a black solid hit okay and then you can just decrease the opacity of it to put it a little bit more in the background so it's not as prominent next up is one most of you should know if you don't know then well you definitely found the right video and that is a bit of a grid background with a little bit of extra finessing in there to make it a little bit easier to work with you'll typically see this in a bunch of the finance YouTubers like imangi and what not they use this effect all the time because it just it's clean it works well and it's a great little extra level of detail to add to your backgrounds but we are very simply going to start by adding a solid and we'll just name this background and then we are going to add a gradient so we're just going to add a gradient wrap to it and in this case I'll do a radial wamp and I'll set the start of the ramp to the middle of my layer so for 1920 composition that would be 540 and then I'm going to swap the colors and for the lightest color I'm just going to make it a little bit darker of a gray and increase the end ramp to be a little bit smoother so we don't have it super dark then we are going to add another layer and it doesn't matter what color this one is because we're going to add the grid effect to it so that's doesn't matter but we're just going to name this grid and hit enter and then again using FX console we are going to add the grid effect super simple so far we have the border which essentially just decides how thick your border is I like to put it pretty low to something like two or three depending on the size of the composition and then instead of working with the corner point to try and get it the right size we can change it to either a width slider which is going to make every single one a quadrant no matter what so it's a perfect square or you can do a width and height slider if you don't want it to be a perfect square you just want it to be a rectangle maybe then you can do that as well we're just going to stick with the width slider to make it a little bit easier and then you can just decide whatever size you want let's maybe do this size right here and then decrease the border to something like two to make sure it's not too overpowering if you want you can always change the color of it if you wanted to you can animate this a little bit so let's say you key frame the width and you want to do a zoom in effect so if I hit U you can see my key frame down here and I go forward to maybe 3 seconds and then if I increase the width it'll look like I'm zooming in now if you want to add that Zoom with a little bit of movement we can key frame the anchor on the grid effect hit U again to show that key frame and maybe move forward a little bit and then we can slide this around and essentially gives us an infinite grid but this can be a bit tedious if you have a composition where you already have some movement and then you're trying to manually animate it as well so what we can do is if we move both of these key frames and then we can go in and let's add a bit of a composition here I have one set up already which is just a couple of different layers and it has a little line animating so nothing too fancy what we can do with this is if we open up the scale and the position position of our prec comp with all everything that we have in it we can link the anchor and the width to each of those parameters that way we can animate it at the same time so it kind of looks like a Flawless camera flowing between all the elements so if I take my anchor and keep and pick whip it to the position of the assets and then the width and pick whip that to the scale we can now if I scale it up you can see it moves with it and the same with the position this makes it a lot easier to essentially fake a bit of camera movement so we are going to key frame both of these with this first one in the center then we're going to go forward to about 2 seconds and then we are going to find the next one and let's Center that up as well you can always use the grid if you want to to line things up just to get them perfectly centered maybe a little bit more of a zoom in and just like that looks pretty good I'm just following the key frames from this composition so I have 2 seconds and then a half a second Gap and then it moves again so again key frame all of these then 2 seconds forward and we'll go on to the next just like that and then you can select all your key frames and ease them however you want I'm just going to use sexy speed for the sake of the tutorial ease all of that and then now playing this back we have the camera a fake camera following along and we have an infinite grid which just super sick way of doing it and using the power of off effects and parenting different parameters to each other to create a super easy way of like animating and just way easier than if you had to manually animate the grid can always add a little bit of flare to it maybe you want to add an adjustment layer with some Optics compensation and that will just give it a little bit of that distorted look that you often see in those videos and you going to reverse that and that'll give you that little bit of distortion on the edges which just Narrows down the focus a little bit you can add whatever else you want to it a vignette Etc next up we have something a bit similar we're going to have a grid floor which is just like a super retro cool looking thing somewhat of the same effect we are again just going to create a new solid and we're just going to name this grid doesn't matter what color and then we going add the grid effect to it and this time we're going to turn the lay into 3D and we can rotate it and we'll rotate it to lay flat and move it down a little bit to create a floor looking thing and we will hit shift command Y and that's going to bring up our solid settings and then we can increase the width to cover the whole length of the the whole width of the canvas and again we'll just pick whatever you want withd and slight Hiers or just a width Hider it doesn't matter in this case let's do a little bit of an alarm elongated rectangle something like this looks pretty good and again we can just key frame the anchor and that will allow us to slide it so if you just move it forward that is pretty good so now you have an infinitely scrolling floor where you can put whatever on it you can even duplicate it and then go to Rotation by hitting all and then rotate it the other way move it up and now you have both a ceiling and a floor with the room for something to go in the middle maybe you want like a super cool little title text and add a little bit of deep glow to it maybe change the text color to a nice reddish color decrease the exposure of it a little bit to something like .5 or click the exposure and add a posterized time set that to six and a wiggle let's do 10 comma 0.2 and that just gives us a super sick little flickering text with a little bit of motion above and below you can even copy that and paste it onto your grid layers I like it without it just looks a little bit cooler and as you can see if you just add it to it it'll of course be bound by the layer itself so what you can do to avoid that and get like real good glow is precount both of those we'll name the scrid pre and then we can paste it onto there and that's just going to make it look a little bit nicer and just like that you've made a nice little floor ceiling animated grid super cool title sequence look last but not least we have an infinite tunnel but it's pretty simple to create we're going to start with a rectangle tool so again go up to your shape tool click and hold and Shake select your rectangle tool you can make this any size you want you just want to make sure you have a fill off and then turn on the stroke in this case we're just going to do a white stroke and set it to something like let's do three pixels and then we're just going to draw you can do a square you can do whatever ratio you want I'm going to go into the rectangle settings and then I'm going to change it to a 1280x 720 and that's just going to make it so that it's essentially the same ratio as a video 16 by9 and I just like that look cuz then you can display a video in the middle middle of the scene so do that and then lock the size back together so that it'll be proportional the whole way through and then we just want to make sure that we have this object centered in the middle now you want to go forward to let's say about 4 seconds set a key frame for the size go back to the very beginning and set it to zero and then you want to go forward to your key frame and then you want to scale it all the way up until it's out of screen so we have a little animation that looks something like this and as you can see the closer it gets or the bigger it gets the slower it goes so to compare that movement and make it a little bit more seamless throughout we're going to select the key frames hit F9 to ease the key frames and then go into your graph editor and we're going to select the last points and hold shift while dragging all the way in and then do the same with the first two points drag them towards the right and that's just going to make it so it goes slower in the beginning and faster in the end but because of that optical illusion it's going to look like it's actually just moving at pretty much the same Pace throughout now I'm going to end and this layer right here after it's done it's out of the frame we can just trim that down so now we have this but that's only one this bit is a bit tedious you want to essentially duplicate it and I guess you could make this with the echo effect as well but this gives us a little bit more control and we want to move forward and we're just going to drag this layer out a little bit and then we're going to see what it looks like with more copies coming in so we can kind of decide on how close do we want these to be together so let's say this distance is pretty good it's 7 frames we want to keep that in mind because we're going to drag this layer back and then we're just going to duplicate it as many times as you need to but you don't need to do too many times we just need it to Loop for a little bit and then we can keep that looping we've made a good few copies I'm going to select it all and then using the motion tools plugin which is free and Linked In the description we are going to offset these layers by seven frames so in the offset I'm going to type seven make sure step is at one so it's going to do every single layer and then we're just going to sequence them from the bottom layer and up so hit sequence and just like that it sequences all the layers so if you play that back we should now have a nice little tunnel created we are going to start at a point where it's pretty much covered up so let's start right here hit command R to bring up your rulers and then you can CL click and drag and you want to kind of line it up with this Edge out here just so we can see when we want it to Loop hit B on your keyboard to cut that so that we can Loop the sequence move forward a couple of seconds until a another shape layer has reached that same point and then you can hit n and that'll just trim the end of it it'll just keep looping and looping and looping forever which is perfect so we can right click on that and trim comp to work area and it'll just mean that now we only have this little section that Loops now we can add the placeholder for our little screen and we don't need to be super perfect with the size because we know what aspect ratio we want it to be from the outside Circle so I'm just going to click and drag and make sure that I have my strike at the same width as everything else go into the rectangle rectangle path unlink it and do a 1280 by 720 size link those two together and make sure that our shape is centered up and then we can scale it down to whatever size you want it to be maybe you want it to be right about here and playing that back we now have this little bit of like radiating flashing things and it looks pretty cool but I want to add a couple more details to make it look more square or like more like a little tunnel you're going through so I'm going to hit G to bring up my pen to make sure fill is turned off and what I'm going to do here is simply get a line from one corner to the other so I'm just going to click down here click up in the other corner and then hit V and then I just want to make sure that it's lined up correctly all the way throughout going all the way down maybe move this one just a little bit just a little bit like that that looks pretty good and we can put this below our shape layer and once we have that lined up I'm just going to duplicate the shape and then I'm going to go into the path options on the contents and line it up with the other Corners so taking this down going to drag this down to that corner and this one up to this corner just making sure I have that lined up pretty good and the same with this bottom corner and again we can duplicate it and then we just want to make a flat one for this one I'm going to use my grid one point in the path once again I'm going to gohe and click and click and drag that and we want to make sure it's right in the flat and make sure this is selected to just like that and then if I hide my grid and just like that we have a nice little perspective background type of showcase thing that is pretty much it for this tutorial just four different ways of creating some super cool and unique backgrounds for your motion design work whether you're doing one style or another I'm sure these techniques will come in handy but with that being said I just want to say thank you and uh I'll see you again next week peace out

Channel: Mapal

Views: 25,970

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Id: NZs5BTukALA

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2023