- What's up, Joey here at School of Motion,
and welcome to day two of 30 Days of After Effects. Today what I want to talk about is an effect
that a lot of people don't really understand, and it's called polar coordinates. It's this really geeky sounding effect. But with a little creativity and some know-how,
it can do some incredible stuff. Now, this tutorial was inspired by a sick
piece done by my favorite motion designer, G Munk. I tried to recreate a little bit of it, and
I show you how I do it. And don't forget, sign up for a free student
account, so you can grab the project files from this lesson. Now, let's hop into After Effects and get
started. So like I said, the purpose of this video
is going to be to introduce you guys to the polar coordinates effect. And if you look at the final render that I
put together, I kind of went a little bit overboard, and I obviously did a lot more
than just put together a simple little demo here, and I'm not going to be able to show
you how I did every little piece of this. If that's something you're interested in,
please let me know in the comments, because you know, all of the stuff you're looking
at, there's free information about how to use, you know, the sound effector in Cinema
4D, and how to create things that react with audio. What I want to show you in this tutorial is
how to make this tunnel, this kind of rotating 3D infinite tunnel. And it's actually a lot easier than you'd
think. I wanna show you guys the G Munk piece, and
I know it wasn't just G Munk. He probably worked with a lot of people on
this, but he made this piece recently. And if you look at this part right here, this
tunnel. And there's a lot of really neat stuff going
on here, and there's some really fancy particle stuff. But this tunnel, this cool techie-tron-looking
tunnel, is what I wanted to try and recreate, and I thought it would be a good way of using
the polar coordinates effect to show you guys how to use it. So let's hop into After Effects. First let me try to show you what this effect
does. Just on a very simple level. So I'm going to make a new comp, we'll just
call it test. All right, so, what this effect does at its
simplest level, okay, I'm just going to make big horizontal line across the entire comp. And I'm going to add an adjustment layer,
and then I'm going to add the polar coordinates effect to it. So polar coordinates, it only has two options. The type of conversion, and then the interpolation
is basically the strength of the effect, so if we set this to rectangular to polar. And then we up the strength here. All right, you can see what it does, it basically
takes that linear thing, and it basically bends it into a circle. Okay, so that's what the effect does. And you might be wondering, why is that useful? Well, like if you want to turn the tutorial
off after this, this might explain everything for you, okay? If I take this line, put it up here. Actually, I got a better idea, let's put it
way up here. Let's actually move it out of the frame. And let's put a key frame on Y position. And go forward one second, and move it down
here. That's it, okay? Now when we play that, that's the animation
that's happening, very simple. If we turn the polar coordinates strength
all the way up to 100, and then we play it, well now look what it's doing. All right, it's taking that vertical motion
in our layer and it's turning it into radial motion. So that's really why this effect is so cool. I'll show you guys how I made the tunnel,
but before I do that, I wanna, I just want you to understand a little bit better some
other ways that this effect can be used. Of course, we're just scratching the surface
here. And there's actually some other really cool
things you can do. So let me first turn my adjustment layer off. Let me delete the shape layer. And I'll show you guys this example that hopefully
will start giving you some ideas of your own, some cool experiments you could run with this
effect, and see what you can come up with. So here we've got a star. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn
the conversion, instead of rectangular to polar, I'm gonna say polar to rectangular. All right, and what this is gonna do, is it's
gonna take something that's radial, like a circle or a star, and it's gonna sort of un-distort
it and create and unwrapped linear version of it, right? So if I turn this adjustment layer back on,
right, I'll scrub the strength here, so you can see what it does. It does this weird warp, and we end up with
this, okay? Now why is that useful? Well, it can be useful if you have something,
a piece of artwork that's circular or something, anything that kind of has this radial shape,
radial symmetry to it. You can use polar coordinates to now create
a unwrapped rectangular version of it. Then you can do other stuff to it. So for example, what if I, you know, just
took a simple effect like venetian blinds. Sometimes a useful effect, and all it does
if you've never used it, it just basically makes a lot of little cuts in your footage,
and you can control the angle of the cuts, and you basically use it to wipe things on
and off. And what's interesting is that, you know,
this effect right now, it doesn't really look like anything special. The trick is you basically use polar coordinates
to unwrap something, you then affect it, then you use polar coordinates again, and go back
to your original polar look, right? So we first went polar to rectangular, then
we affected it, and now we're going rectangular to polar. And this doesn't look really all that interesting. Now you've got lines radiating from the star. Let me zoom in and go full res so we can really
see this. But now you can start to get some interesting
looks, right? If I start messing with the direction, now
we're getting kind of a spiral wipe, which, you know, would actually be pretty tricky
to do. And let me up the width of these things so
they're a little bit bigger. And then I can adjust the direction till we
get a nice seamless looking thing. And now what you have is a wipe that actually
works in a spiral fashion, okay? So this is something that would be pretty
tricky to do actually. If you wanted to create this type of wipe. But here's a quick little trick to do it. And it can also be used for maybe more useful
things. Let me turn this off for a minute. If you wanted to distort that star, but have
it be distorted in a radial way, you could use maybe turbulent displace, and maybe set
it to vertical displacement. And let's bring the size down, bring the amount
up. And then use that same trick, right? Then, you know, if you change the evolution
of this. You can start to see, you're going to get,
you're going to get noise and distortion that moves in and out from the center of this object. And so you could use this, you know, here's
a really quick cool example of how that might be useful. And I actually got this idea recently from
watching Andrew Cramer's tutorial on how to make this really cool explosion, and he uses
polar coordinates. I promise you, Andrew, if you're watching,
I did not steal the idea for this tutorial from you, you just happened to do it at the
same time as I was doing this one. So yeah, what I wanna do is just turn off
the fill. And just turn the stroke up a little bit. So this is interesting, right, because. Let me turn these effects off for a minute. So we've got a circle. And then I'm going to use the polar coordinates
effect to turn it back into a line. Now why in the world would I want to do that? That seems kind of ridiculous. Because now I can use this turbulent displace,
right? And let me turn it to something else, maybe
twist. And if I animate the evolution, you're going
to get something like this. And even better, if you offset the turbulence,
you can have something that looks like it's moving through the shape. And this effect, it doesn't work in a radial
way, it works in a linear way. So if I use this trick of, you know, sort
of sandwiching an effect between polar coordinates, what I can get, if I offset the turbulence
on Y, is I can kind of get this radiating, you know, it almost looks like a star or something. Like the corona of a star. So let me just put a quick key frame here
on the offset turbulence, so I'll go forward one second, and I'll move it outward a little
bit. And then we'll just RAM preview that, and
you can see, it's a pretty nifty little trick. You'd obviously want to put some more effects
on it and layer it, and do other things to it. But hopefully this starts to show you the
power of using the polar coordinates. It lets you do things in a linear way, but
then turn them into this radial thing. So hopefully that gave you a hint about how
I actually pulled off copying this amazing G Munk piece. So let's take another look at this. You know, I didn't copy it exactly, there
were so many layers, I mean, there's so many things going on. And again, I want to stress that what makes
this piece amazing is not the fact that maybe they used this trick to create it. It's obviously the design and the sound design
especially, and the vibe that this piece gives you, and none of that has to do with actually,
you know, what effect they used. It has to do with the thinking and the art
direction behind it. So I just wanted to stress that, 'cause that's
kind of a big thing for me, is never forgetting that that's the important thing. But look at the design of this. You've just got a bunch of sort of lines that
just move at right angles. They sort of randomly, like, they'll come
out a little bit, then take a turn, then turn back, then turn this way. And every once in awhile, there's like a little
area here that kind of gets enclosed, and as the piece goes on, too, you kind of see
this come back. And you even get to see if from a side angle. And you'll kind of see that sometimes these
little shapes get filled in, sometimes they look a little bit less transparent. This part's really cool too. I'll just let you watch it because it's awesome. All right, so what I wanted to do was to see
if I could just make that in After Effects without having to resort to Illustrator or
something like that. So let me delete this stuff. We're gonna create all of this stuff in After
Effects. If we want to have things radiating out from
the center of our comp, then the way we need to do it is to have them start at the top
of our frame, and move down. That's how you get outward motion using the
polar coordinates effect. So the first thing we need to do is create
our artwork. And I'm gonna make this comp a lot longer,
a lot taller than it is, because if I'm gonna be moving these shapes down, and I want to
have a lot of them, I'm not gonna have enough room if I only have this small little comp. So let me make this, instead of 1920 x 1080,
I'll make it 1920 by, let's do like 6,000. All right, so now you get this nice tall comp. So let's come down here to the bottom. And I want to be able to make these shapes
really easily, so I'm gonna do two things. One is I'm gonna turn on the grid in After
Effects. So you can go to View, Show Grid. I usually use the hotkeys, so it's Command
+ apostrophe will show you the grid. And then the second thing you need to do is
make sure that you have Snap To Grid turned on. If you don't, the grid won't actually help
you create these things. So now I'm going to switch to my pen tool,
and I'm gonna hit the tilde key here. All right, and if you don't know what the
tilde key is, it's the little key next to the one on the top row of your keyboard with
all the numbers. That little squiggle is called a tilde. And whatever window your mouse is over, when
you hit tilde, will get maximized. So if I wanna zoom in here and work on these
shapes, this makes it a lot easier. All right, so the next thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna set up my shape settings. I want no fill, all right? So you can click the word fill, make sure
that this None icon is clicked. For the stroke, white is fine for the color. I'll just make it white. And then for the thickness, I'm not exactly
sure what I want yet, but why don't we just set it to five for now. First let's just try drawing one of these
shapes, all right? And let's just keep this open, so we can reference
it. Let's find a good frame, like that's a good
frame, okay. So really all I need are a bunch of, you know,
like a vertical line, and every once in awhile, it kind of takes a right or left turn. So let's hop into After Effects. We'll start down here. And I'm just gonna put a point there, and
because I have Snap To Grid turned on, I can actually do this pretty quick. Have this come back up here, come over here. Up, up, like this. And you can see that this actually doesn't
take that much time. So now I want to draw a different line. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the
V key, switch back to my arrow, and then I can just click somewhere else outside of this
to deselect it, right? Or a faster way would be to deselect everything. So if you hit Shift + Command + A, that deselects
everything. So Command + A is Select All. Shift + Command + A is Deselect All. So now if I hit my pen tool again, which is
the G key on your keyboard, you guys should learn these hotkeys, they really make you
so much faster. So now I can create another shape. So maybe this one starts here. Now I'm gonna show you this, I just screwed
up a little bit. When I clicked, I clicked and dragged a little
bit. And you can see that the bezier handles of
this point were pulled out a little bit. And that's a problem because now if I pull
this point over like this, it's actually bending a little bit. There's a little curve to it, which I don't
want. So I'm just gonna hit undo. So that's one thing you have to be careful
of. Make sure that when you click your point,
you just click, and you don't click and drag. So that you don't get any curves, okay? So now I'll click here. Click over here. Maybe come down like this. And, you know, I'm not really following any
rules here, I'm just trying to make something that resembles the spirit of G Munk's. So now I'm gonna deselect all, and let me
make one more shape. All right, and then we'll move on here. Make this one like a little bit fatter. So then the next thing we wanna do is I wanna
take some of these. Oh, I forgot to deselect all. There we go. So next thing I want to do is I wanna create
a few little caps for these things, all right? So I'll create one, deselect all. And then maybe I'll create a little area like
this, just fill in that shape like that. All right, deselect all. And then I'll do maybe a thicker one here. Okay, and then maybe this one. Okay, and then maybe I'll put a line here
and a line here. Then we'll call it a day. Okay, deselect all, and then do one maybe
up here. Cool, okay, now I'm gonna hit Command + apostrophe,
and you can see our design here, beautiful. And so then, the next thing I wanna do is
just sort of duplicate it a bunch of times, so I don't have to actually create this really
complicated set-up here. So an easy way to do that is to just select
all of these. Precompose them, and we'll call this Shape01. All right, and so let me scoot this guy over
like this, and then I'm gonna duplicate it, and I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna
try to line up these lines right here as best I can. And then scoot this one down a little bit,
and the reason I'm doing this is so that we can sort of hide the fact that we're just
gonna clone this thing a bunch of times. I want to try and mix up, and then maybe for
this one, I could scale it negative 100, horizontally, so that it's actually a mirror image. So it actually looks even a little different. I can scoot this one up like this. Cool, so now I've got this kind of building
block that I can start to use. So maybe I'll duplicate this one more time,
scoot it over here. And I'm just kind of nudging these things
with the keyboard and zooming in. It's not gonna be perfect. Unless you take the time to make it perfect,
which I'm not very good at. I'm kind of impatient. So now I'm gonna take this whole set-up, precomp
that. We'll call that Shape02. And I can duplicate it, and bring it up like
this. And you can see that there's like a little
hole here that we need to fill. So what I'll probably do is just duplicate
it again, and I'll just bring this over like this, and I'll just sort of position it so
that it fills in that hole. And we're getting a little bit too much overlap
down here, so what I might do is then mask that section off. And set that mask to subtract. And then I can just adjust that mask. So it only shows up where I want it to, right? And maybe move it up a little bit. Grab those points. Cool, and hopefully you're seeing how quickly
you can do this, too, I mean. You know, if you're actually doing this for
a paying client, yeah, you probably want to take the time to make it perfect. But if you're just playing around, or if you're
just trying to, you know, do something for your reel, just to make something cool-looking,
no one's going to notice these little inconsistencies when this is moving, cool? All right, and then why don't we duplicate
this whole thing one more time. And precomp this whole thing. Shapes03, duplicate, bring it up here. And just to make life easier, let me mask
off this little top piece here. Subtract it, and then duplicate it, and so
now we can move this up. There we go. Cool, and then we just need one more copy,
and we're pretty good to go. Cool, all right, so we've got this really
interesting looking set-up here. The next thing I did was I actually filled
in some of these shapes. All right, so, maybe just wanna precomp this
and just call these Lines, so you don't have to think about it anymore, and then you can
lock it, so you don't accidentally move it. And then let's hit that tilde key again and
zoom in. And this time what I want to do is I'm gonna
select my rectangle tool. I'm gonna set the fill to a full fill. And set the stroke to zero. And so now what I can do is zoom in, we can
turn the grid back on. Although, that may not actually help us at
this point because since we sort of hand positioned those lines, you can see that a bunch of them
don't actually line up to the grid anymore. So let's not even both with that. And let's turn off Snap To Grid, which it's
grayed out because the grid is not showing. So we're good to go. So then I just take the rectangle tool, and
I just sort of quickly go through, and I try to be somewhat arbitrary about it, and not
have too many big areas of filled in color. But sometimes I want that section, sometimes
I want that section. And I'll just try to do this a bunch of times. And I think when I did this for the tutorial,
I probably spent, I don't know, 15-20 minutes making this design and filling this in. I'm trying to do it a little quicker, 'cause
I know how boring it is for you guys to watch. But one of the things I'm hoping. Let me undo that. One of the things I'm hoping that you're getting
from this in addition to learning a new trick is, you know, seeing how quickly you can get
things done in After Effects. And not having to overthink the production
of your elements sometimes. I know I've done jobs where you have a big
team, and so you sort of end up trying to find ways to include everyone in the work,
and so you might have a designer actually create this stuff in Illustrator, but then
you gotta take that Illustrator file into After Effects, and then you may need to tweak
it. So then you have to do a bunch of work, and
so, you know, when you're doing something like this, don't be afraid to just say like,
"Hey, I can just do it in After Effects, "and we don't need another person, "and we don't
need to make work for somebody." A lot of this type of stuff you can just do
very quickly. So that's pretty cool, and let's just leave
that for now. And what we may actually be able to get away
with, all right. And one thing you should notice, too. Because I didn't deselect all, when I was
making those shapes, it put all of those shapes on one shape layer. Which is okay for this, this isn't gonna bother
me. So I'm renaming this Solid. What I'm gonna do is just duplicate it, and
see if I can get away with just lining it back up. Which seems to work. So that way I don't have to literally go through
this entire layer here making these. Okay cool, so we've go some filled in areas,
we've got some lines, we did that fairly quickly. All right, so this is now our design. Let me rename this comp. This is gonna be Tunnel_Flat, okay? Cool, so let me make a new folder here. Because I'm super anal retentive. There we go, all right. So here's our Tunnel_Flat layer. So the next you wanna do is make a new comp,
and this is gonna be our polar comp, okay? Now what I'm gonna do here, I'm gonna start
by making it 1920 x 1080, and I want to show you what happens if I do this. So let's drag our Tunnel_Flat comp into this. And let's flip it upside down, and the reason
we need to flip it upside down is because, so this needs to be negative 100. It needs to be upside down because in order
for the polar coordinates effect to work correctly, and make this look like a tunnel coming towards
us, this layer's gonna have to move down, and since I designed it from the bottom up,
then I actually just need to reverse it when I move it this way. So let's start by just opening up the position
property here. So hit P, I always separate dimensions. I almost never leave them connected for position. We'll put a key frame on Y, we'll move this
thing out of the frame. And then we'll go forward. Our comp is 10 seconds long. And let's just move this thing all the way
down like that. Let's see how fast that ends up moving. That might be too fast. But we'll see. Okay, cool, so there we have it. And now, the last thing we do, is we add the
adjustment layer, and we add the polar coordinates effect. So Distort, Polar Coordinates, switch this. By default, it's polar to rectangular, you
have to switch it rectangular to polar, and then turn the interpolation up, okay? And now, if we RAM preview this, this is what
you get, okay? So you get this infinite kind of, you know. I mean, there it is, right? Looks just like G Munk's. Same thing, done. All right, so obviously there's some problems. One is the effect. It only creates a circle that is as tall as
your comp, okay? So what I did for the video I made for the
tutorial was I actually just set the width and the height to 1920. And then make sure that your adjustment layer
is the same size as the comp. So I just opened up the settings for that. By the way, the hotkey, if you don't know,
Shift + Command + Y opens up the settings for a solid, and then you can just hit make
comp size, and it'll scale it to the comp size. So now we get a tunnel that actually is the
full size of the comp. Now, I'll show you what's gonna happen. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take
polar comp. We're gonna make a new comp, and this will
be our, you know, our final tunnel comp here. And this comp is gonna be 1920 x 1080. So this is gonna be our normal comp we're
gonna render from, and we're gonna take our polar comp, put it in there, all right? And you can see that it's almost big enough,
but it's not quite big enough And that's okay because I knew going in. If you look at the final here, there's so
many effects and layers of things happening here, that I knew that I could just kind of
cover that up if I wanted to. And what I actually ended up doing was putting
an adjustment layer above this whole thing. And I do that a lot, I use adjustment layers
to kind of affect my whole comp. That way it's easy to turn it on and off. But I used another distort effect called Optics
Compensation and what that does is it sort of simulates either a fisheye lens, if you
just sort of leave it on and you turn the field of view up, it kind of makes your, it
basically simulates a very wide angle lens. Or you can do a reverse lens distortion, right? And it'll actually, it'll suck out the edges
of your comp a little bit and give you a little bit of lens distortion. And so that's what I wanted to do. So why don't we pull the start time of polar
comp to there, okay? Or better yet, why don't we go into polar
comp and we'll have the Y position start where it's already far enough out that it's reaching
the edge of our tunnel, okay? So now if we look at Tunnel_Final, we're in
half res, I'm just gonna do a quick RAM preview. Just to get a sense of the speed of this thing. All right, so the next thing is, you can see
the beginning of this, and it kind of goes off into infinity. Which could be cool, and if you look at the
G Munk piece, it goes pretty far back. But there is a definite hole there, okay? So I don't know if they used polar coordinates
to actually create this piece, but to fake that, there's an easy trick. All you have to do is go to your polar comp
here. Let's turn off this adjustment layer for a
minute, so the way the polar coordinates effect works is the top of your frame is the center
of the circle, okay? And the edge of the circle. And by the center of the circle, I mean the
top of this frame correlates to the center of this circular version of your layer. Now this outer part actually falls in the
middle of your comp, okay? So the polar coordinates effect, it doesn't
use this bottom part of your frame. So what I wanna do is mask out the correct
part of this, so that I get a hole in the middle. All right, so since the middle corresponds
to the top of my frame, I need to mask this part out. So I'm gonna make a matte layer here. Just a new solid. And I usually make my mattes some really bright
color on my timeline, so I can differentiate them. And then I'm gonna take my mask tool, and
I'm gonna mask out this part, and I'm gonna feather that mask and then invert the mask. Sorry, I did
that wrong. So yeah, so I do that. No, I was right. Invert it, and now tell this layer to use
this as an alpha matte. There we go, okay. So here's my matter layer that I'm using as
an alpha matte, and so now we don't see this part of it, okay? If I turn on the transparency grid, you can
kinda see, it's a little tough, but you can see that there is no information there now. So when I turn the polar coordinates adjustment
back on, now we have a tunnel emanating from there. And I can adjust that by feathering the mask
more, and if I want, I can even adjust how far down this comes. And that's gonna affect where the tunnel actually
starts. So now let's go to our final. Cool, so we're starting to get somewhere now,
okay? Now I moved the mask too far, so you're starting
to see a little bit of the center there. And so this is why it's helpful to have polar
coordinates on an adjustment layer, because you can just turn it on and off really quickly
if you see that you messed something up, like I just did. So I need to adjust this mask, this. And this needs to come out more. There we go. Now turn it back on, come here, now we're
good to go. Cool, all right, so. The next part of this is I wanted to make
it look like the tunnel was a little bit more 3D. We're getting that sense that we're moving
through a tunnel, but it doesn't feel very 3D, it feels very flat, which could be cool. But if you want it to feel like it has a little
bit more depth to it, what you kind of need is a little bit of parallax. You can kind of see that parts of the tunnel
move slower, parts of the tunnel move faster. So what I did, I just kind of did it the easy
way. So let's turn off our adjustment layer for
a minute. Oh, sorry, wrong comp. Turn off our adjustment layer. And what I did. First let me change this set-up a little bit
to make this easier. So I'm gonna turn off. This layer is now no longer using this layer
as a matte. What I'm gonna do is turn this layer back
on, and I'm going to set the mode to stencil alpha. And so what that's gonna do is it's gonna
use this layer as the alpha channel for every layer that's underneath it, okay? And the reason I want to do that is because
I'm gonna duplicate this layer. I'm gonna duplicate it, and I'm actually gonna
make it a 3D layer. And then I'm gonna push it backwards in Z. So let's push it backwards like 1,000, okay? And now, since I did that, I need to adjust
the initial Y position. All right. But you can see that it moves slower than
the layer in front of it, because it's further back in space. Just a very quick and dirty little way to
do this, and I'm gonna make the opacity like 50%. I'm also going to scoot this thing over. And I'm gonna make it a different color, so
I can differentiate, and I'm gonna duplicate it, and scoot this over so now it'll fill
the entire frame, okay? So now, we've got one layer of parallax, just
by doing that, and if we look. Oh, I need to turn my adjustment layer back
on, pop over here, and just by doing that, you can see that it's given the tunnel a lot
more of a 3D look. Cool? Another thing that really really helped with
the tunnel kind of feel of this was having it rotate a little bit. Which that was really easy to do. You could actually just rotate this comp. The way I did it was I actually used another
effect on my adjustment layer. I used Distort Transform. And then I put an expression on the rotation,
to just keep it rotating. So that's a very common expression I use all
the time. What you do is you hold the Option key, and
you click the stopwatch for rotation. You can see it turns red. So now I can type in an expression, and the
expression is just time times, and then whatever number I want. So let's try time*50, all right? And I'll do a quick RAM preview. That feels way too fast, so why don't we do
time*15. And that's better, okay? So now if we go to the final, we have this
nice kind of, you know, we're drifting towards the tunnel, and it's coming at us and it's
really neat looking, everything's cool. All right, and then, you know, just to make
it a little bit neater, why don't we turn this off, and why don't we do one more layer
of parallax. So let's duplicate this, make it a different
color. Let's push this one back to 2,000. And pop over here, push this over, and let's
see how fast that's moving. Let's make the opacity different, too. Let's make this 20%. All right, and then change the Y position
a little bit, so it moves a lot slower, there we go. Cool, all right, so then I'll just duplicate
that, push this over like so. You can see I'm be very very imprecise with
this, but because it's so busy now, we've got so much going on, it actually works okay. Cool, so we've got that. And if we turn our adjustment layer back on,
and go back to the final comp, now you're getting something with a ton of complexity,
and a few layers of parallax, and you're really getting that 3D tunnel feel to it. So now, looking at this, one of the things
that jumps out at me is that everything feels really really chunky, and that's not what
I was going for, One of the things I love about G Munk's stuff is that he is not afraid
to make stuff very thin, okay? So let's try to do that. The great thing about this is the way was
have it set up it's all done in After Effects, so if we just jump back into our comps. Let's jump in here. All we need to do is go back into our lines
comp and find our original shapes buried in there. There we go. That whole thing's built out of this little
set-up. I'm just gonna select all these, and change
that stroke to two, all right? And now I'm going to jump to my final comp
here, and that's a lot better, okay? Now this is half res, so you're getting a
little bit of degradation, but I love how much thinner everything looks. And then the next thing that I had done. So here, let's RAM preview this a little bit,
I wanted to get a little bit more randomness in how bright these panels are. Because they just felt too uniform to me. So this is already feeling pretty cool, and
this could be useful on its own, but it just doesn't feel as glitchy and analog and crazy
as I wanted it to. So I'll just show you a few more things I
did. So if we go back into our tunnel comp, and
you can see that all of these solid pieces here, they're actually just made from these
three shape layers, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna precomp these, and I'm gonna call
this the Solid shape layer. I'm going to make a new solid that is this
gigantic 1920 x 6000 size, and I'm gonna use a fractal noise effect. And if you're not familiar with fractal noise,
you should be, and there is a tutorial coming on the 30 Days of After Effects about fractal
noise. There might even be two of them, so you will
learn more about this. But fractal noise is great at generating random
shapes and noise and stuff. And it's got this really cool setting. If you change the Noise Type to Block, okay,
and maybe it's hard to see, but let me zoom in here a little bit. It starts to resemble pixels, and there's
still like a lot of noise and static looking stuff in there. And all of that stuff is actually the kind
of sub-noise. There's kind of two levels of noise happening
with fractal noise, the main level and then the sub level, and that sub level, if you
take the influence of it down, here in the subsettings, turn that down to zero, okay? And you'll see now you just get this pixel-y
pattern which is cool, and I am going to close that down. I'm going to scale this way up like this,
and what this effect can now do, if I animate the evolution of this, right? I can get this cool kind of pixel-y pattern. I can even move this noise through these pixels. So I'm gonna do two things. One, I'm gonna put that same expression on
this evolution that I did on the rotation, So I'm gonna say Option, click that, and type
in time* let's try 100. All right, and so it just gives it a little
bit of change over time. Nothing too crazy. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna offset
the turbulence, and I'm gonna have it offset, like this, it's gonna offset vertically. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna put
a key frame here. I'm gonna hop to the end. And I'm gonna animate this up like this, and
then let's take a quick look and see what kind of speed we're getting. All right, I may want that to actually happen
a little bit faster. So let me crank that value a little bit. Do a quick RAM preview. All right, maybe a little bit faster. Cool, and so now what I want to do with this,
is I want to use this cool animated pattern I made using fractal noise, I want to use
that as a Luma Matte for my solid shapes layer, right? So here's the solid shapes, right here. And I'm gonna tell that layer, solid shape,
to use my cool fractal noise as a Luma Matte. And so now, if we watch this, you're gonna
get this cool kind of pattern moving through it, okay? It's gonna animate continuously throughout
the comp, okay? And it's gonna be kinda cool. You know, and if you wanted to, I mean, there's
a lot of ways you could make it even more random, it might be cool, you know, maybe
what I could also do is put an expression on the transparency of these shapes. So maybe I could have then flicker a little
bit, too. So why don't we turn the opacity maybe to
like 70%, and I'm gonna put a quick expression on there called Wiggle. If you're not familiar with expressions, by
the way, you should watch the Introduction to Expressions video. It's on the site, and I will link to it in
this video, in the description, so you can watch that. But there's a million ways to use expressions
to really speed up your ability to do this stuff. So what I'm gonna say is why don't we have
this thing wiggle 10 times per second by up to 20. And if we RAM preview that, you can see it
just gives it a little bit of like a flicker, cool? And if I wanted it to actually flicker more,
I could change the amount, that second number is sort of the strength of the wiggle. And one thing that now looking at this, that
I wish I had done, I wish I'd had all of those shapes on their own layers so that I could
have them all flicker separately, but you know what? Live and learn. All right, so now we've got that, and we can
turn our lines back on, right? So now this is what you're getting, and now
this is what's feeding all the way through your chain into your final tunnel comp. Okay, and so now you're starting to get a
lot of that cool, you know, complexity and that richness, and there's just a lot going
on, and frankly, now that I look at it, I think I want those lines to be even thinner. I think I might just set this to one pixel. All right, and come down here. All right, in half res, it's gonna make it
look a little bit chunkier, but I don't want the render times to be ridiculous for this. Cool, so, I mean this is essentially how I
built the tunnel, and then of course, I did some compositing, and I couldn't just let
the center be, you know, have nothing in it, so I had to make this crazy thing in Cinema
4D. Watching the G Munk thing a million times,
I noticed that there are these cool pulses. Kind of timed out with music, and it kind
of looked like, you know, one of those rainbow rings you get with, with a lens flare. So I used that and just, but really it's,
you know, chromatic aberration. And some vignetting, I did some fake depth
of field using the lens blur with a gradient. So that is, I guess that brings me to the
end here. I hope that this was useful, and I hope that
you kind of have like a new appreciation for this effect that has, you know, a weird name
and it's only got two settings, and it seems like how could that possibly be useful? But look at this crazy thing that we just
made, you know, in like 20, 30 minutes, together, all inside of After Effects, with absolutely
no Illustrator, nothing like that, there's no third party plug-ins or anything. And it's great. And you can use this to make really interesting
radio waves. I showed you a bunch of ways you can stack
a polar coordinates with effects inside, and then un-distort it using another polar coordinates
and get some really interesting things. So anyway, I hope that was useful. Thank you guys so much. Stay tuned for the next episode of 30 Days
of After Effects. I will talk to you guys later. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that was cool, and I hope you learned
something new about using the little-known polar coordinates effect. Now, we'd love to hear from you if you use
this technique on a project, so please, give us a shout on Twitter @SchoolOfMotion, and
show us what you did. Thank you so much, and I will see you on the
next one.
