Gradient Experiments in After Effects - Animation Tutorial)

In this video I'm going to show you all the experiments I made using gradients in After Effects. Let's begin. This is based on my previous gradient animation tutorial where I go through how to make this animation using gradients here and I'm just going to use this comp as a basis for all of these experiments. The first thing that is really cool to do is you can duplicate your gradient comp and then draw any shape with the shape tool using a mask. Then if you just move that layer around you get some really cool sort of borders and contrast between the edges here and even though we're not animating the inside of this shape it kind of looks like it's changing color depending on what background it's sitting over which I think is really interesting. The second experiment I made just using the venetian blinds effect so I've got two layers of our gradient one that's just been rotated by 180 degrees and then I've added the venetian blinds effect and then put the time times 50 expression on the rotation and from here we can adjust the width of the blinds as well. If we go really low we can get like a cool sort of tv sort of noir effect that's happening here but we can increase those and you can even feather them to get a bit of you know a bit of softness and gradients to them there. My third experiment got this effect I did this by duplicating that comp setting the mode to difference because you use exclusion or maybe divide to create some interesting effects as well and then I've scaled this this up slightly and I'm just rotating it so if you set to normal it just looks like a scale up motion like gradient making you know 360 degree rotation but if you set it to one of these you know ridiculous crazy blending modes that you know I've never really used before because it was great wacky results you can get this this cool wacky result. In this fourth experiment I'm just adding the ripple effect to our gradient layer and it just adds this really nice sort of smooth kind of almost retro looking effect here and of course you can change the width height of all of these properties as well to make it sharper or more subtle and the next one I've added the twirl effect and if we just start to change the angle you can see we get a nice little bit of you know warping in the middle here you can also change the radius and if you bring that open a bit too far you can create you know this kind of cool look as well and you can adjust the sort of twirl center as well by dragging this property and if you move from left to right it kind of almost looks like that James Bond opening but in a more psychedelic look that we've got here. In this next experiment I tried to create a look that was a bit more like sort of watercolor paint bleeding into one another and I've taken a few steps to do that the first thing I did was create a new adjustment layer and then add fractal noise to it let's reset that so we can see how it begins when you first add the effect then I up the contrast a fair bit and then also the scale as well to get it a bit bigger let's increase that contrast as well I've also added an expression on the evolution property which is just time times 100 to create a constant loop of this sort of background texture here and then what I did is I duplicated our main gradient comp here added a five degree rotation to it so it's just slightly off and then while underneath that fractal noise I've set it to luma matte so now it's only visible on the white layers of this fractal noise layer and this just kind of gives the edges where it's rotated a little bit more rough sort of bleeding inky texture that I think is really cool and then if I chuck a just a watercolor texture over the top it kind of you know helps sell that idea that this is on paper and I think this will definitely be a cool way to get a bit of fluid motion to any sort of you know paint textures you might be working with this next one is using the effect cc gritter which I had never used before I just found it while searching and if we reset cc gritter it doesn't look like anything's going on but then if you just increase the horizontal and vertical scale you get these kind of cool brick looking shapes and then you can of course increase the tile size to however much distortion as you want and I just think it looks kind of nice especially with the gradients it kind of looks like each individual brick has its own sort of shading and shadow which I think looks kind of fun and then you can also add the classic mosaic tile effect as well if you just want a straight up pixelation in this next experiment I'm going to duplicate our gradient layer and add the effect cc smear the smear effect is kind of really cool you can see it kind of uses these points to sort of push one point of your layer and it sort of drags and warps the other areas behind it so let's increase its radius and it's let's leave the reach as it is and if we drag this side the from area of the smear down to outside the comp you can see that it kind of pushes the rest of the comp outwards so if we hide the bottom layer you can see that it's transparent so we're kind of sort of like lifting the curtain on this layer of it here let's increase the radiance a bit more as well there we are so just by moving this sort of point around you can create some cool effects and you can also duplicate that so now you've got two cc smears on that one layer so now we can create like kind of an s shape with these two smear effects and kind of smash them together where we'd like and get some kind of kind of interesting results from this I think experiment number nine I've created a sort of 3d looking cube using our gradients and I want to hide all these layers to build one from scratch I'm going to duplicate our gradient one comp layer then I'm going to add the effect power pin cc power pin that is and here I'm just going to drag our corners out and it's helpful it creates these nice perspective guides as well which can be handy and I'm going to drag this to make sort of one face of the cube and then I'm going to duplicate that go to the effect and I just need to drag the two opposite sides of the face of the cube that we want we create another cube shape let's drag this down because we want to see the top side of the cube as well the perspective the perspective isn't great on this at the moment but with a little bit of you know time and finesse you can create something that you know looks 3d unbelievable and you can of course create something similar by using 3d shape layers but I find it's just interesting using power pin and then you can create some more interesting shapes and you don't even have to make them a cube or 3d shape you can just make some interesting forms in experiment number 10 I've added the wave warp effect and I've just pushed the height up enormously so you can make that as subtle or as few as you want if you go too far you'll get the edges of the comp bleeding in which you know could look interesting and on this other variation of wave warp if you set it from sine to sawtooth you get this effect which I think looks really neat and then if you stack another wave warp effect on top of that with a sine wave you get this effect which I absolutely love I love the sort of little gradients that it looks really cool and then of course if you set that second wave warp to triangle rather than sine you get this nice sort of jagged look and of course you can manipulate the height of all of these layers to create some cool effects as well that one looks not too bad and then finally on top if you just use the triangle wave warp here you create these nice sort of sort of bent almost like corners which I think looks you know pretty neat I'm not sure where you'd use this but it would be a good you know maybe texture to matte out a shape or something like that handy to know and in experiment number 11 I've just added the cc sphere effect we go back to without that effect and add cc sphere but we'll create whatever layer you've got and just warp it around a sphere you can change the rotation of that sphere we change the y one you can see the gap where our you know gradient will meet up with the other side you can see the bottom pole there where it all happens and then you can rotate each axis of these and you can increase the radius here and also add some different sort of lighting and shading effects as well and maybe you wanted to animate like a kind of planet I think this would be a good idea for this and then we can even replace this with a comp from one of our other experiments to create some more interesting effects as well and we can replace this comp with one of our other experiments by holding alt and dragging one of those onto that layer we can also take one of our already made experiment comps here and add the cc sphere effect and create you know a more psychedelic crazy pattern this one actually looks like a ball of wool a little bit by stacking a whole lot of effects you can create some really interesting results hopefully some of these will be useful to you or maybe just a bit of fun that you can see how some effects could work in some different ways I've made a short playlist of some related videos that I think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week