Better Animated Grain Texture ｜ After Effects Tutorial)

I'm going to show you my new method to quickly get this textured grain shading in After Effects. In my previous video I showed two methods to approach animated grain and this is now my preferred method. Let's start from a comp without grain. I've shied most of the layers so we can focus on our main eye shapes. First let's draw our shadow by creating a new shape layer with our pen tool and let's parent that to our main eye layer so now they move as one. Now let's add the set matte effect and select take matte from eye main in this drop down menu. This is a great way to use a matte without creating additional layers but both layers do have to have continuously rasterized selected down here otherwise it won't work how you want it to and you might have to use an alpha matte instead. And now we're going to add the roughen edges effect. I learned this method from Bernd Bussard, an amazing designer and animator I worked with while freelancing at Buck Sydney. Check out his work, he is brilliant. And we're going to increase the border way up to 150. And it's going to look like garbage so don't panic yet. We need to drag this roughen edges effect above set matte in the effect stack. So now it's only roughening the edges of the shape and not of the matte as well. And now let's take the scale down from 100 right down to 10. Now that's starting to look better. Let's move our shape a bit more inwards as well so we get more of that black visible. Now you can bump up the scale to increase the coarseness of the grain. You can go as high as you want, under 20 I think is pretty good. I do like it really fine so I'm going to stick with it at 10. And you can also change the style of the grain by changing the edge type to maybe spiky to get a bit of a different result or even a rusty. But let's stick with a roughen for now. Now if you want to add more contrast to this gradient that you have here you can add a levels effect. And from here select alpha from the channel drop down menu and then bring the outside handles in slightly to crush the alpha channel. And we can adjust our border as well to make that a bit larger. Now there are two downsides to using roughen edges. One is that it probably takes more time to render. I haven't really noticed it but if you were to do it on a lot of layers it might add up. And also when we play our animation the gradient moves with our layer but the texture doesn't. And I don't quite like how that looks so let's fix it. To fix that we are going to add a boil which animates the grain every few frames. This technique I learned from a comment by pieceofcake on my hand-drawn effects video. I use this expression all the time so please keep leaving awesome comments. I'm learning a lot from you. To do that in our roughen edges effect we're going to toggle down evolution options and on random seed I'm going to hold alt or option on a mac. Click the stopwatch which will bring up our expressions panel. And I'm going to type in the expression time multiplied by four and press enter. Now if we play it back every four frames or so we'll get a new random seed and our grain texture will change. And to me that looks much better. You can increase the number you're multiplying by if you'd like it to go faster. Here it is changing every frame but I prefer it a little bit slower so I'm going to stick to time times four. And to get an additional rim light on this shape all we need to do is duplicate this grain shading layer by pressing ctrl d. Change its fill to something like white and then with our pen tool selected drag our path out to create a new shape. And then also let's decrease the border down to maybe 100 maybe even 50. And there we are. And once we add another layer to the iris and a few other appendages we're done. Grainy goodness all over. Be sure to check out my looping textures video to how to get this speckly overlay texture as well for the background. 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.