After Effects Looping Background Tutorial - 3D Grid

Hi I'm Ben Marriott. I make weekly motion design tutorials and this week we're going to talk through making that 3D grid or with 2D shape layers in After Effects. Let's begin. To start we're going to choose a shape for the center of our 3D grid tunnel. Let's choose a square to keep it simple but these principles will apply to any shape you choose. So we've got our square which is just a shape layer centered to the middle of our composition and I've given it a stroke width of six pixels and I've given it no fill. Having no fill on these shapes will allow us to just put a background in seamlessly behind everything but I'm going to show you a few tricks and little extra things you can do if you choose to add a fill to these shapes as well a little bit later on. And we're going to animate that using a rectangle size property which you'll find down here. So we're going to keyframe it here at the beginning of our timeline and we're going to set it to zero pixels and a few seconds ahead let's drag this up so we can see it growing until it just gets clear out of the bounds of our composition. We're out there. That should be good. Let's play that back. All right that's the beginning. Now at the moment we've got the square coming towards us which gives the impression of the grid sort of coming at us and enveloping us and if we want to do that in reverse all we have to do is select the keyframes, right click on one of them, choose keyframe assistant and time reverse keyframes. So now it's going to go in reverse which will give the appearance of a sort of of a sort of moving backwards out of the grid. Let's undo that. Now let's add some easing. Now when I first keyframe here to ease in so we're going to press F9 I get the selected keyframe and because it'll move slower at the beginning here it'll give us the impression that it's coming from more of a distance and then speed up as it's sort of getting towards us. Let's adjust that. Let's make that a bit quicker and I'm going to go into the graph editor and edit that ease a bit more. In the speed graph I'm going to just drag this handle over here to give a real intense easing and drag this one a bit further back too. Let's play that back. All right I think that's what we're after. Maybe a bit slower. There we go. Now that we're happy with that let's duplicate that with Ctrl D or Command D which will make a copy of it above it and let's drag this one over to offset it slightly. We can play it back and see what two of them are going to look like. Now I think they're probably a bit too far apart so let's drag this one a bit over like that. All right that seems like a good distance to me. Now to make sure that when I duplicate more of these they're all that same consistent distance apart I'm going to create a marker on this first shape layer. So I'm going to move my playhead over to where this second one starts and on our first one I'm just going to hit asterisk on my keyboard the one over on the number pad and that's just going to create a little marker here that I can use for reference. I'm also going to trim this layer and I'm going to do that by when the second one goes off frame. I'm going to select this one and press Alt right square bracket which will just trim it back to that frame. There we go. Now I'm going to delete this top one and I'm going to duplicate this bottom one hold shift and just move this over until it snaps and lines up with this marker. Now I know that when I do it again they're all going to be the same distance apart. To speed this process up I'm going to select all them by pressing the bottom one holding shift clipping the top one pressing ctrl d or command d which will duplicate them all and then press command right square bracket which will move them all up to the top hold shift and drag them across to create more and then I'm going to repeat that process again. There we go. Now we've got lots of these shapes all coming towards us and because I want to make this loop I'm going to scrub ahead to where the whole animation is squares all throughout a composition and we're going to go to the beginning of one of them let's say here and I'm going to press b on my keyboard which will bring the beginning of my work area here and about three seconds later let's go to the end here and press n so now we should have a loop. Wonderful and this is the basis of our grid. Now let's add some lines coming out of the center. I'm going to do that by selecting our pen tool here and just drawing a line from the top left by clicking here down to the bottom right. Now I'm going to adjust that to make sure that it lines up with the corners of all of our squares. There we are and let's rename this one grid line because we always label our layers. To create the other lines let's open up our shape layer thingies here a technical term and select our shape and we're going to add a repeater. What a repeater does is it duplicates that shape and you can manipulate some of the properties of those copies as well. At the moment we've got three copies let's pop that up to seven I think. At the moment it's moving each repeater 100 pixels to the right we don't want it to move the distance anywhere so let's zero that out. We want its rotation to change so if we drag this out we can see our lines start to spin and we want ours to go 45 degrees. There we are we've got our grid and at the moment it looks a bit like a spider's web so if you don't want this sort of vanishing point in the middle here getting a lot more crowded where you've got all these lines and things happening something that I like to do is I'm just going to duplicate one of these shape layers here. I'm going to drag it over and I want to add a fill to this one by selecting fill let's make it black. I'm going to put that above our grid line layer as well there we are. I want to press u to open up our keyframes here I'm going to select these size ones and I'm going to delete them because I don't want this square to move. I'm just going to increase the size somewhere maybe around there that seems all right. Now this square is going to stay static in the middle and all our lines are going to radiate outwards from that. Let's rename that and I'm going to remove this marker as well just to be tidy. Now another neat thing you can do is add a rotation to this whole animation. To do that I'm going to create a new null object which you can do by pressing ctrl alt shift y and by default that will create a null object in the exact center of your composition which is exactly where we want it. Let's rename that as well and I'm going to select all of our layers with ctrl a grab the pick whip and parent it to that null and with that null we can control all the properties of this grid. Now we can move it around in position but what we're going to do is we're going to change this rotation so let's press r to bring up our rotation keyframes select one here and then a bit further along let's say 90 degrees which will put it back in the same position. Now we've got a little rotation let's easy ease those with f9 let's spread them out a bit more and let's go into our graph editor to really pump up that easing. Yeah that looks nice. Now I'm going to show something neat you can do by filling in some of the segments of these grids. To do that the first thing we're going to do is select all of our square layers and we can select them all easily by going over here to our little labels menu clicking this and select label group which will select everything of that color. I'm going to go up to our fill here and let's fill it in black which will look the same to us because we had a black background. Now at the beginning of our work area here we're going to choose one of our segments which is just about to be revealed from outside of our middle center area. I'm going to select this one square 07 I'm going to duplicate that and let's recolor this one and call this square segment and here we're going to change the fill from black to white and if we play that back we're going to have a little white segment that comes through our grid and we're going to add a mask to that by selecting our pen tool selecting a tool creates mask up here otherwise we'd create a new shape layer and we're going to draw a triangle by selecting in the center of our composition one point over here another one over here and then clicking back in the middle to close it. I'm just going to change adjust the shape of that to line up exactly with our grid. There we are. Let's play that back. Perfect. Now you notice here there's one frame where our layer isn't long enough so to adjust that I'm going to select all of these guys down here and just extend them a little bit more. There we go. Problem solved. Now that we've got this one segment I'm going to add some more to different sections of the grid and I'm going to do them in a kind of a spiral pattern that sort of goes backwards through our grid and loops. So to do that I'm going to duplicate this square segment layer move it up one by pressing ctrl right square bracket moving it along so it lines up here and at the moment that just means we've got our two segments going back to back so I'm going to select just one point of our triangle and move it over and line up with this grid here and now I've got a sequence of the two of them. Let's do that once more and move this mass shape again over to this side. Now let's continue to do that for the rest of them. All right so now I've got all of our segments sort of placed in this sort of spiral pattern. Now you'll notice that it doesn't quite loop anymore so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to scrub through and find a spot where our spiral is just going off screen which is right here. I'm going to press b to make that the new front of our work area. I'm going to drag this rotation so it happens a little later and a little quicker and then when that sort of frame repeats itself which is over here I'm going to press n on the end of our work area and now we should have a loop. Perfect! There we are a little spiral flourish to you know add a little bit extra to your grid and I've also added a eye animation as well to go in the middle of this of this grid just add a bit more story and in this case the story is there's a giant eye in a 3d revolving grid for some reason a classic and I've just drawn that with shape layers I parented them all to this eye element shape which is position is just bobbing up and down a little to make it look like you know it's hovering just like eyes do. Let's actually color this iris as well let's color that white for a bit more contrast. Excellent! Now let's add a few effects to give it a bit more 80s glow sort of aesthetic. To do that I'll create a new adjustment layer with ctrl alt y I'm going to call this one glow I'm going to add a glow effect from over here in the effects panel I'll make this first one fairly tight the default is pretty good for that let's duplicate this again make the radius a little larger duplicate it once more make the radius much larger and remove the take down the intensity a bit as well there we are got a nice glow happening it's a little bit intense here so I want to change all of these white grids by selecting them and changing them to a gray color there I think that looks pretty neat and same with our iris as well I'm going to knock down the shading of this eye also there we are we've got our glow now to add some grain I'm going to add some a noise effect to this adjustment layer let's deselect color noise we want it to stay black and white actually let's increase that to twenty percent let's go all out and we do get a little bit of noise in the black here which we don't want so let's add a curves effect on top of that and let's crush the blacks by dragging this one a little bit over here and we won't do the same to the white so let's drag this top one over to the left as well there we are so now we've just got grain in this in the grays of the image and if you want to add a bit of color to the grays as well you can select one of the color channels up here let's say blue and just drag this up in the middle I need to get a nice blue sort of effect and you can do it to the red as well to get make it a little purplier a little pinker and the last effect I'm going to add is a posterized time effect because I love my animations look like they're animated on twos so I'm going to change this to 12.5 which will just look like lower the frame rate a touch and give it a bit more of an organic feel that I kind of I kind of like one more quick tip with these grids is to get this spiral effect we've got here I've had to make all of these layers and there's lots of layers here they're pretty much identical to each other but if you just want a simple grid you don't want any of this spiral nonsense going on you can do that with a simple repeater so I'm just going to solo one of these layers square 13 over here and actually I'm going to solo our lines as well and our center square as well so we've just got one square selected if we go into our shape layers we're just going to add a repeater similar to how we did with our lines across the edge we're going to bump up the copies let's change this position down to zero and let's change the scale up here and we're going to have offset these layers turn that back a bit so they go and well now it's not quite aligned so things are up but it looks kind of cool so let's adjust our anchor point to make those line up there we are we just got your simple grids there but the thing here is the stroke the stroke width is going to scale with your property there that's why I didn't use that in the beginning but if you don't care about a looping you just want the grid to happen quick and dirty there's a little solution the project file will be available for download down description if you use anything you found in this video please tag me on instagram so I can see what you make please let me know down in the comments what else you'd like to see from this channel and don't forget to subscribe hit that bell icon share and attack that like button I'll see you next week