Animated Grain shading In After Effects Tutorial - Noise And Textured Gradients

Hi, I'm Ben Marriott. I'm going to show you how I made this animated grain effect from projects like these. What is Grain? Let's begin. I'm going to show you two methods that I use to create this animated grain look in my animations and we're going to do one on each of these eyeball characters. Let's get stuck into our first one. For this first character, we're going to use the easiest method, which is using the dissolve blending mode and then a couple of effects to get the look we want. You'll notice that I've got a few layers shied here, so you can see these are just the arms and the legs and some other rigging layers. We don't need to focus on them, so I'm going to hide them. The only things we need to pay attention to are this eye main and iris layer, which are the layers we're going to add the grain to. The first thing we're going to do is duplicate this eye main layer and rename it to eye main grain, so we know what we're working with. We should always label our layers and we're going to change its color. Now, we're going to draw a mask to create our light source. We're going to select our ellipse tool from up here on the left. Make sure this button is clicked, tool creates mask. Otherwise, we're going to create more shapes that we don't need. Now, we're just going to draw a circle around where we want our light source coming from. I think we want it from the top left, which is my go-to for a lighting source. I'm just going to expand the mask a little bit to cover mainly the iris and the pupil. By default, the mask is set to add, so we just want to click inverted to get the reverse of that. There we go. Now, we want to feather this mask, so we're going to click F to bring up the feather options and let's make this 65 pixels. Now, we can see kind of what we're looking at. That looks pretty good. So, to add the grain, we're going to change the blending mode to dissolve, and that's going to do most of our work for us. Now, by default, the dissolve is going to look up close, really pixel-y like this. How dissolve works is it just makes, with a gradient, it makes the pixel either on or off to give the closest digital approximation to a smooth gradient. I don't particularly like how this looks at the moment. I want it to look less sort of pixel perfect and more sort of smudgy and grainy, like it's from, you know, a brush or a scan or a texture or something like that. We're going to do that by creating a new adjustment layer. We're going to go up to our layer menu, select new adjustment layer or Ctrl-Alt-Y, and we're going to add the effect turbulent displace. So, if we click that over here, already it's going to look really wild. Now, this, if we play back, this is not the look that we want, but we can get very close to it just by adjusting the size from 100 down to 2 pixels. And we're going to change the amount down to 30 as well. So, if we're looking closely, we can see that now, what was once these sort of pixel perfect sort of bunches and clusters of pixels down here, it's now becoming a little more mashed together and smudged. It's really subtle, and when you look at 100%, you kind of maybe make out the difference a little bit, but I think it's that little touch that, you know, brings it all together. And the advantage of this method is that it's all controlled by these masks. So, if we want to adjust the light source, we want to move the light source up to the right, we just move that mask and it's changed. Let's move it back to where we had it. Okay, I'm happy with that. Now, the next thing we're going to do is add a rim light. So, we're going to duplicate this eye main grain layer and rename it eye main grain rim. I'm going to change that color to white. And we're going to expand our mask because this light is only going to be visible on the edge. And it's going to be much harsher, so we're going to change the feathering down to 20 pixels. There we are. Okay, so now it looks like it's lit from two sources. That's looking good. Now, let's do the same thing to our iris. All right, we've added that to our iris. One thing I do want to change is the feathering on this first mask we drew. Let's change that down to 55 because I just want to see a little bit more black before the rim light here. Now, let's take a look at the whole animation. One disadvantage of this method is that that turbulent displace adjustment layer is going to affect all the layers underneath it, which includes these clean vector lines that we've got here. And they're going to become a little bit bumpy. For most of the projects I tend to work on, that's going to be fine because I'm generally going out of my way to make things look a little more rugged and handmade anyway, so that's going to be fine. If you do need your clean vector crisp lines, this method might not be for you. Let's take a look at our second character. The method for the second character is going to be a little more time-consuming to set up, but I prefer the look of this one. And you know what they say, no pain, no grain. Over in Photoshop, I've got a still of that comp that I'm just using as a reference, a 20% opacity. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be using this texture brush to draw out about five frames of the animation that we want. This grain brush is one that I've made myself, and it's going to be available for you in the description, so you can take it and use on your own projects. To start, we're going to draw an arc in the bottom right-hand corner of this eyeball where we want it darkened. There we go. I'm going to set this layer to 20% opacity because I'm going to use it as a reference for the next layers. I'm going to create about four more layers, and I'm going to duplicate what we did there on each one of them. All right, now we've got five of them made. I'm going to turn the opacity of this bottom one back up to 100%, and we're just going to make sure all of these are turned on, and save our Photoshop file. From here in After Effects, we're going to import our file by pressing Ctrl-I. And select the file you want, and make sure you click Import as Composition Retain Layer Sizes. Click Import, and then click OK on this dialog box too. That's going to make sure that it imports the project with all its layers, and not just as a still image. Let's go into our composition, and first thing we can do is delete these bottom reference layers. Let's turn on our transparency. I want to make sure that this comp is 10 frames wide, so I'm going to press Ctrl-K, and make sure that its duration is set to 10. So change this last number here to 10 frames. Now I want to make each of these frames two frames long, and I'm going to drag them out so they appear in a sequence. Now let's play that back. Okay, this is going to be our animated grain. Back in our character composition, we're just going to drag that grain texture over the top. And you'll notice if we play, it's going to play this 10 frames and then stop. So we need to loop this composition. And I'm going to show you the method I use for looping compositions in After Effects, which is not at all tedious. So we're going to right-click our composition, go over to time, enable time remapping, click on the frame before the last keyframe, make another keyframe, delete the last keyframe, hold Alt or Option, click the stopwatch here, click the arrow, go to property, go to loop out, click off, and then drag this comp as long as you need to be. Now, looping composition in After Effects. All right, let's drag that on top of our eye main layer and parent it to the eye main layer as well. So it's going to move with it. We're going to use this eye main layer as an alpha matte. So to do that, I'm going to duplicate it, drag it on top of our grain texture layer. I'm going to rename it now, call it eye main matte. And we're going to select this grain texture layer and under track matte, select alpha matte. So now that texture is only going to be visible within the confines of that shape. That's looking good to me. Now we're going to duplicate these two to make our rim light again. That's our texture layer and our matte. We want to duplicate them both. Now to change the color of this one, we're going to need a fill effect. So we're going to type fill into our effects panel over here. And by default, it's set to red. So let's select white and we're just going to grab that composition and move it down to the bottom right a little bit. All right, let's do the same thing with our iris. I'm also going to make sure that those two new texture layers are parented to the iris. There we go. All right, let's play it back. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that. Let's go and compare the two looks. You can tell the difference of these a little more when they're next to each other. The one on the left is a little more intense because of the way that texture is boiling. And the one on the right, it just tends to be a little more subtle. I've used these both in different scenarios. They both have their advantages. The one on the left, I kind of tend to prefer more generally, but it is a little more tedious to set up. If you're in a huge project, that might not be viable. Both, I think, are great to have in your toolkit. Both this After Effects project and the Photoshop file are going to be available for download in the description box. So take them, open them, unpack them, have a look around, add some grain to maybe an existing vector animation you've already done, and please upload it to Instagram and tag me at Ben underscore Marriott underscore. I would love to see what you make. Thank you so much for watching. Please let me know in the comments whether you prefer method number one or method number two. And also remember to subscribe, hit the bell icon, like, and share. Thank you.