Hi I'm Ben Marriott
today I'm gonna show you how to make
animated gradient effects like this in Adobe After Effects
Let's begin
this is the after effects project we're working on
all the elements already set up here so we can concentrate fully on our gradient bubble
there's a bunch of layers shied here like the face and some of the other
extra stuff that you don't need to worry about so we can hide them and ignore them
one neat thing that I did want to point out is that this distortion happening here is done
by using the Bulge effect on our egg layer and I
parented the Bulge Center to this null over here
and I've also parented that's burned to that null so whenever I move that null
the sperm follows and distorts our little egg
and you know I thought that was neat
we're gonna start out drawing a gradient egg here in Illustrator
I just got a black background layer here and the colors already selected out in the swatches over here
so let's start by drawing our egg and let's make this 665 pixels
now let's select the gradient mesh tool and make some magic
I'm going to place two points and here and here in the circle and what these do is
they split up the shape into different segments
and each one of these segments and points you can attach a color to
and it will smoothly blend with colors of the adjacent points and segments
now let's select direct selection tool with A
click on one of the points around the outside of the circle and just select
some colors from over here in the swatch panel
now it's important the colors don't clash too much if I was to select red
and put a green one next to it the colors can get real muddy in here
what I call gradient no man's land
let's undo those
the center will remain black because in after-effects we're going to use the screen blending mode
and all the black will just turn invisible
now we're going to add a second bubble
so let's copy this with ctrl C and paste in front with ctrl F
and let's drag that selection up to the top layer up here
we're gonna alternate between these two layers to create that shimmery motion
so I need them to be a little bit different
so let's just rotate this top layer
there we go
let's flip between
they look pretty different
let's move these anchor points as well a little closer to the center
so we get more color
so one of the layers is gonna be a little more illuminated
Done!
let's save.
let's import that illustrator file
we're pressing control I, finding that illustrator file
and making sure you import as composition retain layer sizes
and click import
let's drag these over into assets folder over here
So we're gonna head into this comp
and we're just gonna need to copy those two egg layers from here
and then go into our egg 01 layer over here and paste them there
and we can get rid of this bottom shape now as well
let's make this top layer visible
and we're gonna use an alpha matte to control what's visible on that top layer
and we want that alpha matte to be sort of blobby and moving around
to do that we're gonna create a new solid by pressing ctrl Y
and these settings should be fine
we'll call that, umm... blobby matte!!
we always label our layers
and I'm gonna call that purple
cause I like all my mattes to be purple
from here we're gonna draw a mask on this solid
so I'm gonna make sure our pen tool is selected and for the moment
we're just gonna draw an odd shape around here that we're gonna manipulate a little later
there we go a bit like ye olde fidget spinner
now let's expand this shape so it fills up most of our egg shape and kind of
actually spills over in a few of the sections and we can adjust this later
now let's make it warp and move by adding a turbulent displace effect ---
everyone's favourite effect...
the defaults look pretty good here
so to make it animate we're going to use the evolution property up here
so we're going to add an expression by holding alt or option
clicking on this stopwatch and
adding the expression time * 250
and that just gonna means...
and what this expression does means that it will continue to animate in sort of
blobby fashion forever really or until the end of the comp whichever is sooner
that looks pretty good
let's select alpha matte from that egg II layer and
now we can see kind of how it's working
we want to smooth a gradient on these lines here
so we're gonna go into our matte, press F to bring up the feather property on our mask
and let's slide that by, say 120
there we go
now if we play that back we can see a little bit of shimmering happening here
but we need some more,
let's also take this opportunity to extend these egg layers to the end of the comp
there we go
we want that shimmering to be a little more intense
so I'm gonna rotate both of these egg layers in opposite directions
so I'm gonna make a rotation keyframe at the beginning
and then at the end
I'm gonna have the bottom one rotate 360 degrees and the top one -180 (degrees)
now let's play back and see how that looks
ok that's looking a little more like it
now I still want the shimmer to be a little more intense so what I think I can do is
go into this blobby matte selection and just change the mask shape a little bit
now that's looking pretty good to me so let's pop to our main comp and
see what we're working with
the first thing we're gonna do is select our egg comp
and change the blending mode to screen to make that black invisible
and let's play it back here
that is looking pretty good
now I've got some glow effects with this egg comp as well
so let's turn those on and I've got a few glow effects
because when I work with glows I think two or three works a little bit better
and you can have a little more control over how the glow looks
I think the fall-off will look a little more natural so you should have
your first glow fairly tight and fairly intense towards the edge of your glow
and the second one have the radius a little bigger and maybe a little less intense
and the third one the radius much much larger and the intensity really down low
so it's just got a bit more of an organic sort of fall off
this is also looking a little too bright in the center for me
so all we can do is add a curves effect over here
I'm gonna bring back to the top of our stack so it doesn't affect the glows
and I'm just gonna bring the darks down a little in the middle, not too much
there we go
and you can see when the sperm interacts with the egg you have this cool effect from the glows now as well
now you want this gradient shimmer to loop as well
so to do that I'm gonna make a marker on the egg 01 composition
using the * way on the other side of your number pad
and just mark that one second in
I'm gonna duplicate that, drag this top one right to the end of the comps, so the marker hits the into the comp
and move this bottom one forward so the market hits the front
now the end looks at the front
now we just need a fade between these two comps using our transparency property
perfect
now we have a loop
to make the in a bubble of our egg, let's duplicate this egg I comp so it's egg II
now we don't the gradients and the colors of this in a bubble to match too much with the outer bubble
so let's change the rotation a little bit by selecting all of our keyframes
and let's just change it by 60 or so, the number doesn't really matter
I'm also going to scale down these comps by pressing S and changing
these both to around 83, I think should work
so if we're going to our main comp
now I want that inner bubble to have the same effects the glows and the bulge that we've already got on our first egg composition
so we're going to duplicate both of these egg one comps here
let's move them up slightly and let's change the color to orange for kicks
so we're those selected, we're gonna click on our egg II comp over here in the project panel
hold alt or option and just drag and drop onto either one of those layers
awesome
let's play that back
perfect
it's got our glows and a bulge
now I do want to make this bulge effect a little subtler so I want to click on this layer
and in the bulge property change the bulge height to 1.9, a little lower so it's a bit more subtler
and I'm also gonna adjust the curves on this one a little more just to make it a little more darker in the middle
I think that should do
now I want to copy that bulge and that curves effect so I'm gonna
select both the shift press ctrl C and then paste them onto this layer back here
and I'm gonna move those up to the effect stack here and replace the
existing curves and bulge layers because we don't need those anymore
all right, I think that's looking pretty good to me
Now I should warn you when you're working with a lot of gradients like this
one thing that you're going to run into is bending
banding is an artifact in your render when the computer tries to
compress your file and reduces the amount of color in some frames
and it makes your render look a little like this
now to reduce that as much as possible
the best thing to do is to increase the color depth of your project
by selecting over here where it says 8-bit, change that to a 16-bit may be 32-bits if you're spicy
I've never had to go that far
and also add a bit of noise to the whole thing
so I've just got the noise effect on this adjustment layer and that's set to 5%
now let's look at it all together
now the project file is available for you to download down in the description box
please open it up have a play with this effect
it's really fun and it gets a really cool result
maybe try and add it to one of your existing animations
please upload whatever you make to Instagram so I can see it
and tag me @Ben_ Marriott _so I can share it with my audience in my stories
thank you so much for watching, please let me know in the comments what else you'd like to see from this channel
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