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 gonna 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 so 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 * 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 moire effect that's
happening here we're gonna increase those and you can even feather them to get a
bit of you know 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 scaled it us this up slightly
and I'm just rotating it so be set to normal it just looks like a scale
libation that 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 really used
before and there 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 it's really nice sort of smooth kind of
almost retro looking effect here and of course you can change the width height
of all 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 a little bit of you know warping in the middle here
you'll also change the radius and if you bring that up too far
you know this kind of cool look as well and
you can adjust the sort of twirl Center as well by dragging this property if you
move 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 try to create a look there was a bit more like sort of
watercolor paint bleeding into one another I'm taking 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 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 * 100 the it'll 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 5 degree rotation to it so it's
just slightly off and then more 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 just a watercolor texture over the top it kind of you know
helps sell that idea that this is on on paper and I think this is definitely 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 effects CC Gridder which I had
never used before I just found it while searching if we reset CC Gridder 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 whether 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 to straight-up pixelation
in this next experiment I'm gonna duplicate a 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's sort of
drags and warps the other areas behind it so let's increase its radius
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 it kind of pushes the rest of
the compound word so if we hide the bottom layer you can see that it's
transparent so what kind of sort of like lifting the curtain on this layer of it
here as increase the radius a bit more as well there we are
so just by moving this sort of point around you can create some cool effects
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 to 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 gonna duplicate our gradient one comp layer
then I'm gonna add the effect power pin CC power pin that is and here I'm just
gonna drag our corners out and it's helpful it creates these nice
perspective guides as well which can be handy and I'm gonna drag this to make
sort of one face of the cube and then I'm gonna duplicate that go to the
effect and I just need to drag to opposite sides of the face of the cube
that we want to 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 and believable and you
could 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 ten I've added the
wave warp effect and I've just pushed the hide up enormously
so you can make that as subtle or as severe as you want if you go too far
you'll get the edges of the comp bleeding in, which you know could look
interesting on this other variation of wave form 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
gives inside each of these little wave paths this I think looks really cool and
then of course if you set back second wave walked a triangle rather
than sign to give this nice sort of jagged look and of course you can
manipulate the height of all of these layers to create some cool effect as
well that one looks not too bad and finally on top if you just use the
triangle wave warp here you can create these nice sort of sort of bent almost
like corners which I think looks you know pretty neat
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 eleven I've just added the CC sphere effect if we go back to without
that effect and add CC sphere that will create whatever lay you've got and just
warp it around a sphere you can change the rotation of that sphere which means
the y one you can see the gap where are you know gradient will meet up with the
other side you can see the bottom pole there where it all happens 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 it would be a good idea for this
and then we can even replace this with a comp from one of our other experiments
to get some more interesting effects as well and we can replace this comp with
one of our other experiment by holding alt and dragging one of those onto that
layer we could also take one of our already made experiment comps here and
add the CC sphere effect thank rate you know a more
psychedelic crazy pattern this one looks like a bowl of wool a little bit but 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 you
can see how some effects could work in two different ways I made a short
playlist of some related videos that'll 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
Subtitle: Zoe J Marriott