I'm gonna 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 that 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 wanted to and you might have to use an alpha matte instead
and now we're gonna add the roughen edges effect I learned this method from
Bernd Bousard an amazing designer and animator I worked with while freelancing
at buck Sydney check out his work he is brilliant and we're gonna 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 gonna stick with that 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
roughing 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 slowly 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 wouldn't do
it on a lot of layers in it might add up and also when we plan 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 Piece of Cake 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 * 4 and press Enter now if we play it back
every 4 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 want to stick to time * 4 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 that 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 of our appenditures we're done grainy goodness all over be sure to
check out my looping textures video to how to get this especially overlaid
texture as well for the background 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