Create Gold Text in Adobe After Effects - A Short Motion Graphic Design Class

1. Introduction: In this learned five, we will be creating gold text. We will start off by creating text with a basic bevel layer style. Then we'll create a gradient over our text, and we'll be remapping that gradient's colors with an effect called Cloama. Finally, we'll bring it all together with some texture and light effects. Can't wait to see your animations. 2. Getting Started & Class Project: Getting started with this class, you'll need Adobe After Effects to follow the lessons. Your class project will be to follow along and create your own gold text. I'll provide a completed version of the project file. On the project and resources page, it might help if you get stuck on one of the lessons, feel free to post your project to the project gallery. I always love seeing what you create. 3. The Main Lesson Part 1 - The Text Layer: Mm hmm. We can start things off by creating a new composition. I'm going to use a preset social media landscape, 30 frames a second. Let's head up here and grab our type tool and type out some text. We can center to the center of the composition with the align panel. And we can go ahead and search for our first effect, the gradient ramp effect. We'll move the beginning and end of the ramp to just above and below our text. And once we're finished that, we can begin to remap our colors using the Colorama effect. So we'll add the Colorama effect to our layer. And under the output cycle is where we can change the colors of our gradient. Lucky for us, there's actually two gold color presets in the preset panel. I'm going to choose golden one. And if this is your first time using colorama, essentially what is happening is this circle represents our gradient in a clockwise motion. And as you change the colors on our circle on these tabs, it changes the colors on our gradient based on where they are relative to the circle. It's a little hard to wrap your head around at first, but it begins to make sense the more you use Cloama. We have our golden colors plugged in, we're still going to have to do some work to really sell the gold. Look. One thing we can do is add a Bevel layer style to our text. We could head up to Layer Styles, Bevel Ln and Boss. We'll toggle down the menu. Besides technique, we'll choose chisel hard. And we'll turn up the depth to 200%, and then I'll just add some depth to our text. If you zoom in, you can notice a little bit of weird artifacting around the sides of our text. That will go away with a simple fix by adding our next effect, the set MT effect. We can leave the set mat effect at the default settings. Now we can bring a couple additional effects to reshape and add some texture to our gold. The first of which is the fast box blur effect. I'll change the blur radius to five and move it above our colorama effect. At first glance, it doesn't look like it's doing much, but it'll make more sense when we go to add our next effect, fractal noise. We'll move our fractal noise above Cloama and we'll change our blending mode to color burn. Opacity down to 35, complexity to one, contrast to zero. Now we can go down the fractal type menu and see how the different fractal types affect our text. You can really go with any look you want, but I'm going to go with dynamic twist. Now we can turn our fast box blur on and off again, and you see it does have an effect on the shape of our text. I also want to reiterate the importance of our set MAT effect. Our set MD effect is essentially gluing all our effects to our text layer. 4. The Metal Texture: If you would like to skip this lesson, it's understandable. Just download the metal texture from the project and resources page. After you import, make sure you select the metal comp composition and drag it into the layer stack. Change the blending mode to overlay, use the Track Matt pick whip, and then turn the layer back on and you're done. Now, to create the metal look, I first started off by creating a new composition. I created a solid layer by going to layer new solid. And I added a fractal noise effect, and then I dialed in the settings. Now, I probably spent a good 5 minutes dialing in these settings to get it to look like this, but I'll just zoom in so you can copy them. Make sure to unlike uniform scaling, to be able to edit to scale, height and width separately. Then I added a tritone effect to change the colors. I'll put up the color codes on the screen. Next, I created another solid layer with a different fractal noise to create the dots, and I dialed in the settings as hum. And I copy and pasted the same tritone effect to this layer. Then I changed the layer's blending mode to screen. Now, to create the lines in the middle, which simulate cracks in the metal, I created a new composition, created a solid layer again. But this time, I used an effect called lightning to create these lines. I'll zoom in on the settings if you want to copy them. And then I changed the start in endpoints, and then I duplicated them, so there's six of them. And I kept them all towards the center of the composition because that's where our text is going to be. I forgot to mention in the original recording that this layer's blending mode is also set to screen, and the opacity is turned down to 75%. Then I dropped that composition into our metal comp, and I also changed the blending mode to screen. Now we can drop our metal texture comp into our main composition, turn the blending mode to overlay, and use the track mat pick whip to make sure it only shows up on the text. We'll have to turn our text layer back on. 5. Additional Effects: Now we're going to add some additional effects that will really tie the whole composition together. First thing I'm going to do is add a background. Got a layer, new, solid, rename it BG for background. I have a color picked out already. I'll zoom in so you can copy. We'll move that to the bottom of our composition. Now I'm going to create an adjustment layer. Right click New Adjustment layer. We'll rename it grain and Glow effects. With our layer selected, we'll search for the noise HLS auto effect. We'll change our noise type to grain and turn up the lightness to five. This will give our whole composition a little bit of grain. Then we can add a Gauging blur. Change it to something subtle like 3%. This will just soften out our composition. Then we'll add an unsharp mask and we'll bring up the amount to 300. And this will re sharpen our composition, but it'll give it more of a low fi look. You can really see the effect when you turn the layer on and off. And finally, we'll add a glow effect because our gold text just wouldn't look the same without a little bit of glow. I'm going to change the glow threshold to 80%, the radius, I'll change to 25, and glow intensity I can turn down to 0.5. To give it a more radiated look, we'll duplicate our glow, and on glow two, we'll change our glow radius to 125. You can see the impact all these effects have when you turn our adjustment layer on and off. And as a final touch, why not animate some light moving across our gold? We'll start things off by duplicating our gold text. We can go to the effects controls and delete every effect that we have leaving only our text with the bevel. I forgot to mention in the original tutorial that you'll need to have your fill color for your text set to pure black in order for the blending mode to work properly that we're going to use later in this tutorial. We'll move that new layer above the metal comp. We'll head to the effects and presets and look for CC glass. Right away, I'm going to change the height to zero to get rid of that weird effect. We're only going to be using this effect for the light controls. We'll go to the light type and change it to point light. Now we can change the lights position. Toggle open shading, we'll change ambient to zero, diffuse to zero, and metal to zero, leaving only the specular and roughness. Now we'll head back to our light control, and we'll change our light position to shine across. We'll start on this side of the text, press the stopwatch. Now let's move over on our timeline. We want it to animate slowly. So why don't we go to around 5 seconds? Now we'll change the lights position to the other side of the text. Now let's preview. I think that's a good enough animation. Now let's bring in some color to our light by adding the tritone effect. I'm going to change the color of the midtones. I already have a color picked out. I'll zoom in so you can copy it. We'll change our blending mode of the layer to screen. This will get rid of the black text while leaving our highlights and our light effect. You can always change the light intensity. Alternatively, you can change the specular, and of course, you could also change the light position. And that just about concludes this lesson. I want to thank you for taking my class. I hope you enjoyed it, and hopefully see you in the next one. H. 6. Outro: Congratulations on making it to the end of the class. Now you can post your project to the Project Gallery. I always love seeing what you create.