Mograph Smears - Quick Tricks in Adobe After Effects

1. After Effects Shorts - Mograph Smear- Intro: This little quick tip is going to introduce using the echo effect to get a thick looking smear on your motion graphics. 2. After Effects Shorts - Mograph Smear- Tute: So what you've got a thing zipping around, but you don't want to just use motion blur 'cause been there done that. You want to get a smear on there. You want to get a super Mgravy. Hill. What you can do is use a funky Dunkey little effect called echo. So you chuck that onto your layer? What we'll do is we'll change the echo operator from add to maximum. So add it's just like a blending mode. That's how it treats it. I'm not sure why that's the default because 'cause it's useless. And we'll change the number of echos from one to a bunch, and you can see what it does have a little play. Obviously, that's insane, and doesn't look like a smear. But if we change the echo time, so by default, it's 0.03 to 33. If we make that 0.001, And then make the number of echoes a bunch. We could probably even do get away with 0.01. We don't need that many decimal places. Just because the amount of echoes that you're going to make is Magni machine. That's all. It's all I'm being a out. Let's try. Oh, still too much. Still a bit. We do that 42. Let's have a little look si poops. And you'll see the faster that the little buddies going, the longer the smear, which is exactly how an animated smear works. And that's he's doing. That looks heats better. Ship, shrip. Yeah, so you've also got the decay you can play with, so you can reduce the value down from p, and you'll see that it like fades off. And you can definitely see the circles there. So in that case, I would make it add another zero. And then counter it with a bunch more little fellows. Mm. It's quite the balancing act because they are in weird units, but any whos. If you wanted, like I quite like using the decay for, like, a light tabor type effect. Actually. So you can get a little ghosty type vibe. Or, of course, y, you can keep it. Solid. But yeah, really, really simple little effect that is super duper powerful. And you can chuck it on. I'm not going to say everything because after effects, we'll get up there with you, but you can chuck it on so many things. If you've got, like a little cursor that animating around the screen, chuck a little smear on it. Little echo effect. Top notch. 3. After Effects Shorts - Mograph Smear- Wrap Up: So that's it, just a quick little echo effect, and you can get heaps of different looks. So I challenge you to experiment with it and see what you can do. So I've tried it here on even a little cursor, and you can see how it makes it look like there's actually depth to it. It's not just a straight smear. So by making a duplicate layer and making that a slightly different color. You can do all sorts of different things. As I said, as well, I've used it for a light saber effect, or given a big wooh. So I challenge you to have a little play and see what you can get out of it and export it out as a little gift and pop it in the discussions. I'd love to see what everybody's making.