Texturing in Adobe After Effects

1. Course Trailer: Hey, I'm Jake Bartlett and in this class I'm going to teach you how to apply textures to your animations in Adobe After Effects. Texture and things in After Effects is one of my favorite things to do in several of my classes here on Skillshare revolve around the idea of applying textures to create a certain look. And it can be applied in so many different ways. In this class, we'll take a look at a variety of those options from using photo assets to apply to your entire composition or select elements, generating textures right inside of After Effects and even applying texture to specific parts of your design, like the edges of your graphics. And I'll even show you how to animate these textures so that you can give more life to your design, complimenting what you've already animated, and giving everything a cohesive, that visual language that fits together and feels right on top of all of that, I've created a tool for looping seamless textures that I'm going to be giving away to students in this class, including over 50 seamless textures that you can use in any project, whether it's personal or for commercial work. And because textures can be applied to literally anything the class project a little bit more loose than my other classes, but I will be showing you how to make this cool animated text project using a font that has multiple weights and then apply many of the techniques that I teach you in this class to that text animation to come up with something that looks so much more visually interesting than the original design. So you can either follow along with me and create your own text animation project, or you can just apply what you've learned in this class to any project that you'd like. This class is for anyone who's interested in texturing and after effects, whether you have years of experience under your belt or you're relatively new to the software, you'll be able to follow along and learn things along the way. If you've never used After Effects before, then I'd strongly encourage that you check out one of my other classes like the beginner's guide to After Effects or the beginner's guide to Animating Custom gifts. First, that way you'll be able to get up to speed with After Effects and follow along in this class with no problems. I'll see you in class. 2. Class Project: Like I said in the last video for the class project, you can really do whatever you want if you want some structure, follow along with me. And after I teach you how to actually apply textures to things, I'm going to show you how I make this animated text project and then apply the texturing techniques that I teach to that specific project. Your text animation doesn't even need to look like mine. If you don't want it too, you can be very creative and come up with something a little bit different, like maybe this animation here. Or you can go in a completely different direction and make a project that is completely unique. I'm totally fine with that. The idea is that you take the texturing techniques that I teach in this class and apply it to your own project. And if you'd like to follow along with me as you're watching the lesson videos, learning and applying these techniques yourself. Go to the Project and Resources tab and on the right side you'll scroll down just a little bit and you'll find all of the resources for this class, including the project file with assets that I'm using in the lessons. So you can follow along just like what I'm doing. And as with all of my Skillshare classes, if you ever have any questions along the way, do not hesitate to ask, leave a discussion asking your question. I always respond as quickly as I can to those. So don't hesitate, I'm here to help. Otherwise, let's get into this and learn how to start texturing things in After Effects. 3. Photo Textures & Blend Modes: There are a million different ways that you can apply textures to things in After Effects. And there's no way that I can cover absolutely every single one of them. But my goal is to give you some starting points and some basic concepts on how to apply textures in different ways so that you can start to think about how you might do it yourself. One of the most straightforward ways of adding texture is to just use a photo image as a texture and apply it uniformly across your comp. So I have a very basic comp here was just a solid background. And then I have this lion head, which I've used a few effects to just tint. So if I turn the effects of this is the actual photo that I've cut out in Photoshop. I added a CC toner to tint The lion. And that way it has highlights that are yellow mid tones that are green, the same green as the background. And then the shadows are just a very deep saturated blue. Then I brought in a levels affect just before that and just crushed all the levels a little bit to make that a little bit more stylized. So we're losing a little bit of that detail and getting more of this stylized look. Now to apply a texture to the entire comp, all you have to do is go grab my photo asset. So this is a crumpled paper texture that I got on unsplash.com, which is one of my favorite places to get textures or any photo asset because it's absolutely free. Everything on this website is free for personal or commercial use. New photos are constantly being added and you can do something like just search for paper and find all kinds of really high resolution textures to use in your designs. So I grabbed this one right here and brought it into After Effects. And to apply it to my design, I'm just going to drag it out on top of everything. And then we're going to utilize the blend modes. If you don't see this column right here where it says mode, then you need to click on this button in the bottom left corner that will bring that column up. And then we have access to all of these different blend modes. So there are three main ones that I want to focus on right now. Multiply, screen and overlay. And you can see that these have dividers between sections of these blend modes. That's kinda dividing how these are operating. So this section right here that multiplies a part of, generally darkens the image. This section right here where screen lives, brightens the image and the section that overlay belongs to is more of a mix between brightening and darkening. So let's start with multiply. I'm going to expand this out so we can see a nice and clear, but as soon as I change that blend mode to multiply for the paper texture, it's now being applied to my entire comp. Everything below it is getting multiplied. What multiplies doing is blending out all of the pure white values and then gradually introducing all of the other colors that aren't pure white, leaving us with this kind of shaded look. Now, this image is basically grayscale. It's just white and black. So we're not really manipulating colors as much as we are just values. But if I were to add a tint effect to that layer and then change the black to be something much more vibrant like that bright red now are actually changing the colors. And if I took that white and made it something crazy like this, bright blue, that's also going to have an effect. So if you're ever trying to apply a texture but not modify the colors, just use a tint effect and that will D saturate the entire image before applying that blend mode. But like I said, this is basically a gray scale image already, so it's really not doing much color wise. Now I can adjust this texture a bit if I add maybe a levels effect to that paper texture and then just crush the blacks right here. That'll make the shadows more intense. I could grab the gamma or the mid tones and adjust that so it's not quite so black. I could bring that back a little bit and I could even crush the whites so that there's a lot less detailed being applied. So now I've managed to really tone down that texture so that it's not quite so overwhelming. I could also just apply it to the background if I move it below the line or if I wanted to apply it to just the lion, then I'll just duplicate my lion head. Move this instance and below the paper texture. And then I'll use a track matte to Matt off the alpha channel of that texture. With my texture selected, I'll come over to the track matte column, click on None, and then choose Alpha Matte lion head. It's looking at whatever layers above it. I'll say alpha matte. And now that texture is only going to live within that lion and now it's a little harder to see. So maybe I'll adjust my level some more so that I can get something that's a little bit more apparent for this actual texture. And I can still move this texture around if I grab it, I could shift it around, rotate it, scale it up or down however I want. Now I kinda like the way it looked over everything. So I'm going to take that Alpha Matte off, delete that track matte layer. And then I'm going to fit this to my comp by pressing Control Alt Shift or Command Option Shift and H, that will fit the layer to the size of the comp. Now that texture is really intense. I'm going to backoff the darks a little bit and maybe crushed the whites just a little bit more. So this is a really great way for applying texture over the entire image. And it works with lots of different photo textures. If I jump back into Chrome, there's another website that I like to use all the time run by my friend Brady texture labs.org. Not only does he run a fantastic YouTube channel, but his website is full of photo textures, specifically for what we're doing right now. So I could grab any one of these. Let's just say. This one ink paint three to seven. I'll grab the medium version. Again, this is totally free for you to use for both personal and commercial use. I'll bring that into After Effects. Then I'll just drag that out over my comp again and then change the blend mode to multiply. Now if I solo this layer again, this is black and white. There's no color information, so I'm just dealing with value changes, but there's a lot more darker values to this. So it's really overpowering the image using the Multiply blend mode. I'm going to switch this to the Screen blend mode, which is going to do the opposite of what multiply does. Instead of keeping the darker values, it's going to blend the darker values out and keep the lighter values. So now we're seeing a lot more of these light ink paint strokes over the entire image, which is giving a really cool look to the entire thing. Considering all I'm doing is adding a couple of photo textures. And that's the other cool thing. You can layer textures to make it more unique and complex. I'm going to disable that paper texture just so we can focus on exactly what this one is doing. But if I zoom in, you can see that we're left with those brighter parts of the image and the darker parts are blending out. Again, I could add another levels of fact and crushed the whites to bring those in even more, or crush the blacks to blend more of that out. As well as use that gamma control to shift those mid tones. So just with some very basic effects and blend modes, you can really dial in a specific look. Once again, you can introduce some color if you're using a grayscale image, I'll get rid of those levels and add a tint effect. Change the whites to maybe that greenish color and leave the black set to black so that fades out. And now we have a much more subtle brushstroke texture over the entire thing. And I can combine that with my crumpled paper texture, maybe add a tint to that as well. And this time it may be make it a little bit more of an orange color. And now we've got these two textures interacting with each other, adding a lot more visual grit to my composition. Let's jump back over to texture labs, but I'm gonna look for another type of texture, like this one right here. Grunge 249, washed and warn, I'll download that and bring it into After Effects and once again apply that over the entire composition. I'm going to shut off the other two layers. And for this one I want to switch to the overlay blend mode. If we go to the blend modes, dropped down again, it's in this category right here, overlay rate at the top. What this blend mode does is kind of a mixture of both multiply and screen. If I zoom in nice and close and switch between the solo view and the full comp view. You can see that we're maintaining not only the darks of this image texture, but also the highlights of the image texture. It's affecting that whole range, What's being blended out the most is the 50% gray areas rate in the middle of that spectrum. So let's add a levels effect to this photo texture so that we can see the histogram. This is a visual readout of how much color information is in the photo that we've applied it to. So again, I'm going to solo this and because we see this large lump or hill on the right side, this is corresponding to this grayscale slider down here. This is telling us that there's a lot more bright information in this image than dark information that we see down here. So I could bring this slider in to introduce some more darks into my image and pull my gamma slider over towards the top of that lump to even everything out. Now if I duplicate this levels and reset, we're going to have a much more even toned histogram. I don't really need this, so I'm just going to delete it. That was just for a visual aid. But now that it's more, even if I turn this off and back on, you can see that again, the overall values of the image have not really changed. The darks and the lights are basically being left as is. And it's those mid tones that are really being blended out. Like I said, it's kind of a happy medium between the screen and multiply. And this is way too intense. You could always bring up the opacity by pressing the t key on the keyboard and then just dialing that back so that it's not nearly as intense. And just like our other examples, I could bring in a tint effect and play around with the colors. So maybe we'll add in some more blue at the darks and make the lights maybe closer to a light emission, green, yellow color. So those three blend modes are very important to get used to and understand. Multiply is going to leave the darks, screen is going to leave the bright. And overlay is going to do a mixture of both of those things and blending out the mid tones more than anything. But combining all three of them gives us a very unique textural quality. And it's a very simple way to add more interest to your compositions. In the next video, we're going to take a look at how to add more textures using built-in effects inside of After Effects. 4. Generating Textures with Effects: Now let's take a look at some techniques for generating textures inside of After Effects. I'm just going to shut those image texture is off for now so we can focus on the line had a little bit more. What I want to try and do is add a grainy shadow to my lions. So I'm going to start by duplicating the lion head and turning that instance off and going to the one below it, I'll add a drop shadow to that layer, collapse up these other effects so we're not distracted by them. And then check the box that says shadow only. So we're left with basically a filled version of the lion. In fact, I can even get rid of these other two effects. So we're left with basically a filled version of the line. And I'm going to turn the opacity all the way up to 100%. Now if I turn my other line head back on what this is going to allow me to do is apply effects to this shadow independently of the foreground line head. So I can leave this one untouched. But now with this second instance, I can turn up the softness and get a gradient. And that is what I really want, a gradient from the dark to basically transparent. What this is going to allow me to do is apply certain effects that interact with different values and generate texture within it. So if I zoom in a little bit so we can see that fall off of the shadow going from dark to transparent. Maybe I'll push the distance out a little bit more. I can add another effect called solid composite. And this is going to fill the background with whatever color I put in here. And I actually want it to be white. Now if I solo this layer, we can see that we're left with the black falling off to white. And that's actually going to be really, and that's actually going to be perfect for adding a noisy texture. So I'm going to collapse up those two effects and add another one called noise HLS. And that stands for hue, lightness and saturation. I can apply noise to each one of those channels individually. If I go to the lightness channel, which is what we're dealing with here. There's no color information, just lightness values and increase that. We're going to apply noise to that channel. And what I like about this effect is that I can switch it from the noise type of uniform two squared or grain. And grain allows you to choose a grain size. What I really like about this is that if I make it a lot bigger, it does get a little blurry, but it's much more chunky. So I'm going to turn that green up quite a bit and then add a levels affect rate after it, so that I can crush those white values and get rid of the texture in the areas I didn't actually want to see it. I can also do the same thing with the blacks just to dial this in a little bit more. Now, that's probably a little too large. The grain size is really, really big. So maybe I'm going to dial that back. It looks almost more like a paint splatter texture. Now I'm getting some of those dots back in here, so I'm going to crush those whites a bit more. And now that I have this black and white texture, all I need to do is change the blend mode for that layer to multiply and it will remove all of the white. So now I have this grainy shadow texture that's showing up behind my lion. Now, if I didn't want it to be pure black, I could obviously open up the opacity, dial that back a little bit. Or I could add a tint effect just like before and change that black color to maybe be that deep blue. I think that looks pretty good. But because I'm using that blend mode of multiply, that is going to interact with those background colors. So if I wanted to truly have whatever color I want without it blending, I would need to delete that tint effect and change this blend mode back to normal. So we're left with the white and black again. Then I'll add one more effect called extract, which is going to allow me to fade out the white if I grab the top right square right here and move it down all the way to the left. That's going to blend out all of those white colors without actually using a blending mode. And then I can grab this bottom right corner and slide it out to the right a bit just so it's a little bit more soft. If I zoom in nice and close, you can see what that's doing. It's really, really crunchy without that softness down here, this is the exact same control, but as I increase this, it's going to soften that out. I don't want to do it so much that I see that white, but maybe right about there looks a little bit better. Now that this is actually a transparent texture, I can fill it with any color I want. So I'll add in a fill effect and maybe sample this dark blue color in the main of that lion. And now I have this gritty texture and it's all based on this drop shadow, so I could push it out a little bit further. I can make it even softer or change the direction to whatever I want. It's all really easy to do. Now that I've set this all up, I could also just select all of the effects that generated that texture, which would be the drop shadow, solid composite noise, HLS, levels extract and fill and then come up to the animation menu and say Save Animation Preset. Even though this isn't an animation, it still saves all the effects, controls and whatever you've applied. So you can save it as a preset and then apply it to whatever you want. In fact, we could even adapt this to work not just as a shadow, but to actually texture the entire lion. So I'm going to shut that layer off and rebuild the effect on top of the lion. Now, I'm using the CC toner effect to add this color in. That's something I want to maintain that. So for now I'm just going to turn it off, but that's going to go with the bottom of my effect stack. I may or may not want this levels of fact, but I'm going to reset it to start and then apply the tint effect to desaturate the lions. So I'll just take out all the color and I want those whites to be a lot brighter. So I am going to use this levels of fact. I just need to drag it below the tint effect so it applies it after that, these saturation, then I'll grab my whites and bring it up a lot more. So I really do want to crush this quite a bit on both the lights and the darks, and maybe overall increase the brightness in the mid tones. I'll close both of those up and then add the noise HLS effects, noise HLS rate after levels. Again change the noise to grain and increase the lightness grain. And if I zoom in and we take a look, we still have all of those details. It's basically using this noise pattern to shade or generate the different values of my lion. I can increase or decrease that grain size if I wanted to. And then again apply another levels effect. I'll duplicate that, but drag it below the noise HLS effect, reset it, and then dial it in however I'd like. So I'm gonna get rid of some of those smaller dots by crushing the white. Fill in some more of that black area by crushing the blacks. And I'm getting these faded out, semi-transparent areas. That's just because of the alpha matte of this layer. So I'm going to go into the first instance of levels and switch my channel to alpha to actually crush that Alpha channel a little bit so we don't get so much of that semitransparent. See, now it's a much cleaner edge. I've generated this texture to shade my lion, rather than actually using the photo so that it's not so photorealistic. And what I can do is bring my CC toner back on to get back to those similar colors that I had originally. And now looking at this as a whole using those same types of effects, I've converted basically the photo version of my line into a stippled version of my lion almost with that noise HLS and I can increase or decrease the grain size to add more or less detail and play around with the instances of levels to bring more or less detail into the overall image. This actually works really well for photos, but it can also be applied to basic shapes in After Effects. So if I turn that layer off and I just take something as simple as a square, I'll just hold shift and double-click on the rectangle tool to make it perfect square. And then scale it down by going into the rectangle path and turning down the size. Now I want a fill, no stroke. So I'm going to turn off the stroke, turn on the fill, and we'll change this to being white. Then I'll click. Okay, and we're going to apply another stack of effects to generate an inner shadow. Now, there is a layer style that allows you to apply an inner shadow, but doing it this way will allow me to bypass pre composing the layer, which is something I tried to do as much as possible. I'm going gonna go into my effects and presets and again add a drop shadow effect. This is gonna be the basis for my inner shadow. I'll check the shadow only Box increase the opacity all the way and turn up the softness. Then I'm going to apply an invert effect, which by default just inverts the color channels. But I want to change the channel type from RGB to alpha all the way down to the bottom. That's going to invert the alpha channel, leaving me with this soft square hole. Then I'll add a CC composite effect, which is going to allow me to bring the original layer back on top if I uncheck RGB only, but instead of actually bringing back that original unaffected layer, I want to use the CC composite effect to shape the alpha channel based on that unaffected version of the layer. So I'll change the composite original mode all the way down off the recording. Actually two stencil alpha that's going to take the original unaffected alpha channel and use it basically as a track matte for the effected version of the layer, which essentially leaves me with an inner shadow for my square. But what's cool is that because it's based on this drop shadow, I can increase the distance, change the angle, as well as the softness. And it's going to allow me to dial that look in however I want. Now I do want to bring in that white filled background, so I'm going to duplicate CC composite one more time. Reset it, change the composite original tube behind as well as uncheck RGB only. That's going to composite the original layer behind everything that's already there, including the original alpha channel. So now I have this inner shadow on top of my square and it's black and white, which allows me to do that same process again, I'll collapse all of these effects, add a noise, HLS effect, increase the lightness value to bring in some of that texture, change the noise to grain, grab a Levels of fact. Crushed those white values, crush the blacks a little bit. And now I have this grainy shaded texture that I content using any one of the tint effects. Since I'm dealing with just black and white values, I will use tint instead of CC toner or tritones, something else like that. And that will allow me to change the white to be something that maybe fits my color palette a little bit better and change the blacks down to again, that deep blue I think looks pretty good. Maybe a little bit more on the cyan area. And now I have this shaded textured square. And what's really cool is that this noise HLS effect allows you to animate. The noise phase. So I could set a keyframe on the noise phase and go forward a few seconds and then just increase the revolutions a lot. And I'm going to have this kind of dancing noise texture. And if I don't like how fast that is, I could add a little expression to that value if I just press U to bring up those two keyframes, I just set a hold Alt or Option and click on the stopwatch and type out posterize. And it's actually going to auto-fill for me. I'm just going to click on Posterize Time, double-click on that. It fills in the expression. And all I need to put in between these parentheses is the number of frames per second. I want this to actually update. So I'm working at 30 frames per second. Let's drop it down to ten frames per second. And what this is going to do is only update this value at a rate of ten frames per second. But I need to add one more line if I dropped down, I just need to type out value and finish it off with a semicolon. In fact, I'll do that at the end of the first line as well, just to follow proper syntax for expressions. But what is it going to do is look at the value. So whatever value I've said between these two keyframes and update that value at ten frames per second. Now if I click off to apply the expression and play this back, my texture is updating much less frequently. I'll play this back now that it's rendered in real-time. So you can see this is updating now at a rate of ten frames per second instead of 30. And I could do the exact same thing to my line if I just right-click on the noise phase property and go down to Copy Expression. Only. Then I'll turn my lion head back on, double-click on noise phase up here in the effect controls to bring it up in the timeline, select noise phase and paste. So it applies that same expression. And I actually will need to copy those keyframes as well from the shape layer. So I'll just grab that, paste it in here. And now this noise is going to update on the line as well. And that gives it a very cool look. Now I don't have to use keyframes. I can easily drive this with expressions. So I'm just going to delete those two keyframes, go back into my expression. And instead of value here, I'm just going to say random in the parentheses, say 10 thousand. What that will do is generate a random value between 010 thousand for every frame of my composition. Again, posterize in that update by ten frames per second. So now it's going to just constantly give me a random value into the noise phase, which produces this animated dancing texture. In this all works really well with the texture photos as well. So I can enable all of those back in here. And now we're combining techniques to create something that looks really interesting. But going back to the shape layer, I wanted to point out that you can use texture as an effective way for shading things in a very least stylistic way. Maybe I want to round off the corners of this square a little bit more so it doesn't feel quite so sharp. I could just go into the roundness of the rectangle path and increase the roundness of the corners so that it fits that a little more. And then maybe I want to add a grainy shadow to this as well. I could just duplicate the layer, copy those effects from my second instance of the lion head, again from the drop shadow down, which if you save it as an animation preset, you would just apply that preset. I'll get rid of all the effects by pressing Control Shift E or Command Shift E on a Mac and then paste what I just copied and then just dial this in. However, I need to probably turn the softness down and change the angle a little bit, bring the distance in, and then change this darker color to maybe be a little bit more green. And now I have that grainy shadow applied to the square, not only inside but also on the outside of that square. And maybe we could even introduce that into the background of this design that I've been developing. And maybe we could even try introducing this technique into a background element for this part of the composition with the lion head, I'm going to add a new solid layer by pressing Command or Control Y. And I'll just call this stripes and we'll make it white. Click, Okay? And then add a Venetian blinds effect. This is one of my favorite effects for patterns of stripes because all I need to do is increase the completion and that will give me stripes. Basically, I can increase or decrease the width to make them bigger or smaller. And I can also rotate them to put that at any direction I'd like. So I'm going to move this down below, just above the background. So it's just being applied to the background. And then maybe add a twirl effect, which is gonna give me a little bit of distortion on that background if I increase the toroidal angle as well as the total radius to be much larger than we'll see these stripes twirling around. Now, this is getting cropped off because of the size of the solid. So I'm gonna go up to Layer Solid Settings and increase the width and height to say 2300 by 2300, just so it's much bigger and we're not going to see those cropped off edges. Now to introduce this more as a texture rather than just stripes, I could increase the feather so that it fades from that solid to transparent again and fill in that background one more time with a solid composite effect. This time I'm going to change the color to black so that we see these stripes. Nice and clearly I'll solo it so we can see exactly what's happening. If I increase that feather even more than we're going to get a nice soft transition from white to black. Maybe I'll increase that twirl angle even more to get something really cool looking, I could move the center point around, but that is going to start revealing some edges. So I've gotta be careful with how far I push that. But now I have this cool striped pattern in the background, but I want to introduce that same grain to it as we have on the square up here. So again, I'm going to select the effects that are generating the noise. So noise, HLS, levels and tint, copy those, turn that layer off and solar the stripes layer, paste those effects. And instantly we've got this grainy texture applied to our stripes, as well as those colors that we applied with the tint effect. But I want to point something out. If I turn the feather all the way off, then we're barely getting any texture at all. And that's a key thing to understand. Generating the shading with noise really depends on a gradient or a change in value. The more I feather this out, the more that noise is going to disperse and give us a gradient for this shading. Or if you don't want the shading, you can turn that all the way down and it just gives this kind of printed quality that is still really cool. So there are lots and lots of possibilities and an endless number of effects and ways to combine them to create your own unique textures. But now I have these cool stripes in the background. I can animate the textures of those as well. And just to make it go a little bit quicker, I'm going to double-click on the noise phase from the lion's head, copy that property, go into the stripes, double-click on that, paste it in there. I don't need the keyframes anymore, but now the noise is going to be uniformly changing between the lion and the background. I'll probably want to paste that on the noise for the shadow of the lion as well. So noise phase paste that in. Now everything is going to animate together. And then I could even make the background a little bit more interesting by going into the stripes layer, going into Venetian blinds, and then adding some keyframes on the direction. So it's going to give a lot more movement to the background. If I set a keyframe here, go forward maybe five seconds, and just twirl this around a little bit. Now we've got some movement in the background, but it's animating faster than the actual noise texture. So why don't I synchronize those up again, I'm going to double-click on noise phase, right-click and say Copy Expression Only because that's the only part that I want from that I don't actually want the property. Then double-click on the direction for Venetian blinds and paste that with Control or Command V, but go back into that expression in instead of random, just change this down to value one more time. So it's looking at the keyframes that I've set, but post rising them again to ten frames per second. Now if I play this back, everything is going to have a more uniform look in terms of the motion. But we've got a lot of movement in the background. This animated texture with all that chunky grain, as well as the photo textures of the paper and the brushstrokes all being applied on top of everything. And this is obviously very in your face, very bold. But we could dial any of this back just by turning down the opacity or maybe changing the colors. If I go into the tint, I could choose values that aren't nearly as intense or that have nearly as much contrast. In fact, if I choose the same green color and then just slightly bring this down and maybe make it a little bit more saturated and slightly change the hue, then it's going to be much more subtle and keep the focus a little bit more on our subject, which is really the lion. But you can see just how much fun it is to just start iterating and applying different effects, adjusting the different values of those effects and starting to get some of the textures moving to create a very unique look. 5. Animating With Distortions: Another way you might want to apply an animate texture is to the edges of your layers. This is a really fun and popular technique for giving some life to your graphics. So they're not so static. And I actually have an entire class here on Skillshare dedicated to it called scribbled in After Effects. But I'm going to quickly show you how you can apply the same type of look to basically anything. So I'm just going to turn off these photo textures for a second and we'll stick to just the lion. And actually I'm going to duplicate that and remove all of the noise effects. So I'll delete the noise HLS and the second instance of levels. So we're left with just this stylized version of my line. And I actually don't need that tint effect either. Alright, also shut off the stripes in the background. So we're back to where we started. And I'm going to apply an effect called turbulent displace. If you're not familiar with this effect, it's going to apply distortion and that makes the line and look really silly, but it's basically just randomly applying distortion across the entire image. And with the evolution control, I can change that distortion in this very Warby, wavy looking shape. I could also offset the turbulence with this point control, and that's right here. So this is just shifting the distortion map around the image. And I can do things like change the amount, change the size, so it's much finer and that's actually what I wanna do. I want to turn this down to a very low value of maybe 234, somewhere in there. And now the texture is much more subtle. So we're not destroying our image and making it look all crazy, but we're giving it a textural quality that it didn't have before. And that we can animate using evolution or randomly if we go into the evolution options using this random seed, every time that value changes, the texture is completely regenerate it. So I'm going to add an expression to that random seed. I'll double-click on that value. It will open it up down to my timeline and then I'll Alt or Option click on the stopwatch. Then I'll just again type in my random expression, random and in the parentheses, 10 thousand. Again, that gives me a unique value on every frame of the composition between 010 thousand. I'll just apply that and play this back. Now I haven't animated texture. This is sometimes referred to as a boil animation because it kinda does look like it's boiling. But I think that's a little too fast again, I want to add that Posterize Time part into my expression. So I'm going to finish this with a semicolon, go to this top and drop down a line and just say posterize time, ten frames per second and it with a semicolon and apply. Now it'll update that value at ten frames per second instead of 30 frames per second. And I can go in now and maybe turn the amount down, maybe turn the size down to three. And now it's much more subtle that can be copied and pasted onto absolutely anything. If I copy it from this layer and put it back on our layer with the noise pattern. I'll paste that right at the bottom of the stack. It's a little harder to see with that noise patterns. So maybe I'll increase the amount and maybe even the size a little bit. But now we're getting some movement within that texture that we didn't have before. So this is without and this is with Turbulent Displace. But let's say that you didn't want it to affect the entire image, you just want it to affect the edges. Well, let's actually switch over to our square for this example. And I'll select all of these effects and collapse them. So we can apply a new effect called roughen edges. At the bottom of this layer stack, what this effect is going to do is Distort just the edges of the layer. If we zoom in, you can see the edges are now rippling and it's not doing anything to the inside of the layer. So it's using the Alpha channel to determine where the distortion is actually going to happen. So I'm going to turn my edge sharpness up just so that's a little bit more defined. I'm going to turn the border up so that we see more of it. I'm going to turn the scale way down again so that it's a much more subtle effect around the edges. I use this effect extensively in another Skillshare class, the stop motion look in After Effects, where I show you how to build a procedural felt look inside of After Effects and the roughen edges effect is great for making these fibers coming off of the edges of your layers. So if I make that edge sharpness a lot thicker, maybe turn the border down just a little bit. Now I have these roughened edges that I again can animate either fluidly with this evolution slider or going into the evolution options animating that random seed that just like before. So I'm gonna go in to that expression that I typed on the turbulent displace the lion head, I just double-tap the E key with that layer selected to bring up the expressions, I will copy that random seed value. Go back to my shape layer, double-click on this random seed value and paste it right there. So now the roughen edges is going to update at ten frames per second with the same timing we have for the noise. And we've added a textural quality to the edges of that shape layer unaffected what's inside it. So both Turbulent Displace and roughen edges are extremely valuable for texturing anything in after effects. And the built-in animation controls that just makes it that much better. 6. Animating Seamless Texture Overlays: Now we've looked at how easy it is to animate textures that are generated using effects just by changing the random seed or Evolution controls. But how can we add some animation to actual photo textures so that this isn't just a static design. Well, there are a few ways that you could do this. I think I've come up with a pretty good technique and I've even turned it into a little rig that I'm going to give you as a download for taking this class. But it's always great to understand how things are working so that you can take that knowledge and apply it to future projects. So I'm going to show you how I would approach this without the rig because I really think it's useful to know how to do. Let's just start with one texture, maybe this paper texture in the back. I basically want this texture to just be moving around randomly on the frame and maybe even rotating so that it's not just sitting there, but obviously it's the size of my comp. If I move it around, I'm going to see those edges. Well, there's an effect called offset if I undo this, so it's back to where it was originally, and I apply the offset effect to it. I'll just solo this layer so we can focus on just the texture. All I have with this effect is the ability to shift the center to. If I click and drag this around, you can see it's just going to shift the contents around without moving the layer around. The only issue with this is that you can actually see that seam where the edges meet again and it doesn't look very good. I'm going to ignore that for now because we're going to actually fix that in Photoshop. But I just want to show you how we actually get it to move around here in After Effects. So we're going to use another expression on this shifts center to property. So I'm going to double-click on that again to bring up that property in the timeline and Alt or Option click on the stopwatch. We're again going to use that random expression, except I can't just type out random and 10 thousand in the parentheses because this value is an array, meaning there is more than one value within the property. So I have to write it in a special way. And that's within brackets. If I type a left square bracket and type in say 100, and then I separate that with a comma and type in 200. Finish it off with a closing square bracket and click off. Now this value is one hundred, two hundred, just like I typed in here. So the first section of the array corresponds to the first property value. The second part of the ray goes to this second property value. I need to put a random expression in both of these sections. But instead of typing out the random expression two different times, I'm actually going to store it in a variable which you can think of like shorthand for expressions. To write one, I'm going to type it VAR for variable, and I'll just give it any name. It can be anything you want as long as you don't use numbers or special characters. So I'm just going to call it r for random and then add an equal sign. And this is where the expression will go. So I'm going to type out random 10 thousand and finish it with a semicolon. Now, wherever I type are beyond that line is going to be the same as if I typed random 10 thousand. So instead of 100 by 200, I'm going to say R comma r. And now I should get a random value between 010 thousand for both the x and y values on this shifts center to property. I'll click off to apply it. And sure enough, now my texture is moving all around at that crazy high rate and I can still see that seam. But it's doing what I wanted it to. It's just doing it a little too quickly. So let's apply that Posterize Time part of the expression as well. I'm gonna do that right at the top of the line. It doesn't really matter where this goes. I just prefer to put it on the very first line. So Posterize Time and we'll say ten frames per second semicolon at the end. And now that texture will move much less sporadically. So we're already getting that kind of result that I was looking for, which is great. Now let's say that I also wanted this to rotate. I'm going to use another effect called transform, which gives me the transform controls that we have down in the layer. If I just expand this out and collapse the effects, they're the same as right here, except they're being applied with an effect rather than the actual properties of the layer. So what this allows me to do is rotate the layer. Now when I do this, we're going to start to see the edges of that layer, which is not something that we want. So I'm going to add one more effect, motion tile and apply it just before Transform. Let me solo the texture layer. Turn off my transparency grid and show you what this actually does. If I change the output height, it's going to repeat that texture and fill in that gap. So anytime that I see an empty gap, I'll just increase the output width and height a little bit on motion tile. But now this texture is being offset, repeated, and rotated. But I want to apply that same expression that we have up here on the Shift Center to property to the rotation, except this is not an array. So I don't have to include the variables and the arrays to target two different values. I'm just going to type in posterize time, ten, drop-down, say random 10 thousand. And now that's going to update randomly at a rate of ten frames per second. Now we are getting some gaps. They're uncertain frame. So I'm just going to find one of those, go to my Motion Tile effect and increase the output width. Just so we fill that all in. Actually, I'm just going to say 250 on the width and height just to be safe. But now it's going to animate not only the position shifting the center around, but it's also rotating. So we're getting a lot more variation out of this single photo texture now. And if I un-solo it, it's being applied with that Multiply blend mode. It looks really cool. But how do we get rid of that seam if I find one of those frames right about here, you can clearly see that seam. I don't want that happening. So I'm going to actually open this up in Photoshop and show you how to do just that. In Photoshop there are effects just like in After Effects there under the Filter menu. But if I go down to the other category, there's an effect at the very bottom called offset. This is going to do the exact same thing that we had inside of After Effects. It just shifts the contents of the layer around. I can even click and drag this in the document to kinda center that up. It doesn't have to be perfect, but somewhere right about there, I have a wraparound checked. Make sure you have that checked in order for it to actually shifted around the way that it didn't After Effects. And then just click Okay, then I'll press S to bring up the clone stamp tool and press the right square bracket key to make my brush size bigger. If you don't know how the clone stamp works, you hold down Alt or Option to sample a part of your layers. So I'm going to choose right here, just click once and then let go of Alt or option. Now you can see that portion of what I sampled underneath the brush cursor. I'm just using a regular round brush with no hardness, so it's a very soft. And now when I click and drag, it's going to paint that texture. It's going to repeat it. You see how it's cloning it as I move it down. Now, that doesn't look very good. I'm going to undo that. But the goal with this tool is to paint out this seem. So it's not nearly as noticeable. So I'm going to sample and maybe right here and then just click and drag a few times. I'm gonna do this a little at a time and go pretty quickly. I'm just resting my thumb on the Alt key and choosing new sample points so that we don't have a lot of repeated textures. That's the key with this Clone Stamp Tool is to always be changing your sample point so that when you get rid of this seam, it's not very obvious where you painted it out. So I'm just going to continue doing this for all of the same edges until I have a scene that looks pretty hidden, because this is a random crumpled paper texture. It's not that difficult to hide it. And it's okay if you see a little bit of repeated stuff and some splashes because of the way that we're using this. It's not all that prominent on our design. It's just being used as an overlay. That looks pretty good. The way that we can test to see if our siem has gone is just going up to Filter and clicking offset. Again, it's going to offset in the same amount. And now it's not really clear where that seam was at all. And that's really the goal with making a seamless texture. But now that this is done, I can just save it, jump back into After Effects and my textures automatically updated. Now if I play this back, there is no seam. It's totally invisible. And we're getting a lot more mileage out of this texture. Now, you can do this with virtually anything as long as the textures aren't extremely uniform, you can make them seamless. So I'm gonna do the same thing to this brush texture right here really quickly. I'll go to Filter Other down to offset. Shift this around so that I can see the kind of that center point. Click Okay, press S to bring up my clone stamp and maybe make this a little bit smaller sample and start brushing out this seam. Now this one is probably going to work even better because there's so many random brushstrokes, they're all overlapping. So you're never going to know that there was actually a seam between these different sections of the texture. I'm just going to continue painting all this out. Again, pretty much sampling and new point randomly on the Canvas every time that I apply a new stroke with the Clone Stamp Tool. Alright, that looks pretty good. Let's just apply the offset one more time. And sure enough, there is no seam. I'll save that. Jump back into After Effects. It's automatically updated. I can just copy and paste the offset motion tile and transform effects from the first texture onto this brush texture. And it's going to be the exact same thing. Repeat, rotate and offset the contents, all animated at that ten frames per second. And now we have this very unique dancing photo reference to texture applied to our composition. It's really not all that hard to do, but it produces some really great looking results that give you a whole lot of mileage inside of After Effects. 7. Free Texture Looper Rig Walkthrough: Now that we've taken a look at how you can create your own seamless textures and animate them in a looping repeating way. I'm going to show you this tool that I'm offering to you for taking this class as a thank you that you can use in any project you want moving forward. And you can download this under the Project and Resources tab on this Skillshare page. Just click on that tab, look at the right side, scroll down a little bit, you'll see resources and then the attached zip file, extract the contents of that zip file to someplace that you can get too easily in either open up the After Effects project file or imported into the project you're working on. I created a rig that does basically what I just showed you how to do. But instead of using a single texture, it uses a comp that has multiple textures within it. This is a paper texture comp. If I go to the beginning, you'll see that it's made up of a whole bunch of layers. These are all photos that I got from Unsplash converted to be seamless and balanced out the levels so that they all have similar values. The way that I've set this rig up is that you insert whatever textures you want into this comp, make that texture one frame long and offset each layer in time so that none of them appear at the same time. You can add as many textures as you want to this comp. And what it's going to do is cycle through all of those textures, in addition to giving you some extra controls. So if we take a look at the effect controls for this comp, there's a pseudo effect here that I created called texture looper. This allows you to set the frames per second. So using that posterize time expression, it's going to be based on whatever value you type in here. So this texture is updating at a rate of 12 frames per second. Now, I could drop that down to six frames per second and it's going to update even slower. I have random rotation set to one revolution. If you turn this down to 0, then the textures aren't going to rotate. They're just going to alternate between that sequence as well as offset using this random offset feature. So if I set that down to 0, then we're not getting any shifting around a rotating of that texture. It's just switching from one texture to the next at a rate of six frames per second. There's one more control down here, which is random seed, and this will just give you a random starting point for your textures. Now, I've added a levels control as well, which is just making this texture a lot less prominent in my comp. You can adjust this levels to whatever you want. There's nothing special about this effect. If you'd rather use something like curves to adjust the contrast of your texture, you absolutely can. That's just what I chose to do because of the histogram which I find to be really useful for dialing in those values. If I scroll down the effects list, you're going to see a Motion Tile effect. And this is where you can control the output width or height if you need to fill in those gaps at all. But I'm actually using the tile center property of the motion tile effect to shift things around instead of the offset effect, it does the exact same thing just shifts the contents around within that tiled area. Then we have the transform effect. This is where the rotation is coming from. Again, you don't need to touch anything in here. It's just the output width and height for the motion tile that you may need to adjust depending on the textures that you use, the blend mode is set to multiply. You could change that to maybe overlay if you want to introduce some of those highlights, but then you'd probably want to mess around with the levels. I also need to point out that I did increase this output black to be much, much brighter. So with the Multiply blend mode, that helped to tone down those blacks a lot. But if you were to change this to screen, you'd probably want to just reset the levels fact, then change your blend mode to say screen, and then dial in your levels however you want. So if you want a less washed out look, then you'd probably dial that in and maybe bring the whites down a little bit so it's not quite as intense. And again, reset the effects, switch it to overlay if you want to get a balanced texture affecting both the shadows and the highlights. In this case, I might leave the levels up here exactly where they are, but then drop the output white down and increase the output black so that it's much more subtle. Alright, let me change this frames per second. Backup to 12 will just give another value of one on the random rotation and then set the random offset to 3 thousand by 3 thousand, just so we get a lot of random variation between every single one of these textures. Now that's the paper textures, but I actually have prepared textures for cement, fabric, paper, and wood that you can just swap out. And I'll show you how to do that. Have that layer selected that have all the Effect Controls. And then just hold Alt or Option while clicking and dragging one of the other texture comps. So with this wood texture comp, I'm going to just Alt, click and drag into the timeline and let go. And that swaps out the contents, leaving all of the effect controls and expressions exactly the same. Now I have this wood texture overlay, which might be a little too intense. Maybe I want to change this to multiply and dial this in a little bit so it's not quite as intense, maybe something like that. I could even crush those whites a little bit. So we're just getting a much more subtle wood texture over everything. There's also cement. Let's swap that out, click and drag while holding Alt or Option and let go. I'll reset my levels affect. And you can see that this is a much more grungy looking texture. I think Overlay might work well for this one. And again, I could increase the output black and decrease the output white to make that a little bit more subtle. And then finally we have fabric. Let me swap that out. So you can see what that looks like. And those are the four options that I prepared. All of the textures are completely seamless. Again, I found all these textures on Unsplash, and I re-size them to be 1920 pixels wide and balanced out their levels so that you get a pretty uniform adjustment of shading regardless of which textures you apply. If you want to add in your own textures, I want to show you how you can do that. Let's just say that in this fabric comp, I'm going to add some more textures and I'll just grab maybe the wood texture since those stand out so well, I'm just going to copy all of these and then I will find where the last texture lives in this fabric comp and paste. So now the wood textures are all living above all of the fabric layers. And I'll just zoom in and click and drag to align this in sequence with the rest of the layers. Another really quick way to do this is actually, I'll just bring them all back to the beginning of the comp. Just have them all selected in the order you want them to be offset. So I'm going to start at the bottom, shift click at the top, then right-click on one of the layers and go to keyframe assistant and say sequence layers. Just click, Okay, and they're going to align each one of those layers end-to-end. And it's now going to go through all of them in sequence. Now, the way that I've set up this rig is simply adding those extra layers are now going to be implemented into the texture looper. So if I play this back, we're gonna get a mixture of those wood textures as well as the fabric textures. So if there's a texture you don't like in one of the pre-comps that I've already created, you can simply remove it and just close the gap in the sequence. You can duplicate the texture and offset it in time to have it appear more often. Or you can add in your own textures and make your own comps that have completely unique combinations of textures. And it will all work with the rig that's set up in this comp. Just make sure you don't delete this one because this is what has all of the effects and expressions driving everything that looks into the comp and counts the layers to generate random pattern changes. But that's my gift to you. I hope that you like texture looper. If you do use it in any project, please tag me on Instagram at Jake and motion. I would love to see it and show it off. And I hope that it's useful to you. 8. Animating a Multi-Weight Font: Now I want to show you how to make a cool text animation, and this is what we'll use for our class project. Now animating the text doesn't really have anything to do with texture, but it creates a really cool result. And we can apply textures using lots of different techniques that we've already talked about too is. But to pull off this text animation, a really need to think about what font you're going to use. So I have Adobe fonts open right here, which is part of your Creative Cloud subscription. You have access to all the fonts on this site at no extra cost. I've chosen the font rock grotesque, and that's because there are lots of different weights. This font, in fact, not only are there different weights, there are different widths. So compressed, condensed, regular, widened, extra wide. So there's a total of 45 fonts in this font family, which is absolutely insane. But really I just need three. I want to go with the extra wide version of the font. And I want to animate the font going from a bold version of the font to shrinking down to a much lighter version of the font before expanding back out to the thickest version and kind of overshooting back down to where we started. So that's why you need to look for in a font. And if I just jumped to the all fonts section, you can find a lot of these high-quality multi width fonts on Adobe Fonts, if you just search some of the tags. So let's say we want to go with clean font. I'll scroll down until I see one that I like. And I'm taking a look at these thumbnails here that show it in use. So right here we can see that this has multiple weights to it and it has four fonts. Seeing multiple fonts in the font-family is a good indication that it has multiple weights right here. There's ten fonts on this one. And sure enough, there's a bold version, irregular version of the thin version. So if I click on View family, I can very quickly find out if this is going to have the number of fonts that I need to pull up the animation. So sure enough, this one has ten different fonts ranging from thin all the way down to heavy. This would be a great option for the type of animation we're going to create. But take your time browsing these fonts and find one that speaks to you. And it has at least three different weights. Ideally, it will have a wide range of weights so that you have many options to choose from. But like I said, I chose a font called Rock grotesque. So I'm going to jump into After Effects and make a new composition, 1920 by 108024 frames per second and the duration set to 30. That should be more than enough time. And I'll rename this comp text source. Click Okay, and then type out the word extra using my font, rock grotesque. Now like I said, I want this to go from a thicker version of the font, which there's so many versions that you can't even see the entire list on the recording, but down near the bottom, I have extra wide thin, all the way down to heavy. I want to go to maybe the extra bold version or maybe even one thicker will go to the black as my resting pose, basically the resting weight for this font, I want to shrink it down to maybe the lite version of the font, possibly even extra light, and then reinstate all the way up to its thickest version of heavy before shrinking back down to the extra bold weight that I started with. And I can't animate that using a text layer, I need to convert it to shape paths that I can then animate between. So I'm going to actually duplicate this text layer and move it above and then duplicate it one more time and move it below again. This middle one is my resting weight, but then I want to shrink up to a much thinner version. So I'm gonna go down my font list and I'll say maybe the extra light version. That'll be where it shrinks and down two. And then on the third version, I want this to be my thickest. They're really inflated and change this to the thickest version of the font which is heavy. Now I need to convert each one of these to shape layers. So I'm gonna do one at a time and right-click, go down to Create and say create shapes from texts. And I'll do that for all three texts layers. Then I'll just grab the original texts layers that have been hidden and drag them to the bottom basically as a backup. Now I want to get all of three of these into one shape layer. And to do that, I'm just going to duplicate this top one and rename this extra animated. Now this already has the thickest version, which would be this one right here. So I'll shut that layer off. But what I need to do is clean it up a little. If I open up the layer and go into the contents, I have a different group for each character, and within each group is a stroke and a fill. I only need one fill. I don't need a stroke and all of the paths can live in one group. So to do that, I'm going to switch to my pen tool by pressing G on the keyboard, clicking on any one of these points, and then holding down Alt or Option while clicking and dragging to make a selection around all of those points. Now that they're all selected, I can cut them with Control or Command X, clean up my layer a little bit by deleting all of these extra groups, moving the Fill out into the contents and deleting that stroke, I'll rename this group paths and paste. Now all of those paths exist in that one group. They're all being styled by a single fill and it's much easier to deal with. Next, I just want to type in the word path in my search bar. That'll bring up the keyframes for all of the path properties and just set a keyframe by clicking and dragging downwards on all of those stopwatches. Now I have path value stored as keyframes for that weight of the font. Now we'll move on to the next weight. And I can actually not even deal with all the clean up. All I need to do is select that weight, search for path to bring up all of those path properties. And again, set keyframes for each one of them just by clicking and dragging down the stopwatches. Now if I maximize this panel with the tilde key, I can select those keyframes, copy them, go back into my animated layer by pressing U to bring up those keyframes. And we'll go to say ten frames forward to hold down Shift and press Page Down to jump ten frames, select these keyframes and paste. And now I've duplicated this Layers paths into my animated layer. And it's actually going to interpolate between those two. No cleanup necessary. So I'll just turn off that layer and we'll move on to the last one. Again, just search for path, set a keyframe on all of those stopwatches. Select those keyframes, Copy, and then we'll move another ten frames forward and paste those key frames after selecting the previous set of keyframes. Now, all three weights of that font exist on that same layer, and it's interpolating between all three of them. It's beautiful. And this is working so well because the type designer who created this font and many type designers who create variable width fonts create them with the same number of points. They're just offset in space. But because this was so well-designed, it's animating perfectly. Now one issue that you may come across with your font is that things move around incorrectly as you interpolate between these different weights. And I'll show you exactly why that's happening. If I grab, say, this point on the E, right-click on it, go to mask and shape path and say set first vertex. Then the interpolation is going to completely break between these two sets of keyframes. If you didn't already know pads actually have numbers for each one of the points that make that path up. I set the first vertex here for this weight, but the first vertex here is the bottom-left corner. That's why it broke. Because After Effects is interpolating between an indexed path that's in a different position than the keyframes coming after it. If you see that happening, all you need to do is find that first vertex, which again you can see because this vertex has a circle around it and the other ones are just dots. Find where that first vertex is consistently and set that point to be the first vertex for every instance of that letter and it should interpellate properly. Another issue that you might run into is if there are different number of points being used between character weights on this particular font. If I add another point on this path, it doesn't really make a difference because After Effects is able to interpolate just fine without any real issue. But it could give you issues, especially with curved shapes. And if that is the case, try to also align up the number of points consistently between weights and put them as closely to the positions they belong to a cross each set of keyframes. Now that I have all this set up, I can actually animate it the way that I want to. So let me just turn off this last layer towards the middle of my comp and press U to bring up those keyframes one more time. I can ease between all of these values just by selecting them and press F9 to easy ease them. And if I bring up my graph editor, I'm going to have to ease this using speed and not the value graph because path property is not supported with the value graph. But now I can increase this and it now eases much more strongly between those poses, which is really cool. Now if we take a look at the E, it is shrinking inwards. If I zoom in here, nice and close, take a look at the bottom-left corner. It's moving to the right and then to the right again, I would like all of that to line up on the left edge so that when it expands, it's kind of moving to the right. This is gonna take a little bit of work, but all I need to do is set a snapshot for this frame. So I'm going to click on the Snapshot button, move forward to the second weight. And then this first path is my E. I'll just click and drag that back and show that snapshot by clicking and holding on this button right here. And that was actually pretty dead on. I did hold down Shift while clicking and dragging. So start dragging hold shift and that constrains the axis left or right, up or down. So I'll undo that. That was pretty good. I'll do the same thing now for my X. Grab that keyframe, back it up, show the snapshot. And I'm gonna do this all the way down the line, just to the left edges of each character, lines up with that left edge. And it's going to expand the text out as it grows. This R is made up of two key frames. So I'm going to grab both of those, bring this back. And now that left edge is locked in place. Finally, the last two keyframes are for the a, drag that back. And that looks pretty solid. So what this is going to do now is interpellate not only the thickness, but it's all going to be anchored to the left edge of every character. I'll do the same process between this weight and this weight. Set. A snapshot, zoom in, and then one character at a time offset the paths. There you go. Now my text is anchored to the left edge. It's expanding inwards from the right as it shrinks down and back out to where it was as it grows. Now I can actually play around with the animation and have the sequence play through the way that I actually want it to. I wanted to start here. So I'm gonna leave that set of keyframes right where it is. Then I want it to gradually shrink down to this weight right here. So it's gonna go from this point down to here, hold onto that for a little bit before inflating again, but overshooting this point and growing to the thickest version. So I'm going to grab this set of keyframes and move it forward. And now it's going to shrink down before inflating. And then I want it to end up back here. So I'm going to copy and paste these keyframes. And there we go. Now this is taking way too long to get to the thickest version of the font. So I'm going to move that back. And even that is probably too slow. So I'm going to just readjust these timings a little bit and go into my speed graph. And right here in particular needs a lot more easing. So I'm going to increase the influence of these handles, increase the influence of these handles and play that back. So that's looking pretty good. I don't like how snappy it is right here. I don't want it to hang on this inflated version very long, so I'm going to bring that down and increase this influence. Now it's really going to snap back into position. But I think it could even bring these keyframes back a little bit. So it shrinks down before expanding out. I'm just going to play around with the easing and timing a little bit more until I'm happy with the way this looks. Alright, I think I'm happy with that timing, but now that I have all of these sets of keyframes ease to, I can make this a little bit more interesting by offsetting each one of them by a couple of frames, I'm going to select everything except the pads that make up the E and shift them forward two frames by holding Alt or Option and pressing the right arrow key twice. And I'll do that for all of these sets of keyframes, two frames forward for each. Now the R and the a are made up of two sets of keyframes. So I'm gonna make sure to keep those ones in sync. But now my animation is cascading across the text and make something that looks much more visually interesting. And that's how you can animate a variable width font in a very fun and elastic way. 9. Adding Texture to the Text: Now that I have my text animating, I want to start to add some texture and some modifications just to make it a little bit more interesting. The first thing I wanna do is add that rough edge. And since this is just solid black, There's no detail to it. It doesn't matter if I use roughen edges are turbulent displace. So I'm just going to use Turbulent Displace. I'm going to apply that effect, but actually not on top of the shape layer. I'm just going to make a new adjustment layer and put all my effects on this. So I'll rename this layer effects. The reason I'm gonna do this is just in case I ever want to reuse these effects or change out the design underneath this adjustment layer, I won't have to copy and paste effects around. It's just whatever is underneath this adjustment layer will get the treatment I'm about to give it. So I'll apply turbulent displays to that adjustment layer. And I obviously don't want it this big. I'm going to turn the amount down and I'm going to turn this size way down. So let's zoom in so we can see those edges really clearly. Maybe the amount can be up a little bit more so I can dial in that size, something like that. Maybe a little bit more intense, but just has a little bit of a rough edge that I'm going to apply my random expression two. So let's go into the evolution options. Double-click on random seed to bring that up, down here. There we go. I'll Alt or Option, click on the stopwatch and add my random expression. But I know I want to posterize it. So let's start with that Posterize Time. And in the parentheses, I'm working at 24 frames per second. I'm going to drop that down to 12 frames per second. So I'll type in 12 there, finish it with a semicolon and on the next line, random in the parentheses, 10 thousand, that just gives me a completely unique value on every frame at 12 frames per second. And this is what it looks like. Alright, so that's my small Turbulent Displace. Now I want to actually duplicate this and make a large Turbulent Displace. I just duplicated that with Control or Command D. I will turn up the size so that the distortion is much larger and then maybe turn the amount down so it's not quite as noticeable, maybe around eight. And now if I play this back, we still have that built-in expression in my text is really wiggly. Now that might be a little too much. So maybe I'll drop the amount down to say five. And I think that's working a little bit better. Now I'm driving the animation of that turbulent displace and width my expressions. I could also use another effect that will change the frame rate of absolutely everything. So let me just grab that effect. It's called posterize time. If I apply that onto my adjustment layer, now whatever frame rate I set here is what's going to be applied to anything underneath it. So if I drop that down to say six, then everything including the text animation is going to be animating at that six frames per second. I can set that to 12 and then it's going to match the expressions that I typed in with the posterize time. Now I could get rid of posterize time since they match up. But that's really more work than I need to do since it's really not slowing me down to keep it there. So I'm just going to leave it as is. And I can always turn this off if I decide, you know what, I liked the smoother animation at 24 frames per second for the text, but the texture to be at 12 frames per second regardless. I'm going to leave that on for now. And one more thing I wanna do to this text is basically round off all the corners. Everything is still nice, clean, crisp and sharp. Even though it does have these ripples. I want to round off all of these points, and I'm going to do that with two effects. So the first effect is Gaussian Blur, just a simple blur, and blur it out. Maybe about that much. This is something I can obviously change in a second. And then I'm going to bring out the levels affect, apply that after and switch the channel from RGB to Alpha. So instead of adjusting the color channels, I'm going to adjust the Alpha channel. All I need to do is crushed the low end and the high end. And as I do that, you can see how it's sharpening up that alpha channels. So we still have some semi-transparent and blurry areas. The more I bring these two in towards the center, the more that's going to sharpen up that Alpha channel, as well as round off those corners. So turning those two effects off, this is what we had before, turning them back on. This is what we're left with. So it gives me a much rounder version of my font and I can turn that up or down after the fact. So you can make that as round or it is pointy as you'd like. I just want to knock those points off a little bit. So maybe around 12 pixels on the blur. I'll play that back. And that looks pretty great. Alright, one more thing I wanna do is add a skew to the text. And this I'd probably do want to apply to the shape layer rather than the adjustment layer because I don't know that I'm always going to want everything underneath this to be skewed. So I'm going to grab a transform effect and apply it to my shape layer. Then I'll just go to the Skew property and increase that value slightly. Actually, I'm going to decrease it so it goes in the negative direction and maybe put it at negative eight. So now it has a slant. And that's going to play into how I title this in the next video. But there we go using an adjustment layer and a stack of effects. I've applied this textural treatment to my text and just giving it a little bit more personality. 10. Repeating the Text Animation: The next thing I want to do is title my text so that it fills up the entire comp. And I'm actually going to put this comp into another comp to do that. So I'll drag this text source comp down to the new comp button and let go. That will precompose that comp within the new comp. And I'll call this text tiled. And to do Mai Thailand, I'm going to use the Motion Tile effect, which we looked at with the looping textures. So I'll apply that to the pre-comp. And the thing about this effect is that it's going to start at the edges of the layer you've applied it to and then tile out from that. So I won't be able to see anything if I change the output width or height and less I scaled it down, then we're going to see that repeat. And this actually brings up a problem with the way that I skewed my text, since it's at that angle, when it repeats the pattern, they're no longer aligned. I want this to be a continuous line of the word extra, one after another, but at that slant, in order to get that to work, I'm going to need to go back into this precomp and rotate the text so that it's back to being horizontal. So let me grab that text layer and I skewed this at a value of negative eight. Let's go to the rotation property of the transform effect and change that to a positive eight. And there we go, That's going to rotate it back to me and horizontal while maintaining that skew that I incorporated. Now what I can do is go back to my tiled comp. These are all going to be in a line, but I can press R on the keyboard to bring up the rotation for this layer and back this up negative eight degrees. Now we're back to having the same skew and angle, but the motion tile effect is going to repeat on that angle. Now I don't actually want this text to be scaled down. So I'm going to press S on the keyboard to bring up the scale and change this back to 100. And I actually don't need to change the output width or height, so I'm going to change that back to 100 by 100. Instead, I'm going to use tile center to shift this text around right within the contents because it's being rotated with the Transform controls at the layer that's also going to rotate the angle of the tile. That way we're still maintaining that angle. Now the way that I'm going to animate this is by first setting a keyframe on the tile center property and then going forward maybe five seconds. I don't know how long exactly I want this to be yet, but I'm just going to estimate around five seconds. And I'm going to push this to the left. I'm going to want this center line moving from right to left until I get to a value of negative 960. So the first keyframe value was positive 960. Moving it back to negative 960 is going to shift the contents fully through that tile and we'll end up back where we started. So if I play this back, it's going to end up right where it started. So at the end of five seconds here, there we go. We're back where we started and we could loop this and it would play back seamlessly. So right there you see it jumps back and it just continues on forever and ever. That's exactly what I wanted. But I want that to continue forever after that five seconds has gone on. So I'm going to add an expression to this property by Alter option, clicking on it and type out, loop out. There's the auto-fill, I'm just going to double-click on that. And I could customize this loop out a bit by putting something in the parentheses, but I actually don't need to. I'm just going to finish it with a semicolon and click off. And now it's going to just cycle these two keyframes over and over. So as soon as it gets to that second keyframe, it jumps back to the first one and goes on and on and on. In fact, I can show you what that looks like if I go into the graph editor and I click on this button right here, show post expression graph. This red line is the x-axis for the tile center property. And you can see it's going from the first keyframe to the second keyframe before jumping back and repeating over and over and over again. So every time it loops there, it just looks like the animation continues on forever and ever. That's exactly what I wanted. Now what's not looping is the actual text animation. So let me go back into this precomp and find out where that animation loops. It looks like it's around two seconds and 11 frames. So how about I choose a point that I want this to loop at maybe right about there to 17. I'll play through this one so I can see how long it takes to loop. I think that's a pretty good timing. Maybe shave off a couple of frames there. We'll say two seconds and 15 frames. So that's actually 63 frames, and that will be my loop point. So I'll jump back to this main comp. Right-click on my text, go down to time and say enable time remapping. Because my play head is already aligned to 63 frames, all I need to do is add a keyframe on that property. If you've never use time remapping before, this is basically the timing of that layer. And I can set keyframes to change the interpolation, the speed of that layer. In this instance, I also want to just loop between these two keyframes. So I'm gonna get rid of the last keyframe, since I don't really need that anymore, the animation exists between these two. And I'm going to add a loopOut expression again, except this time I'm going to modify it slightly and I'll show you why. I'll alter option. Click on that time remap and type in, loop in with parentheses. Then after the parentheses say plus loop out, double-click on that one, and then say minus value. Now I'm not going to get into the details of exactly how this works, but I'm just going to apply it. And what this is going to allow you to do is move these two keyframes wherever you'd like. So I'm just going to shift them out over here and now it's going to loop in both directions. Let me shut off motion tile just for a second so we can focus. You see that it's a looping before those keyframes, as well as after those keyframes. I can place these wherever I want and it's going to loop in both directions. And that's really great because the next thing I want to do if I align these back to the beginning is duplicate this instance of the text. Control or Command D shifted up and have another line of text but moving in the opposite direction and have the animation offset from the original. So I need to do two things. I'll press U to bring up the keyframes. First, I need to swap these two keyframes so that instead of moving from right to left, let me bring those effects back on. Instead of moving from right to left, I want this line to move left to right. And all I have to do to get that to happen is swap these two keyframes. So with them selected, I'll right-click, go to keyframe assistant and say time-reverse keyframes. Now they're gonna go in the opposite direction, but they're animating at the exact same time. So what I want to do is grab those two keyframes and basically offset them by half so that the two lines of animation are not perfectly in sync. So if this second keyframe is 63.5 of that would be 31.5. So I'll just say 32. And that's where I want to move this first keyframe for this second instance of the layer. So this is what my keyframes look like. I'm just going to hide motion tile by pressing Alt or Option on a Mac or Shift and clicking on it. And that will hide those two properties. But this is the timing of each of these comps. Now, now I want to take this second instance and duplicate it again and move it down below to keep track of which direction these comps are going. I'm actually going to select these two and change their color to orange. And I'm going to change this one to, let's say purple. The purple ones will go right to left and the orange ones will go left to right. Now I want to make sure that I'm offsetting these equal amounts. So I'm going to add a null object right in the middle of the comp. I'll go up to Layer New Null Object. This layer doesn't render, It's just used for reference basically and allows you to parent things to it. But I'm going to call this center point, then I'll parent all of my layers to it. So now if I press P to bring up the position, everything is relative to that parent layer, which is right in the center of the comp. So this layer is at 00. This layer is moved up negative 338, let's just say 330. And then this one I want to move in a positive 330 pixels. And that way I know that these are evenly spaced out from each other. Now I'm going to need another instance of this one moving right to left, up here as well as down here. So let's duplicate this layer and move it up. Now I know that I need to go 330 times two, so I will say negative 660. And now that's aligned where it needs to be. But it is getting cut off there. And actually all of these layers are getting cut off a little bit. So I do need to increase the output width even just to 110 is enough, but just for safety, I'll say 120. Let me just do that quickly. For all of these layers. Change the output width to 120. And now I know that those will all extend out to where they need to be. Now I'll duplicate that layer one more time, press P and change this to a positive 660 and that will fill in the bottom right corner. Now I can play this back and all of my texts layers are cascading throughout my comp. I think that's all working really well. I think it's all just moving a little bit too fast. So I'm going to press U to bring up the keyframes one more time and select the second keyframe for motion tile on each one of these layers just by clicking and dragging. Honestly, I think five seconds is twice as fast as I want, so I'm just going to go down to ten seconds and move those keyframes all the way there while holding Shift to snap to that point. And now the text is just going to take a lot more time to animate across the entire loop. But I think that's fine. I like this slower movement. Another thing I'm not a big fan of is how far apart everything is spaced out. Now that I see it as a whole, we're barely seeing this copier, this copy. So let's just space these out a little bit differently. I'll press P to bring up the position of all of these. And we'll start with the closer ones. Maybe I'll drop this down to say 280. Negative 280 and then doubled to 80 would be 560 and negative 560. Alright, I think I like that a little bit better. Now we can see more of those outside comps and it's fun to look at. Another thing I don't like is how these two lines are animating at exactly the same time. Same thing for these three lines. So what I wanna do is give myself a little bit more room here and bring up the keyframes for the time remap. So I'll select all of those by controller command clicking on them, and then double-tap the S key to solo those properties and I miss this one. So double-tap on the S and there's my solid properties. I think what I want to have happen is, is offset each one of these by four frames. So starting with the top one, which would be, Let's see this layer right here. So I'll move that all the way down to the bottom. That will be our leading animation. Then we'll go to the middle one and that will go forward four frames. So Alter option right arrow key four times 1234. Then I'll grab the bottom instance and move that forward eight frames. So 12345678, That's Alt or Option plus the right arrow key. Now I'll just solo these three layers so we can focus on them and see that the animation of the text is offset four frames per layer. And I think I like the way that looks. Now I want to do the same thing for these two copies. So let's turn the solo offer those turn so on for these and just grab these two keyframes, move them forward, four frames. And now those will be offset as well. So if we un-solo those and look at all of this together, everything is offset. Honestly though, now that I see it this way, I think it's a little distracting that three lines go at one time and then the other to go at a different time. So what I'm thinking I want to do is actually start at the top and cascade all the way through down to the bottom, not offsetting these so much from the others. So let's rearrange the order of these so they corresponded to the order visually in the comp. So we've got top layer right here. That's the middle layer, the bottom layer. This is layer number two, and this is layer number four. So now these are in order. I just want to offset each one of them by four frames from this layer up to this layer. So it will go 1234, that's page down on the keyboard. And then shift, drag these over. Them will shift the next layover, 1234, this next layer, four frames from that 1234. And then 1234 for the last layer. And now the animation of all of these are going to cascade from top to bottom. I think that plays a little bit better visually. Now, these might even be a little bit to offset. This is all completely up to you how you want it to look for my taste, I think four frames was too much, so I'm just going to quickly take two frames off of each of the spacings of each layer so that they're not quite so offset. Yeah, I like the way that looks better. So you can play around with the timing as much as you'd like. I do want to see what it looks like if I jump into this precomp though and just turn off the posterize time. Since all of this text is moving so smoothly in this comp. I may or may not want to have that in the end, but I think I'm just going to disable it for now. Next, we can really start to grunge this up and give it a lot more texture so that it's not just solid blocks of black text. 11. Final Texturing of the Text: Now we'd like to start adding some texture to my animation. So I'm once again, I'm going to drag this tiled comp into a new comp and I'll rename this extra, extra because I think this is probably going to be my render comp, and this has all been on top of a transparent background. If I turn my grid on and off, you can see there's nothing in there. So I'm going to start by just making a new solid, by going up to layer new solid. I'll name it BG for background and we'll just choose something that's a little gray, not pure white. Click. Okay, I can always change this with a fill effect later, but just something like that for the background temporarily. I'll lock that layer and I want to add a halftone pattern to the inside of this text. Now I have a YouTube tutorial going in depth on how to create this halftone effect. You can find a link to that in the notes of this video right now. But I'm also going to show you how to do it right here. First I'm going to make a new adjustment layer. So I'll go up to layer, new adjustment layer, and I'll rename this half tone. If you're not familiar with halftones, this is what they look like. It's a method of printmaking that allows you to get details with a single pass of ink, so a single color, but it creates these gradients basically that allow you to build images from. Now I want to use this with the photo textures that we've been using. So ours is going to look something like this, where it's a texture that's made up of dots that are also a texture. So the first thing I need to do is generate that dot pattern. So I'm going to bring out the effect CC ball action and apply that to the adjustment layer. This is going to split up everything underneath it into these individual dots. They're a little bit big right now. So I'm going to turn the ball size way down and let's turn our transparency grid on so we can see them clearly. There are also spaced out too much. So I'm going to change the grid spacing down to maybe around two or three and then maybe increase that size back up a little bit. Now, like we already saw, this effect is making the background completely transparent. And I don't actually want that. So I'm going to add a solid composite effect, which will just fill in that background transparency with whatever color I said here, white is actually fine, but for the dots, I want them to be all black right now it's basing the colors on the actual contents of my comp. So I'm going to add a fill effect just before that solid composite and change the color to black. So now I have black dots on a white background. Next I want to add a Gaussian blur, so I'll put that right after the fill, before the solid composite and then just increase this a little bit. This is going to make the dots a little bit softer and allow them to kind of blend into each other. I don't wanna do it so much that I lose the black in the center of the dots. So actually, let me just turn the grid spacing up to maybe four. That looks a little bit better of a size at 100% scale. This is how big they are, and I'll turn that blurriness up to maybe seven. Now on those examples that I showed you of the half-tones, they're not usually in irregular grid where it's horizontal and vertical perfectly aligned like this. It's more often aligned at an angle. You can actually rotate the CC ball action effect. So there's this hack that we can use basically with the Transform effect. If I search for that and bring it out before CC ball action, what I'm going to do is rotate this negative, say Thirty-three degrees. It doesn't look like anything has changed. But if I duplicate this transform with Control or Command D and drag it after the CC Ball Action Effect and change the rotation to positive 33 degrees. Then I'll zoom in here, you'll notice that my dot grid has changed to actually being aligned to that Thirty-three degrees. So let me actually collapse all these effects and walk you through what we did first, we rotated our comp, then we applied CC ball action, which is giving us this perfect horizontal and vertical grid, but everything is rotated. Then we rotated it back so that not only is our comp back to normal, But the ball action grid has also rotated. That's the kind of hack here that we have with this transform sandwich, as I call it. Then we filled everything so that it's pure black, softened it all up and filled in that background with white. Now those dots might still be a little bit on the small side. So I'm going to turn my grid spacing up to maybe five or six. Turn the ball size up slightly and then change my Gaussian blur to match so that it just in bleeds that color into each other a little bit. Now I'm going to add a CC composite effect. This is going to allow me to read composite, the unaffected version of the comp, since this is an Adjustment Layer and unaffected version of whatever we've applied it to cut back on top of everything. So we're basically ignoring all of the effects that we applied before it. But we can blend this with any one of these blend mode. It doesn't have to just be a straight composite back on top. So if I went to say screen, it's going to recompose it, the unaffected version back on top of all of these effects, I want to use a special blend mode called Hard Mix. That doesn't look like it really did anything. But if I add another Gaussian Blur just before CC composite and blur it out a little bit. And that doesn't really look like anything has changed and that that's probably just because of how much I blurred out my dots. So if I go back to Gaussian Blur and turn this down, sure enough, there we go. My halftone pattern is coming in. The thing is with half-tones, they're really meant for shading, for adding in details. And my comp, if I turn off this adjustment layers just in gray and black, we're really going to see a benefit from this halftone pattern is if we add in some variation to our composition, and I'm going to do that through textures. But just to show you, I'm going to add a Gaussian blur to my text tiled layer and just blur it out. So as I do that, you see how the edges are getting that halftone pattern introduced. The way that this hard mix blend mode interacts with values is basically by increasing or decreasing the size of my halftone pattern. So pure black becomes solid and pure white would become pure white. Everything in between is assigned basically a size of dot to produce this halftone pattern. Now, I don't actually want to apply this over top of everything. I want to apply it to a texture and then contain that within my text. So let me get rid of that Gaussian Blur. And I'm going to use my texture looper rig that I created to do exactly that. So to apply to a project that doesn't already have it, I'm just going to double-click to import a new project and I'll navigate to where it's saved and just double-click on the project texture looper, double-click on that. And it will import that project into its own folder along with all the assets that were in that project. Now I need to open up the texture loop comp to find the comp That's actually set up with all the expressions. I'll copy that, go into my render comp here, extra, extra and paste, and then drag that just above the background. So now I have that texture loop in my background, but I want this to have the halftone pattern and be contained within the text layer. So first let's just apply the halftone treatment. I'll solo this layer, go into the Effect Controls and reset my levels so we can see it a little better. I actually want to use the wood textures for this. So I'm going to Alt or Option, click down to the timeline and let go to replace. And now we're using the wood textures rather than the paper textures. These textures are perfect for applying halftones to, since they're just different levels of gray. Remember, different values is what determines how large the dots screen pattern is on top of this layer. So I'll turn on my adjustment layer and solo it as well. And immediately that halftone pattern is applied. And I can modify things slightly to try and get this to look a little bit different if I collapse up these effects and just add a Gaussian blur at the bottom of the effect stack and just increase that value. That's going to make my textures softer. So the details are going to be not quite as sharp. Or if I delete that and go back into my halftones, I could go into CC ball action, maybe turn the grid spacing down one or two and turn the ball size up a little bit. And that almost acts as a contrast adjustment. So you can play around with these a lot to come up with a texture that you like. But over the entire comp, this is way too much. I don't want it to be this intense. So what I wanna do is un-solo those two layers, change the blend mode back to normal for this comp and then select both of them and pre-compose. So I'm gonna go up to Layer and all the way down to pre-compose. And I'll call this halftone texture loop. Click. Okay, and now that all exists as one comp. Now what I wanna do is use this halftone texture as a matte for the text. So I'm gonna move the text below the texture. Click on this comp and go to my Track Matte columns, and go down to the option called a luma matte. What this is going to do is use the black and white values to shape the alpha channel of the mat. So everything that's white will be revealed and everything that's black will go away. So I'll click on that. And now that texture is living within my text. So now if I play this back, we're getting that animated looping wood texture as a halftone pattern contained within my text. And I think that looks pretty good. The dots could probably stand to be a little bit smaller and maybe a little bit more close together. So let's go back into that halftone texture loop precomp into the adjustment layer, turn the ball action size down to maybe three, as well as increased the ball size so that we're filling in with a lot more in black. I can also scroll down my effects and increase the blurriness a little bit to make that a little softer. And then maybe the ball size wouldn't need to be quite so big. Something about there. I just want this to be a pretty grungy texture. So it's okay if I close the gaps a lot, I really don't want to lose too much detail in the text in here. So I may need to tweak this even further, increasing the ball size, taking a look at what the other texture layers look like, and maybe trying something like that. And now that I'm back in this comp, I realized what I did was make it less visible because the more black there is, the more that will be eaten away in this comp. But there is another Track Matte mode called luma inverted matte, where white will become transparent and black stays opaque. So if I just do that, then we're going to get a lot more detail back in our text. And I can probably dial back that size in CC ball action just a little bit more. So somewhere around there. And now that's got a really nice quality to it. But every now and then there is a texture that really takes a lot of the letters away. So say this texture right here. What we can do to make all this text a little bit more legible is bring back a border or an outline for the text and fade into this textured center. To do that, I'll duplicate my text tiled layer. And that's still going to be set to Luma Inverted Matte, even though we can't see it, I'm just going to drag it to the bottom so we can see that. Change this to know Track Matte and then move it back up to the top. And I'll rename this text outline. Now we're going to use that same inner shadow technique to generate a transparent center, leaving just the outside border. So I'll start by adding a Drop Shadow. Say shadow only change the distance to 0 and increase the opacity to 100. Increase the softness a bit. Invert that with the invert effect and change the channel from RGB to Alpha. So now we have basically a stencil of our text and then add a CC composite effect, changing the composite original from in front all the way down towards the bottom two stencil alpha. Now I'm left with this kind of shaded outline, but I can make it a little bit more bold if I add, say, a levels effect. So I'll just add that after everything changed the channel from RGB to alpha and then just crushed the high-end to bring in more of that opacity. I can also play around with the gamma to keep that center point transparent, maybe bring the low end up a little bit. But now I have this outline which if I un-solo that the layer is kinda filling in those outside edges now, that is still pretty soft. So I'm going to really crush the alpha here so that we're left with something that's much more solid and that's what that looks like. That might be a little bit too thick, so maybe I'll bring it out this way a little bit. Now we have this nice textured outline with the halftone interior. And if I go back to my drop shadow, I could increase the softness to bring that further towards the center of the text and maybe play with that Alpha crushing right here a bit more. I still think that it's knocking out a little bit too much of the interior of that text. So I'm going to jump back to my halftone texture and tweak this a bit more. Maybe that ball size needs to be pushed down even a little bit further. And maybe I shouldn't mess with these settings a little bit to get my texture to be a little bit more uniform. If I turn this off and back on, there isn't all that much variation in the contrast. And I think that my halftone texture should reflect that. So maybe I turn them blurriness down quite a bit on the Gaussian Blur and just continue to play around with these balls size settings. I think that's a little bit more subtle than it was. It's still very much a parent, but I like the way that that looks. Now. I'd also like to make this not pure black. I don't want that text to be so dark. And I'm actually going to do this with an adjustment layer and the tint effect. So at the top of the entire comp, I'm gonna go to layer, new adjustment layer. And I'll call this effects. And I'll just apply a tint effect to the entire comp. Now this will re-map the black and white values, and I don't have a solid white background. I have this in gray background. So I'm actually going to change that to pure white by applying a fill effect, setting it to white. And what that will allow me to do is since my text is black and the background is white. Now I can change the colors of everything with these two controls of the tint effect. So I could grab that white and knock it back down to a light gray color. And I could grab this black and pull it up so that it's more of a dark gray color and it's not so extremely black. So this is width and without, and I think I liked the way that, that looks. Now let's incorporate some photo textures to this composition. I have one imported here that's just like a cardboard texture. Just had some very fine details. And I want to randomly offset this. And just like I have in my halftone texture loop, so I'm going to copy this textures would comp into my render comp. I'll just paste that at the top and then I'll pre-compose this cardboard texture just by pressing Control shift C or Command shift C on a Mac. And I'll call this Paper Source. Leave all attributes in this comp is fine. And actually I'm just going to delete that out of here and swap this new pre-comp with this one here. So having this layer selected, click and drag while holding Alt or Option and let go. And now my texture looper rig is going to be applied to that single texture, since that's the only texture that's in this comp. So let's get back to this comp. Now we have this texture looping around. I don't want it to have any color, so I'm going to add a tint effect. Just apply that there. And I want to drag that just above the background and actually use it as my background. So it made everything a little bit too dark. I want to try and match that other gray level. So I'm just going to bring up a levels of fact, apply it to that layer, and then just bring those brights up a bit. So somewhere around there, maybe just slightly brighter. And that's pretty much what I had on the background before. But now it's this nice paper texture. And if I play back, it's animated, which is really great. Now I want to add a couple layers of texture over top of the entire comp. And I can actually do this with duplicates of this paper source texture. So let me duplicate that and move it up to the top. I want to start by adding dark specks based on this paper texture. So I want to kind of isolate these spots right here that are darker. To do that, I'm going to go into the Effect Controls and we'll just use this same levels instance. So instead of just making everything brighter, I want to bring those whites up, but then really crush the blacks and adjust this gamma so that we're left with basically just the darkest areas of our texture. And if I solo that layer and play it back, you can see that now we have these dark specks because those are now isolated. I can use that blend mode of multiply to get rid of all that white area. And those black flecks are now being animated on top of everything. That's great. I want to do the exact same thing now, but basically inverted. So I'll duplicate that layer, solo it so we can see it and add an invert to the entire image. So I'll just apply that. And now my black becomes white, white becomes black. And I have these white specks instead of black specks that I could use the Screen blend mode on instead of multiply. And it's a little harder to see. But if we zoom in right about here, you can see as I turn this on and off, we have white specks now showing on top of everything. And maybe I want to adjust the levels a little bit to bring back in some more of that fine texture detail. So it's a little bit more visible and we have some more movement. As I play this back. I really liked the way that all of those textures are working together. The half-tones are probably still a little bit too distracting. So I'm going to modify these properties a little bit to make it less contrasted. Jump back into my halftone texture loop, maybe go into the levels for the texture itself and just lower the overall contrast by bringing up the output black and bringing down the output white. So if I turn that off and back on, you can see that it's really just a leveling everything out and taking away a lot of that contrast. That's probably the setting that I've been looking for this whole time. If we jump back in. Now that texture is a lot more uniform. And now that I've found exactly the setting I need to be modifying, I can actually click on this comp window and say View new viewer that will open up this comp into a locked comp window, which allows me to jump back into this texture loop and make modifications while seeing what the result will be in my main comp. If I adjust this value a little bit more, we can see how that's going to affect my overall texture. This is more of the look that I was going for. I wanted something that was a lot more filled in and had a subtle texture. So I really just needed to darken it up quite a bit. And now if I jump back into this comp, I can close this extra viewer, play this back. That wood texture is contained within the text much more subtly, but it's all interacting with the other textures that I have going on in the background, the flakes on top, and that outline that we've added around the outside edges of the texts, I could probably make that a little bit more soft now, just by not crushing that Alpha channel quite so much. And now that falls off a little bit more from the solid areas to the transparent areas. Now that I see all of these textures interacting with the text, I'm realizing that the roundness that I added to the points of the texts really isn't that noticeable anymore. So I'm gonna go back into my text source comp, grab that effects layer and increase the Guassian blur here at the bottom of my effect stack a little bit more. Remember the more I do this, the softer the text gets. I want that to be very noticeable. That's a soft edge. And then let's take a look at what it looks like in our main comp. That's a lot better. It's nice and rounded. It looks almost like it was printed. I just want to make sure that on this finished version I'm not blurring it out so much that we're breaking up the text. So right there at its thinnest, It's still just slightly connected. I'm happy with the way that that looks. But I think the last thing I want to do is just embrace the low frames per second look and just drop it all down to 12 frames per second. So I'll just use this adjustment layer that I have in my render comp and apply that Posterize Time effect, drop it down to 12 frames per second. And because this is above everything, everything gets that 12 frames per second treatment. I can play this back and it all feels very cohesive and uniform now. But now as I'm looking at this, I'm realizing that the loop point doesn't sink. If you pay attention right there, this last frame does not match up with the first frame. And I realized that's because the timing of the text animation needs to line up with the timing of the tiles center offset in order for it to loop seamlessly. Right now I have 63 frames and between the start and the end of my text animation. And really I need to re-time this so that it fits evenly between these two keyframes. So this is a 10-second gap from here to here. So if I just drop these back to be 2.5 seconds, it should line up. So let me grab all of the second time remap keyframes, zoom in a little bit on my timeline, find that 2.5 second mark, which would be two seconds, 12 frames, and then just click and drag while holding Shift to drag that back. Now that this is evenly divisible, so ten divided by 2.5 gives me four. The text animation should play back four times within this 10 second loop of the tile center offset. So let's go to the looping frame and compare that to the starting frame. And sure enough now they're identical. So if I go back to my render comp and play this back one more time, when it loops, we shouldn't see any seam. It looks like that was perfectly hidden. Now that crisis is inverted and that's one of the benefits of the time remap because all of the animation was done within this comp here, I can read time it however I need to, using time remapping, fit whatever timing I'm trying to create. One final tweak that I want to make is offsetting the timing of the tile offset. If I just bring up this timeline Windows, we have more room. I'll solo all of these tiles center properties by control or command clicking on each one of them, double tapping the S key to solo them. And basically I want to offset each one of these sets of keyframes by, we'll start with two frames. So leaving the bottom layer where it is, I'll shift all of these forward two frames with alter option and the right arrow key, one to de-select this layer with Control or Command click Alt or option right arrow key two more times and just down the line, offset each of these by two frames. Now if we take a look at this, it's all offset a little bit more. This could probably stand to be even more offset. So let me just quickly add two more frames between each one of these sets of keyframes. And that spreads out the offset of the text animation just a little bit more so they're not all perfectly aligned and I liked that look a little bit better. The only issue I'm seeing here is that they don't have that special loop in loop out expression that we had for the time remapping. So I'm just going to press U to bring up all the keyframes for this layer. Right-click on time remap and say Copy Expression Only, and then paste that expression on all of the tile center property. So that will lead the keyframes where they are, but change out their expressions that they loop in both directions. And the animation will have been already started on this first frame and should line up perfectly still and at the 10-second mark, which it does. So now I'll play this all back as a whole and we can see all of the different techniques that we've learned in this class being applied in different ways. I really liked the way that they're all interacting together. I think it gives it a really nice visual texture that you just can't get from standard vector solid graphics. I think it's really fun and a cool piece to share. So now you can take what you've learned in this class and apply it to your own class project, choose your own font, your own word or phrase, and give it a fun animation and see what you can come up with and make sure that you share your class project with all of your other fellow students. 12. Thanks!: That's it. Congratulations on finishing this class. Thank you so much for watching. I truly hope that you were able to learn some new things and think about how you might start applying textures in some unique and creative ways. From here, if you haven't taken some of my other classes, I would definitely encourage you to go check out something like the stop motion look in After Effects where I show you how to make a completely customized felt look stop motion animation type motion graphics project. And it uses a lot of the techniques that we've learned in this class for applying photo textures as well as roughening up edges. That's a really great example of how to take what I taught you in this class and create something very specific. There's also the knit sweater look class where you can basically put anything that you want into a comp and it will come out looking like it was knit into a sweater. And one of my earliest classes, the paper cutout look in After Effects. I showed you how to use, again a photo textures of actual paper and apply it to graphics to make it look like it was actually made out of that paper. And those are just a few. Just check out my classes on my profile and you'll see a variety of things that you can start learning from and start to have fun with. If you enjoyed this class, I would love it if you left me a review. It's always beneficial for me to know what I'm doing well and what you'd like to see me improve on and be sure to follow me here on Skillshare so that you can see anytime I post a new class, as well as over on YouTube, I have a YouTube channel where I post regular content and you can learn all kinds of stuff from me all the time, right over there. You can find the link to that in the notes of this video right now. And if you use anything that you learned from me in any projects on Instagram, be sure to tag me at Jake in motion. I always love to see that and show off my students work in my stories. So don't hesitate to do that either. Thank you again so much for taking this class. I truly appreciate it and I'll see you in the next one.