Creating depth and movement with Fractal Noise - After Effects Tutorial

Right eye is a little bit easier to work with bit more in shadow, so we'll start with the right eye, open that up. And here's just the eye itself and you can see again the tracking data is here, I left the highlights the weird white eyes faded, those same highlights the specular highlights do something different, So, the main highlights are in the master cop So I want to go to the right eye where we have this that we painted in Photoshop that's just plain, white color, and you know it's not by adding some fractal noise." So I'm just going to go ahead and in this little blank area in the time line period, in this little blank area in the time line period, I'm going to right click and choose new, solid. And I'm going to go ahead, it doesn't matter what color this is really, I'm just going to call this fractal noise, and I'm going to bring this down here. I also have this eye matte and I'm going to use this all over the place. I actually want this eye if I'm to turn off the fractal noise. You can see that the eye actually goes outside of these boundaries and so the right eye matte has this mask that's good for masking off everything. So we don't have to be super particular about the eye, we have this matte that will fix everything for us. So, I'm going to go ahead and take the right eye and layer and I'm going to choose alpha matte, using this matte here. And I'm also going to select this layer, hit command/control + d to duplicate it and we'll do the same thing with fractal noise. We'll, on the fractal noise layer we'll use the alpha of the right eye matte. And, if you want to be particular we can select this and make a couple more duplicates above the eye help layer and the CC. The eye help is just kind of like this little, I felt like once I brought it into after effects from Photoshop it needed a little extra something right there to darken the eye and so that's just that little extra, little patch there. So, I want the right eye help also using this matte and the color correction which isn't on right now, to also be using the matte. Now, I'm going to select the fractal noise layer, and turn on its visibility again, so we can actually see it. And again we want to give this some additional texture here. And actually before I forget, I'm going to go ahead and select the layer below it and I want to trim this so that it matches the duration of the other layers. So, I'm going to select a layer that has the correct duration and press the letter I on the keyboard, to jump to the endpoint there. to jump to the endpoint there. Then I'll select the fractal noise layer and press Then I'll select the fractal noise layer and press alter/option + ( to trim it to the desired endpoint there. And then now because the matte is, the mask on the matte the mask on the matte (laughs) (laughs) is animated then the fractal noise layer then the fractal noise layer is automatically, kind of comes into place at the right time and shape. So, on the fractal noise layer I'm going to go to the Effects and Presets panel, add the fractal noise effect, and we really don't need too much here. I mean pretty much anything you do is going to add some cool texture, but here's what I did. I changed the fractal type to dynamic, one of my favorite types of fractal noise. I took down the contrast quite a bit to 50, and I scaled this down a little bit in the transform section, take this down to 80. So, it's just like a little bit more spread out and not as fine tuned. There's still a little bit too much detail here for me, so I took down the complexity, which is the for me, so I took down the complexity, which is the layers of fractal noise to four. So, this is kind of a little bit softer of a thing. And it looks kind of weird by itself but as her eyeball, it feels more like an, like a glowing magical eyeball would feel. would feel. (laughs) And another thing I did is in the transform section, And another thing I did is in the transform section, we have the Offset Turbulence which is basically kind of like position. You see it kind of like moves that but if we check Perspective Offset but if we check Perspective Offset then it's not like position it's something different. it's something different. It's position with dimension, so as I adjust Offset Turbulence, with Perspective Offset checked you can see that texture kind of moving through and it feels a lot more through and it feels a lot more magical. Like there's depth and something going on behind there. So, I can go to the beginning of the layer here and I'll set a key frame for Offset Turbulence and go to the end, maybe if you hit shift + end and go to the end of the work area and maybe move that to the right. And now if I preview that by hitting zero on the numeric keypad you get this cool, texture going through her eye. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, pretty cool. And now that we have this cool texture in here it's starting to look a little two dimensional, a little flat. a little flat. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to fractal noise, close it up. We're done with that for now. I'm going to go ahead and go I'm going to go ahead and go and add the bulge effect. and add the bulge effect. This is not the most amazing effect. It's a little crude, it's still 16 bit but whatever we're still going to use it. It's going to work. I'm going to click the bulge center, the little effect point here, put that right in the center of our eye. And I'm going to take down the horizontal radius and vertical radius to 40. And I'm also going to change the bulge height a little bit more to 1.4, and so that way the bulge of her, of this kind of, it makes the it makes the center where her eye would be, bulge a little bit. And so now the fractal noise looks like it's kind of wrapping around. You know a spherical eye a little bit more You know a spherical eye a little bit more with the bulge. with the bulge. So again, here's with the bulge So again, here's with the bulge and then with the bulge turned off. With, without. With, without. So, it kind of makes it feel like there's a shape here a little bit. If you wanted to taper that a little bit we could do that as well And again you could play with this to taste. Those are the settings that I use. Also, you might want to take anti-aliasing up to high as well. Now to check this we can go back to our master comp and see what that looks like. And that's looking pretty good except the color doesn't really mesh with the color that was there. So, we need to fix that and also we're going to fade the eye out in the next tutorial.