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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Fractal Noise Tutorial

Block Tint Party

To give the blocky pattern a blue tint, you can use any number of color tint effects. Previously, we used Boris Tint-Tritone or CC Toner for this job; as of After Effects CS3, a 32-bit Tritone filter now comes with the program. The great thing about all three of these plug-ins is that they can tint the midtone color, not just the darkest and lightest color, so you can maintain rich blacks and bright highlights in a tinted image.

Step 6: With the layer FractalNoise_blocky still selected, apply Effect > Color Correction > Tritone. The default settings create a sepia tint. Click on the Midtones swatch in its Effect Controls panel and change it to a darkish blue color. On the Mac, we used HSB settings of Hue 235, Saturation 45, and Brightness 50; on Windows, try RGB 0-255 color values of Red 70, Green 75, and Blue 127.

Step 6: We altered the Midtone color of the Tritone effect to shift the midtone grays to a darkish blue.

Fractal Lighting

You’ll now create another version of the Fractal Noise whose purpose is to add a soft lighting effect to the underlying layers:

Step 7: With the current time indicator at 00:00, press Command+Y (Control+Y) to create a new Solid layer. Name it “FractalNoise_soft”. The size (640x480) and color (black) should be the same as the last solid created. Click OK. This second solid should be resting above the FractalNoise_blocky layer.

Enable the Solo switch for this layer to speed up previews - you don’t want the blocky pattern slowing you down by rendering in the background.

Step 7: Create a second solid called “FractalNoise_soft”, and enable its Solo switch (where the cursor is pointing) to speed up previews.

Step 8: With FractalNoise_soft still selected, apply Effect > Noise & Grain > Fractal Noise.

Step 9: There are a number of combinations that will create the soft “curtains” effect, but these are the changes we made to Fractal Noise’s default settings for our version:

• Set the Fractal Type to Dynamic Twist. This will create twirls in the noise pattern.
• Set the Noise Type popup to Spline. The result is a softer pattern.
• Twirl down the Transform section and uncheck the Uniform Scale checkbox. Stretch the pattern horizontally by setting the Scale Height parameter to 250, leaving Scale Width at 100. This is the key to changing the “clouds” into “curtains” - if you stretch a lot you get the infamous stretchy-lines look.
• Twirl down Sub Settings, and set the Sub Influence to 25%. The greatly reduces the effect of successive iterations of the fractal pattern, resulting in an amorphous look.
• At time 00:00, turn on the stopwatch for Evolution, which creates a keyframe of 0 x +0.0 at the start of the comp.
• Hit End to jump to 05:29 and set Evolution to 2 x 0.0˚ (two full revolutions).
• Press U to check that the keyframes were added correctly.

RAM Preview and tweak to taste!

Step 9: A softer effect was created using a Fractal Type of Twist (top left), Noise Type of Spline (top right), setting Scale Height to 250 while leaving Scale Width to 100 (above left), and reducing the Sub Influence parameter to 25% (above right).

The movie at right is the final result of the second Fractal Noise layer. If the results look nothing like our version, compare your work to [FractalNoise_after Step 09].

Step 10: Time to combine the two effects, so the soft noise acts as an animated light for the blocks:

• Turn off the Solo switch for FractalNoise_soft so you can see both layers.
• Reveal the Modes panel in the Timeline panel (shortcut: F4). Try different modes for the FractalNoise_soft layer.

We personally like Overlay mode for these kinds of lighting effects: highlights in the “light” layer brighten the underlying image, while dark areas create shadows. The result seems to be an increase in contrast and saturation. Toggle FractalNoise_soft‘s Video switch on and off if you want to compare before and after versions.

Step 10: Set the soft noise layer to Overlay mode to act as a lighting effect for the underlying blocks. These two images show before (top left) and after top (right) applying this effect. The final Timeline is shown above.

next page: creating seamless loops

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