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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Fractal Noise Tutorial

Part 2: Seamless Evolution

On the previous two pages, you’ve created a nice texture - but what if you needed it to loop repeatedly without a hitch? There are a few approaches to this, which we have saved as comps inside the Project panel’s _FractalNoise * prebuilt > Seamless Loops folder. We’ll walk through these different techniques.

Cycle Evolution

The Fractal Noise effect has an option where its Evolution parameter can be forced internally to loop seamlessly. This is demonstrated in [Seamless 1].

Open the comp [Seamless 1]. The effect applied to the layer FractalNoise_soft should already be revealed in the Timeline panel; if not, select this layer and type U.

Then double-click on the Fractal Noise effect’s name in the Timeline panel to open its Effect Controls panel. Scan down the list of parameters to Evolution, and then to the Evolution Options just below it. Twirl these open if they are not already exposed.

The Cycle Evolution switch in this section forces the Fractal Noise effect to loop all by itself. The parameter Cycle allows you to set how far you can animate the Evolution parameter until the noise pattern repeats. We set this parameter to two revolutions for FractalNoise_soft and one revolution for FractalNoise_blocky.

The Fractal Noise effect is capable of looping within itself. The secret is turning on the Cycle Evolution switch, and setting how many cycles make up a loop.

Bring [Seamless 1]‘s Timeline panel forward again. Press End to locate to the end of the comp. Note that the current time indicator still hasn’t quite reached the final animation keyframes.

Important Concept: When creating a seamless loop, you want your loop point to be one frame beyond the end of the comp. When looping during playback, going to this “beyond” frame is the equivalent of jumping back to the start of the comp, which is where your loop should be joined.

If you are using keyframes to create a loop (as we are here), and you set the second keyframe to be equal to the last rendered frame of the comp rather than one frame beyond it, this last frame will be a repeat of the first frame at the start of the comp. When you render it as a movie and set the animation to loop, the result will be a glitch when two identical frames are played back at the loop point. Instead, you need to place the second keyframe one frame beyond the end of your comp’s timeline.

To access keyframes that are placed beyond the end of the comp, as in the [Seamless 1] comp, press End to jump to the last frame and then press Page Down to advance one frame later. You can also Go To Time and enter the exact frame, or click the keyframe navigator right arrow for an animated property.

Whichever method you use, the Comp panel will display as a gray frame when the current time is after the end of the comp - which is not very helpful when you’re trying to check that the image at the last set of keyframes is identical to the frame at 00:00, which it needs to be to create a seamless loop. You’ll need to make a leap of faith here.

To set up a seamless loop using keyframes, the last loop point keyframe is placed one frame beyond the last rendered frame of the comp (which is 05:29, where the current time indicator is now).

Note that the Cycle Evolution switch only affects the Evolution parameter - it won’t force Fractal Noise’s other parameters to seamlessly loop!

For example, we had previously animated the Sub Scaling parameter for the FractalNoise_blocky layer to make the blocks grow in size over time. We can’t do that here and expect our loop to work, as you can see by playing the movie at right. If you look at the Timeline panel for this layer, you’ll see we didn’t animate this parameter. On the next page, we’ll explore different solutions to this problem.

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