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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Pulse Rays

Ordinary light ray effects can often look too solid or static (upper left). To add more life to them, matte them with an animated noise texture (above). This looks particularly nice when composited back on top of the original effect (left). You can click on any of these to see them full size. Light rays created with Trapcode’s Shine plug-in; radiation symbol from P22’s Atomica font. Click here to download a project file for this technique.

Light ray treatments, where streaks of color extend from type, a logo, or image, are popping up everywhere these days. But you’ve no doubt heard the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” - and we have to admit, many of those treatments are starting to look a bit…familiar.

At their stock settings, most light ray effects look too solid or static to our eyes. The excellent Shine light ray plug-in from Trapcode has an animateable Shimmer parameter that adds some animation to its rays, but it seems few are taking advantage of this feature. Even with Shimmer, we’ve been interested in finding ways to make rays seem more ghostly and animated.

As it so happens, we recently had a client approach us asking if we could make light rays look as if an energy pulse was flowing out from the center. After some experimenting, we hit upon a formula using stock After Effects Professional plug-ins in conjunction with Shine which we think did the trick - see the figures at the top of this page.

Flowing Noise

We like the basic Shine effect; to enhance it, we wanted to break it up so it seemed more tenuous and flowing. To do this, we decided we needed to create a matte which would eat away some of Shine’s rays.

One of our favorite tricks to give an “energy flowing” feel is to take a fractal-generated pattern such as clouds, stretch it by a large amount in one dimension so it extends into a series of wispy lines, and animate it. This is easy to do in After Effects with Stylize > Fractal Noise effect.

To stretch the resulting fractal pattern out into lines, disable the Fractal Noise’s Uniform Scaling switch - this activates independent Scale Width and Scale Height sliders. For vertical lines, increase the Scale Height parameter to something obscene like 2000% while leaving Width at 100%. The result of this progression is show below:

To create a nice “flowing energy” effect, use the Fractal Noise effect (left), animate its Evolution and Offset Turbulence parameters, and scale it by a large amount in one direction to turn it into lines (right).

Fractal Noise has a number of options that can create a variety of noise patterns. For this application, we used a Fractal Type of Threads, Noise Type of Soft Linear, turned on the Invert switch, and set the Overflow popup to Clip. Of course, feel free to experiment to see which combinations looks best for your own task, as each one gives a different density and pattern to the resulting lines. You can then play around with the Contrast and Brightness sliders to get the dark-to-light mix you want in the lines. Remembering that this will later be used as a matte, we made sure we had areas of pure black (to completely knock out some of the light rays) as well as areas of pure white (to let the rays through at full strength).

There are two ways to animate the resulting pattern in Fractal Noise. The Evolution parameter makes individual lines form and disperse. The Offset Turbulence parameter allows you to move the lines. To have our lines flow in a vertical direction, we animated the Y Position for Offset Turbulence. Remember you can “scrub” these values directly in the Effect Controls panel and watch the results in the Comp panel.

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