Adding Textures and Noise in After Effects (Free Project Files)
Do you want to add textures and noise in After Effects to make your animation truly pop? Let’s see how to do it in a couple of different ways. As always, you can download the project files for free to follow along.
Adding Noise
- Duplicate the body of the character (or whichever shape to which you plan to add noise).
- Create a mask with the ellipse tool. Make sure that you select the Tool Creates Mask option to create a mask and not a shape.
- Position the shape where you want to have the noise and change the mode to Dancing Dissolve.
- Click the Inverted option so you can invert the mask. Make the mask color darker as this will represent a shadow.
- Open the mask settings and change the Feather value until you get the desired result.
- You can duplicate the same layer on the opposite side, and change its color to a lighter shade if you want to create a glare.
Adding a “Glitch” Texture
- This time, we’ll be animating a still image of a texture downloaded from Freepik. You can create your own texture or download one that you like.
- Go to the 5th frame on the timeline and cut and duplicate ( you can do that by pressing Ctrl + Shift +D)
- Flip the new layer and rotate it to make it different from the first one.
- Repeat on the 10th frame and copy/paste the first layer. Then, on the 15th frame, copy-paste the second layer. Repeat until the end of your composition.
- Scale it to fit your other composition
- Make sure the mode is on Multiply.
- Add the texture to the first composition and that’s it.
Textures and noise in After Effects can make your animated shapes more realistic and 3-dimensional, so play around with them to see how you can apply them in your work. Follow our YouTube channel for more fun and useful guides on After Effects.
Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss free After Effects templates.
