Tutorial: How to Add a Motion Texture to a Logo in Adobe After Effects

Changing the Color

By default, the fractal effect came in with the red color, which is not the color of our logo, so let’s change that. With your solid layer selected, navigate to Effect > Color Correction > Change to Color (Figure 9, below).

Figure 9. Changing the color

In the Effect Controls panel, we’ll choose the current reddish color in the From option. Then we’ll select the color picker tool and hover over the composition window and pull directly from the current color.

Next, we’ll select the To color choice and choose the color we want the red to turn into. We already know the hex code for our logo color, so we can type that into the # area in the To color dialog box and then press OK (Figure 10, below).

Figure 10. Choosing the To color. Click the image to see it at full size.

Otherwise, you can choose any other color.

Animating the Effect

Now that we have our color selected, the next steps will be to bring this effect to life through animating our Position and Rotation properties. I want this fractal effect to move across our logo from left to right, over time, revealing it in sections.

To begin, with the solid layer selected, press the P key to open the Position values. With the CTI located at the start of the timeline, you can move the x value by dragging this number to the left until you see the effect move all the way off screen.

Once you have that done, you can set a keyframe here by selecting the Time-Vary stop watch icon (Figure 11, below). Now we've just told After Effects that we want this to be the starting point of our animation.

Figure 11. Choosing a starting point for the animation when the effect is just off-screen.

Next, we’ll move our CTI ahead in time to around the five-second mark in the Timeline. Since we've already enabled keyframes, all we have to do now is drag the x value to the right. For this animation, we'll continue dragging this until the effect goes off screen to the right.

Now you can drag your CTI back to the start of your timeline and do a RAM preview. As you can see at the 3:45 point in the tutorial video below, we now have this effect moving from left to right over time across our logo.

Now let’s do the same idea with our Rotation value. Press R to reveal the solid’s Rotation values. With your CTI located at the beginning of the Timeline, enable keyframes. Then move ahead to around the five-second mark in the Timeline and change the x value to 2x (Figure 12, below). This indicates that you want the effect to rotate through two revolutions over this period of time.

Figure 12. Setting Rotation to 2x

One final thing I like to do is press the U key on the solid layer, which reveals all of the keyframes on this layer. Highlight both of the end keyframes by clicking and dragging a bounding box around them. Then right-click and navigate to the Keyframe Assistant and choose the Easy Ease In option (Figure 13, below). Draw another box around your first set of keyframes, and right-click.

Figure 13. Choosing Easy Ease In to smooth out the animation

Navigate to Keyframe Assistant, and this time, choose the Easy Ease Out option. Now, bring your CTI to the beginning of the Timeline and conduct a RAM preview of the final animation.

There you have it: a quick way to add different effects and looks to your logos. You can choose several different effects to experiment with and then animate these over time. The options are endless.