If you’re anything like me then roughen edges is a daily use component of your arsenal, it’s incredibly versatile and can often be that little bit of spice that takes a project from good to great.
That being said, I realised recently that I tend to just faff around with the sliders until it the effect looks good. What an inefficient way to get the job done.
So, I took it upon myself to break down what each parameter of the effect actually does and lay them out in an SEO friendly blogpost that might just speed your workflow up (or at the very least drive a bit of traffic to my site…)
Let’s start with a bit of an overview. Roughen edges can be found in the stylise section of the effects library. It’s a fantastic way to add a bit of texture to the edges of your designs. Perhaps you’re shooting for that super popular analogue look, or maybe you just want to introduce some subtle movement to your project, either way, roughen edges has you covered.
Roughen edges works in a similar way to turbulent displace, however, true to its name, it only affects the edges of you design. The effect works by roughening the alpha channel of your graphic and can be manipulated via the following parameters:
EDGE TYPE:
Changes the distortion map, creating a variety of different looks. Have a play around with these to discover how each edge type changes your design. I personally use roughen, roughen colour and rusty the most.
BORDER:
Border controls how far the effect will eat into you graphic (in pixels). The higher the value, the further in the effect will extend inwards.
EDGE SHARPNESS:
No prizes for working out what this one does. Sharpness determines how erm, sharp the effect will look. Higher values for more sharpness, lower values for less.
FRACTAL INFLUENCE:
Fractal influence controls the amount of roughening generated; you’ll notice that if you drop this value to zero the effect will hardly affect your design (yes, I had to google effect/ affect for this sentence).
SCALE:
Scale is used to scale the fractal in charge of calculating the roughness up and down. That sounds very fancy but in reality, it just makes the effect appear larger (less detailed) or smaller (more detailed).
STRETCH WIDTH OR HEIGHT
Stretch width or height scales the fractal used to generate the roughness along the X or the Y axis. This will have the effect of stretching the distortion either horizontally or vertically.
OFFSET (TURBULENCE)
Moves the fractal map used to generate roughness around, producing unique patterns. Bonus points for animating this with expressions such as wiggle(,) or time*() to easily produce subtle (or not so subtle) movement.
COMPLEXITY
Complexity adjusts the level of detail of the roughness, a higher value will create a more detailed look. Be wary that raising the complexity can result in long render times on less powerful machines. A simple work around could be to simply reduce the scale for a more GPU friendly render!
EVOLUTION
Evolution cycles through the fractal controlling the roughness and can be animated to progressively alter the look of the effect over the course of your animation.
EVOLUTION OPTIONS: CYCLE EVOLUTION
Enable cycle evolution if you want your evolution animation to loop back to its original starting point. Enabling this will also reduce you render time as After Effects won’t have to render an infinitely evolving pattern.
CYCLE:
Adjusts the number of revolutions your evolution animation will execute before returning back to its starting point (try saying that dunk). In other words, cycle determines how many variations produced before the animation loops. The distance between your evolution keyframes will determine how quickly or slowly this happens.
RANDOM SEED:
Generates a random number of which determines the position of the fractal map. Eh? Put simply, random seed will animate the roughness but jump around jerkily. If that’s what you’re after, great, if not then you’ll want to use Evolution for smooth animation. Where random seed becomes useful is that you can take a roughen edges animation you have previously made and alter the random seed to produce an entirely different look without faffing around with your values – a real time saver.
And there you have it, roughen edges, an incredibly versatile and useful effect. Now that you’ve had the run down on how this effect actually works, how will you use it in your projects?
Hope this article sparked a bit of creativity for you...
Comentarios