Designing Esports Branding with After Effects - Part 01

Welcome. This is the first part of a three part tutorial series where I go through my method for designing and animating some e-sports graphics inside of after effects in part one. This part we're going to be creating a static graphic that features some procedural, noisy blurs as well as a flexible coloring system. In part two, we then go ahead and animate it, and in part three, we create a dynamic template using expressions and essential graphics to create a play profile system that we can then

customize to our heart's content. So there's a fair bit to cover. Let's get into it Now there's no shortage of esports graphics and motion design inspiration. They feature like strong typography, this like bold use of color as well as a variety of looks when it comes to how do they use it texture or some extra technical elements. So I couldn't really resist trying something out, but I was particularly drawn towards workshops branding that they did for Valorant's Champions Tour of 2021. There wa

s this noisy blur that just instantly caught my attention as well as that use of a tri tone color palette. So I thought I'd try and add my own spin onto it instead of after effects. Now for a starting point, it's nothing too complicated. We got a 1920 biotin ATP composition that goes for 5 seconds and it's frame rate is set to 12. You could do a 24 or 25, 30 or whatever, and then do a post rise time over it. But that's just extra frames for the software to have to calculate. And I just like expo

rting at 12 frames per second anyways, which got quite this one is what's designed for now. Nothing too complicated. Now we're just going to be focusing on the directional blur in that kind of noisy blur system. So I'm just going to start with a black solid here at the background. 1922 Natty Black, Solid. We get it. We use that a bunch of times and then we're just going to focus on the text after that using the text too. I'm just going to type out something here, a title for our tournament. I'm

going to call it the Melbourne Major, because down here in Australia we don't get much in the way of esports tournaments. So maybe, maybe I can channel some things to this tutorial. The font that I'm using here is called Van Crime. It's available for free, it's chunky, it's big, it's got that kind of e-sports vibe to it. I can highly recommend it. Now one of the aspects that I really like instead of After Effects is reusing the same solid over and over again. Dirty 1920 by 1080. So we're going t

o reuse this same black solid up and I project panel a bunch of times and this whole effect is driven by fractal noise. This one fractal noise layer, which we get to call now. So that's a good idea and it's going to help generate the blurring kind of system that other layers can reference. So I'm going to add the fractal noise effect to it, but by default it's going to look a bit shabby. So just fine tune some of the settings here. Fractal type. I'm going to change the dynamic to a little bit mo

re, you know, dynamic, I suppose in the contrast and all that up way high because we're just looking for a very distinctive black and white, not much of the grays in between. And right now there's far too much brightness going on here. So I'm going to adjust to -150 so there's less white going on. One of the big important sliders here is the complexity slider. By default, it's set up to be quite gritty and, you know, details, but we lower this down to 3.5. We get some more just ebbing and flowin

g kind of splotches around. The last big thing that we do here is under the transform section is change the scale from 100 to something much larger, something like 450. So we don't focus too much on these little small bits. So we get these large kind of masses. Now these splotches are fine, but let's add a bit more direction to them through a directional blur, something that we're going to use again very shortly. If we increase the ability length here, we start to stretch the amount a little bit

and make those edges a little bit softer. In fact, I'm going to take this all the way up to 250 here to really accentuate them and give it a little bit of a direction here of -33. So we get that nice, slanted look now a bit more soft and smooth, but they're still got that kind of distinction between them. Well, I can also recommend is adding in a curves effect, whether we use it now or later on. But we're just going to increase the white point a little bit here. We can always make a little spen

d. This is really an easy way to kind of fine tune just how gray or white or black, the whole kind of undulating masses. So we're just going to leave that there for now. So with that all done, all set up, I'm just going to hide the way we don't need to see that right now. But what we're going to do now is drag in another black solid. In this one we're going to be calling directional Blur. This one is going to feed off the the whites and the blacks of that fractal noise layer to just directional

blur some specific elements of what is underneath it. Right now it is just a black solid. So I can recommend toggling your switches and modes and to get the little switch border we have here, I'm just going to select the adjustment layout, which is that half semicircle kind of look here. Just tell it that it's now going to be an adjustment layer. Again, we could use an adjustment layer, but I prefer using just the same split over and over again. And turning on that switch just makes it a bit eas

ier. Here. I'm going to add in the directional blur effect and just mimic what we just did in the previous one. Again, -33 for the direction and a blur length of 250 just to really make everything not readable. What we can do now is direct this direction of blur to only be where the fractal noise of what's like aluminum. And essentially we're going to toggle these switches back again. And if you're using a more recent version of After Effects, you're going to have this beautiful new track mat pi

ck. We're being kind of system, which I can highly recommend getting used to. I'm going to just pick up the fractal noise here and right now it's just going to be looking at its Alpha channel, which is, you know, regular. If we click on this little box here that has a circle in it, we can make it look towards the luminosity of the channel instead, much nicer, you get to having these wonderful little streaks coming across your piece instead of cool. This is the point where you can always revisit

the fractal noise curves effect that we have here. If we reset that, you can start to see what kind of difference it all makes. If you're pulling up the white point, it's going to be a bit more extreme in those kind of circumstances. We can start to still tweak it around and t find a nice little midpoint where it's not too crunchy. But again, this is going to be a building process. In the next building process that we're going to be doing is dragging in another black solid here. I'm going to cal

l this one camera lens blur now could have the title as the best blur inside of After Effects. You know, if possible. It blows pretty good too, but camera Lens Blur definitely gets a lot of points for its use of a blur map where you can specify just specific areas of the the layer or everything that's underneath it to be blurred and smoothly kind of transitions it. We love that. We're going to toggle the switches again and make this an adjustment layer so it starts to affect everything underneat

h it. And we're going to specify the blue map underneath a layer. I'm just going to point it towards the fractal noise layer that we've already generated. So it's going to be mimicking it. Right now, it's just pointing at the source. It's just saying a black solid and says no blur anyway, so we just need to specify it for it to be effects and masks and we get to then start to blurring all these kind of regions around. But it's, it's not very noticeable at the moment. So let's bump up that 5 to 1

5 instead and we get a much more smooth kind of look to it. Look, I'm kind of cool, kind of cool. One of the things to note is that we can't really see it at the moment, but that directional blur started to affect the the alpha of the entire video here. If you bring on this little transparency, great. Here you can see that we're introducing all these transparent pixels, which is less than ideal. Well, I can recommend is on a directional blur layer. We can also add in the effect called solid comp

osite, which just fills in the layer with a solid color. It's just nice to be able to check that off underneath the white for the color. I'm just going to change that to black just to fill that in. We just feel like we have an A covered a lot basis there. Now the real source to all these kind of e-sports kind of looks is the texture, their inclusion and what kind of way they're going about it. And this one, I'm going down the pathway of noise thing. It's really nice and great, especially once we

start introducing that toner effect later on. No dragging another black solid at the moment. Track that on the top, make that an adjustment layer. I'm just going to call this noise very appropriately. Now there's a bunch of different noise effects that live inside of after effects, and then they all have their pros and cons. But the ones that I've been really settling on at the moment is called Noise and Auto. Now one's really nice because it brings in all those little settings that you need wi

thout adding in too much extra render time. For one, you get to add noise to just specific channels such as the hue the line is or the saturation, but it also animates, which is really handy for this one. I'm just going to be affecting the lightness since we're not really dealing with any hues or saturation. So everything's just black and white at the moment. I'm just going to introduce some noise to the lightness channel. Nothing too extreme. I'm just going to add it to around about four so we

can start to introduce all that kind of noise around that. Now, just blanketing over the top of everything you can't really see in the blacks of the whites, but it's much more evident in the grays. But I really want to emphasize some extra noise inside of these gray areas that we have at the moment. So I'm just going to drag in one more here. I'm just going to drop it in over the top of the camera lens blur. I'm going to type in Blurred Noise as just a differentiating factor. Now, add in the sam

e effect here. Noise helps auto. I might even make this an adjustment layer too. And this one, we're just going to crank it up quite a bit more. So a lot less. We're turning this one up to 40%, which is going to be a bit over the top, but we really start to introduce that texture now. One of the nice things here is that even though it's an adjustment layer and we're adding in a noise effect and all of that, we can still change its blending mode. And one of the really handy things here is that th

e idea that these first kind of the second category here is, oh, adding in darkness to the second category. Third category here is adding in brightness, that one underneath it with overlay and stuff like that, adding in contrast and they start to affect the grays rather than the blacks and whites. So if we change this noise layer to soft light, for instance, we only introduce noise to the grays. And right now there's nothing in the background, there's nothing on the white bits of the text. But w

e get to introduce all this noise just to all these grays that we've made through the blurring process. Now this works really well when it's a black background and white text, and that's all we've got going on. But once we start adding in more and more elements, it would be good to be able to constrict this just to the fractal noise that we're already feeding. All these blurs all. So I'm just going to pick up this blurred noise layer to the fractal noise and make that point towards the limited c

hannel of it. So it's just restricted to those areas. So now that we've introduced all these grays into the paste, all this blurring process in the noise, we're going to drag in a new black solid here. Underneath the noise layer, we can add in between the noise layers and we can always add justice. Later on. I'm going to call it the tone ox. Now we can start to introduce a sick tone or effects to start colorizing up hits. I'm also going to turn it into an adjustment layer because that's what we'

re seemingly doing nonstop here and adding the CC toner effect. So by default it's going to be set to a tritone, which is perfect for us. The whites stay whites, the blacks stay black in the mid tones. It's up to us to change to whatever. In part three, I'm going to be going through how to actually automate this process more. The idea of just having one color selection and extra slide to help drive this entire color palette for now, I'm just going to stick with something that I found to be quite

successful so far. The bright whites are going to be a nice kind of yellow going here. The midterms are going to be a just a gorgeous purple already looking pretty cool. And for the shadows, I'm going to make it this kind of weird, dark cyan color. Much darker, though. This is something that we can totally change later on. And it's also going to really be affected once we start adding an extra elements. So don't make it so extreme. I'm also going to blend the original by about 30% just so we ca

n find a nice little middle again. We can adjust these old later on. Well, I can also recommend is adding an IQOS effect here and putting it before the CC toner. This allows you to control just how the contrast of the piece or how what information all the grays are being fed into this toner effect. If you start to pull down, you start to induce more the purples and in changing up the contrast again, once we add more elements, it's going to change the look entirely. Now that we've created the blu

rring system, I'm just going to start introducing some extra elements to create that design, going to go with some text to begin with, and I'm just going to write Welcome to the very cool. I'm just going to bring that above the blurred noises. This is a nice little area in between the blurred noise in the toner effects where things won't be affected by the blurring process. But we'll still pick up on all the colors that the toner introduces. And this font is not going to work too well if this is

just the two fonts that we're working with. So I'm going to switch to a secondary font here that I like to depend on. It's called carbon, and I do have a preference towards this font because it is used in T pro galactic and fantastic game, but I think it also makes a wonderful kind of combo between these two, something that's a bit more digital and a little bit less weighted as the, the main vein chrome font for this one. I'm just going to change the font size to about 38 or so. Nothing too maj

or. That's what the big tall text is doing and increasing the font spacing a bit for a bit of comparison. You just line that up as well. Now one of the other things that you typically see with a lot of these sports kind of packages is just some extra technical elements around the page. So I'm just going to duplicate this, maybe center, align it for now and position it somewhere in the top here and I might reduce the font size a little bit. Just bring it down and just add in some extra text for t

he entire thing. Like I could call this, I'm trying to put in chunk motion at the top. You know, maybe there's a little bit of branding going on in here, but duplicate this one and bring this one down to the bottom. Get to include something else. Maybe it's going to be 18 teams, one winner or something like that. In the end, it doesn't really matter what's going on around these pages. It's just extra little bits of information that kind of make the design look a little bit more, a little bit mor

e technical, a little bit more interesting to the eye. This one on the left hand side, I can just change this 1 to 300000 prize pool, rotate this 190 degrees, will keep them the same here and drag the win over to the right hand side to in center align it just a little bit extra text. Look at interest to the entire piece, these ones as well. We can also expand out the tracking a little bit just to add a bit emphasis to them a little bit wider. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. Feeding off this id

ea of adding these elements around the borders of the piece. I also want you to include some corners in each of the corners of the composition, but also since we're already inside of After Effects, I want to make them easy to animate and more procedural. If you change the comp size, they follow suits. And I think I've come up with a pretty cool system. What I'm going to do is without any text layer or any kind of layer selected, I'm going to double click on the Rectangle tool just to make a rect

angle the size of our composition. This one is already set up pretty nicely for me. If Phil is completely turned off at the moment and the stroke is a white stroke about six pixels wide, I'm just going to drag this to be all the way down here. With the Melbourne Melbourne major text, because I want it to be affected by the blurring process as well. Just for the set up here, I'm going to change the last name to corners and more so going to bring down its capacity to around about 50. So it picks u

p more of those gray tones, which will also then result in purple once it goes through the toner effect. But the main juice behind this is inside the rectangle rectangle path, one in the size property. Here we get to manipulate this so it's a bit more responsive to the size of the composition as well as adding in some padding. I'm going to add a slider control to this corner's layer here. I'm going to rename that effect to padding just so it's a bit more legible down here on the size. I'm going

to alt click on the stopwatch to enable expressions here at the moment and I'm just going to kind of stipulate the sizing of this rectangle to be whatever the composition size currently is, taking away the padding so that it's always a uniformed by adding a square bracket. First, I'm going to type in this comp with a capital on C and go since this is for the x value comp width. Now I'm going to add a minus sign and just pick up that slider that we currently have heading in a coma. I'm going to g

o this comp again, but the height this time since we're dealing with the height of it, taking away the slider again and wrap it all up with an end bracket. So ideally nothing's changed. It's still 1920 by 1080. But the idea here now is that we can increase the padding and it pushes in this rectangle uniformly. I would want to say as well that it's 110 pixels currently 110 pixels down from the top, and it's also 110 pixels from the site, which is much better if I just disabled the expressions cur

rently that if you just bring this down, it's not going to be the same width as it is to the height because it's keeping that 16 by nine ratio yucky. No, thank you. I'm going to enable expressions again and it means that it's going to keep this nice distance on all sides. Very cool. It's also not a bad time to align all that text that you have added in just to make sure that everything is indeed aligned with the the boundaries of this composition. Nothing too crazy. But what I do want here is th

at I want it to be just a little corner. But I don't want a full rectangle, just a little corners. And again, that could have been quite a convoluted kind of process when it comes to animating the trim paths or multiple layers. But I think I've come up again with a cool system that makes it much easier for us. It all starts with a trim pause effect on only the one, and then we'll get to be able to repeat it to all the different corners so it all ripples out nicely. The idea here is that since th

is is a rectangle, 50% is ultimately going to be one of these corners. So if I set the the start percentage to be 49, a major saw this layer so it's a bit more legible and bring back the at the background you've got 49 and it's down to hone in on to this bottom left corner. If I set the other sides to be 51, we've I isolated that corner very nicely so far. In fact, we can make this even more automated if we just add an expression to the end property here and we just specify it's 100, take away w

hatever value the start property is currently at, which means if we start to manipulate the start one, it's going to ultimately push out on the other side the same right, but handy. Now we want to repeal this corner out to the all the other corners currently in this composition and we're just going to do that through repeaters. We can add in a repeater affect the shape layer. We can open that up, specify the copies to only be two because we're just trying to isolate one another corner. Trying to

repeat this to all the corners doesn't seem to work very well, but if we stick to just two copies, we can go down to the Transform and zero out the position change that it's got by default and add in 180 degrees of rotation because the shape layer still has its anchor point in the middle, automatically going to rotate around that point and give us two corners very nicely. I'm just going to duplicate this repeater effect by hitting control Audio command. You can also go up to edit and then go du

plicate. And with this extra repeater here I can undo the rotation that we've currently got, setting it back to what it once was. And I'm linking the scale so that I can specify -100, essentially mirroring what we currently have. Making all four corners currently have a corner element to them. Going back into the trend paths, it's easy enough now to fine tune just the sheer size of these corners by dragging around the starting point of this trim pause effect. It's all going to ripple to all of t

hem and set up pretty nicely just for a little reference point as well. If you do change your composition size to say a square format, because we're basing this off the composition sizing rather than it just said 1920 by 1080 is automatically going to response to any composition size changes, which is potentially overkill. Who knows? We've also got some supporting assets to help elevate this piece. For instance, I have a looping image sequence of a particular character from the game Dota2 he's c

alled Faceless Void. He doesn't have a face and it loops for a couple of seconds here and I think too long if you have an image sequence that loops but only lasts for a couple of seconds, don't worry about time remapping or anything like that. What I can recommend is going down to interpret footage to your right clicked on it, going to main and down at the very bottom here you can specify how many times it loops in the actual source footage, like you specify it last for ten loop ten times. Now l

ast 46 seconds, which is really handy for just tracking. Yeah, you have to deal with any kind of key framing or looping time remapping. I'm going to drag in this faceless void character down at the very bottom underneath everything and plant him down in the background here. I'm going to position him off to the right hand side. We're going to be blurring all of these elements so that they're not too overpowering or too demanding of your attention. For now, this will do just quite fine. I'm going

to also add in a less color balance just to help darken them up a little bit. So again, the contrast isn't too noticeable, just bumping that down a little notch. I've also got a light spot from the video copilot tutorial. For many years ago I used this inside of the neon text tutorial that I released a couple of years ago. Now it's just a PNG that has some very nice light fall off from a singular point. Again, you can create this somewhat through some masks or some shapes and blurring in all of

that, but just having it all wrapped up inside of PNG, it makes it very easy to be able to add into your projects and manipulate it. For instance, I've dragged it underneath the faceless void layer that I have here. I'm just going to scale this thing up quite excessively, maybe just around about 450. And as it's this nice bright point for a piece that then gets fed into the blurring and even the the toner effect to help introduce some extra color, but not really effective to be able to add them

behind our hero piece here, if I add the exposure effect to you can also change just how bright it is. Start doing this up gets a bit brighter and brighter and we get to add in a whole bunch of extra color behind our main character. Going up to around about five or so does a really cool effect, and it helps them stand out from the background a little bit more. Something else that I did for the neon sign tutorial is the idea of this slow atmosphere adding a little bit of extra moving elements, wh

ich is something that we'll get to see in the next part where we start animating. But I also have this slow atmosphere that is from premium beat in the volumetric fog overlays kind of pack that is available for free. I really like number 17, Slow atmospherics is nice and 4K and just adds all this extra kind of texture and movement inside the scene of drag that in over the top of a faceless Ford character you can see as again gets affected by the Turner at this really cool effect. She's going to

scale this Badboy down a bit just so it's not too large. And again, I said in the inside tutorial you can add this change the blending mode to screen, but that's just going to introduce a whole bunch of lightness to the scene. And it's not really how smoke works in here. It just makes everything so bright. What I can recommend instead is adding the shift channels effect, because from here we can change it so that it can take its own alpha from the luminance channel. So it starts to actually gray

out the piece and add its own kind of volumetric ness to the animation. And again, as I mentioned the other tutorial, you can add a curves effect and before the shift channels and you can always manipulate just how bright the the luminance of the pieces, which then in turn feeds into the alpha channel, it makes it a bit more visible. You can play around with this, find out where it best suits inside your piece. But I think this is pretty cool to begin with. Now, there definitely are far too man

y elements fighting for attention in the moment, especially with how crisp this hero is. So what I'm going to do is bring in one more black solid in between our slow atmosphere and the main text. And I'm going to turn this into an adjustment layer again here. I'm just going to add a fast box blur, nothing too fancy here and just increase the blur radius to around about like eight or so, and it just helps minimize their impact on the overall scene. Now that we've added all these extra elements, w

e're introducing more and more lights and more grazed the piece, which is making it all a bit colorized and a bit too apparent. What I can recommend is going back up to the tone. And now in that tone, this curves effect that we had before. The key turn is something that we can now manipulate to dial in the right amount of contrast in that piece, like I mostly recommend, is bringing down the shadows by pulling on the line. Just that little bit down, you can start to introduce more of the blacks t

o the pace that a little before and after. Just add to that contrast again makes the text pop. One more low compositing aspect that I wanted to include is another black, solid just underneath the fractal noise here. I'm going to call this glow, just a little bit of airiness of the whole piece just to make it the all these whites pop a little bit more, adding in just the basic glow effect here, of course, the default values are horrendous. I'm going to increase the radius here too much. The much

larger turn about 250 just to really softening it all out and then bring down the intensity by half, 2.5. We can always dial around these, find out what works, play around with the toner effect just to help pull these back down, see what works well for us. This is the part of the kind of tutorial where it's just purely up to us to tweak the final look, and there's a bunch of different things you can do, particularly the curves effect to help introduce the contrast. You can play around with the l

ights, but to find out just how much extra light you need to introduce back there. But even things like the amount of glow, but particularly the fractal noise, is one that since that's driving so many different elements inside our piece, maybe the people do want to see the letter M inside your graphic here, but that's you can select the fractal noise layer, go down to the fractal noise and adjust the random seed. And here you have pretty much unlimited variance of the piece and who knows which o

ne of these is going to strike gold. But that's one of the wonderful parts about this being a more procedural approach, is that you can see just go through all these different instances and find one that works for you. And the other great thing is, which in part two we'll get to do is animate the evolution as well, which allows us to smoothly transition and find these different kind of variations of the fractal noise and then bless your entire piece, you can adjust how much the directional blur

happens, dial it up, dial it down, find the nice kind of middle ground, something that you need to make the piece work. You can also change the camera lens blur radius to see if you can soften it up a little bit. Maybe 15 is too much for you. You can find a nice little middle ground or really go over the top if it's going to be maybe not text based. The amount of noise as well is going to be definitely be dependent on your own personal tastes. Try out the different noise types as well and see wh

at works well for you. I really start to enjoy this textured look that we get here fast, but not least is the tone of colors as well. Playing around with these is going to yield so many different looks and results. You can really find some cool kind of examples from this. It's a really impressive just how far removed these colors can be as long as you've got a nice, bright and mostly unsaturated highlight, a nice saturated mid tone that is somewhere in this middle portion and a very dark kind of

saturated shadow. Any of these hues can really work together and change some really cool looks coming from it. These three colors, for instance, really work well for me, the idea of it's a yellow, a blue and a red for the three colors doesn't look good on paper, but turns out really nicely here. And then we have it. This is what I'm going to settle with in the end of one, where we're designing a nice, noisy, kind of textured kind of look for any sports graphic text is still alive and editable,

and there's so much variation that you can achieve through the colors and the noise and the texture that you can introduce. In part two, we're going to bring it to life animate everything, and then still work with this kind of look and template. Going into part three, I hope you learn some new kind of techniques or even just change the way that you can think about applying different types of effects. Thank you so much for watching this video. Check out for part two. And if you're watching this,

when it's come out live, it will be out very shortly. But most likely when you're watching this part two already be out and you can just click ahead and check out that video when you have the chance. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.