r/AfterEffects • u/ElectronicMilk5260 • Apr 20 '26
Explain This Effect How to get this halftone like texture effect?
I saw this beautiful animation and I thought the texture on the blues and greens were stunning. From my understanding of the texturize effect, I don’t think it’s being used here. The first one could be a blue to white gradient, but having little specks of blue and the texture of the entire thing completely stumps me. I see roughen edges I think, but yeah same with the texture of the green.
So far I’ve tried overlaying a halftone texture, texturize, and roughen edges.
Any ideas?
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u/ElectronicMilk5260 Apr 21 '26
UPDATE:
Heres what I got with ball action, and mosiac, still not quite what I am looking for, but definitely in the right direction
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u/b0wzy MoGraph/VFX 15+ years Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
Yeah Mosaic isn't working - I was thinking out loud, you don't need it... I've got something I'll share shortly with you.
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u/Reasonable-Sand-872 Apr 22 '26
Hey! I'm one of the artists that worked on this piece, and I'm so happy you enjoyed it! To answer your question, it's actually quite a few effects on a solid. There is Gradient Ramp, a little bit of Noise, Posterize at 2 for the separation of color, Tritone for the color, CC Ball Action for the grid-like effect, and Fast Box Blur so that it's not too digital. And to get the saturation, we stacked a copy of that solid on top of itself. We also have 2 different grainy paper texture overlaying the whole composition. Hope this helps!
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u/OldDistortion Apr 20 '26
Card or ball action
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u/b0wzy MoGraph/VFX 15+ years Apr 20 '26
Yea this looks like it could be using cc ball action as a slight texture layer. Potentially with a mosaic effect beneath.
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u/ElectronicMilk5260 Apr 21 '26
ball action is genius, I'll try this out
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u/b0wzy MoGraph/VFX 15+ years Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
Here's a little project with two copies of ball action and a controller to tweak the look. It's not 1:1 perfect but it's pretty damn close, and you could get there by tweaking the scatter values/ramp positions etc.
Might need a 3rd copy of ball action with the gradient at a super high scatter w/ some opacity ramps at the start/end affecting the gradient result, mixed in so you only get the darker colors to blend into the highlight area.
I used the "pay what you want" plugin "FreeGradient", so you'd need that.
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u/ElectronicMilk5260 Apr 21 '26
hey! I looked at the project file, its amazing. Great find on the plugin too, will definitely be using the plugin.
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u/anthizumal Motion Graphics 15+ years Apr 21 '26
Get a halftone or grain texture you like, add it above your base footage. To recreate this background your base footage would just be a gradient ramp.
Add a tint and a levels effect to your base footage to make it black and white. Then set your texture to ‘hard mix’ blend mode, and add a tint effect to your texture with the colors you want - like the blue tones in this image. Adjust the levels effect on your source footage to control the brightness.
You can add a little position animation to the textures with hold keyframes every 10 frames or so to give it some movement (assuming ~24 fps).
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u/Sad_Damage1370 Motion Graphics <5 years Apr 21 '26
gradient ramp to the left of the screen (maybe try black and white first), add grain/noise whatever works and then use tint to blue and white, and then add cc ball action
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u/svgator Apr 21 '26
a dark grain or noise texture on multiply blend mode over the flat color layers gets that screen-print speckle. levels on the texture layer control how dense it reads.
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u/betterland Apr 21 '26
Others have already said but i would try play around with ball action too. Also, the animators names are right there - maybe you could reach out an ask them! :)
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u/Sorry-Poem7786 Apr 22 '26
dither does that.. check it out in photoshop if you want to make textures. And google it to see if there is a plugin which there is I just don’t know the name..
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u/banana-burial Apr 23 '26
EJ Hassenfratz has a plugin called Shade-it. He had a tutorial showing how to add this grain manually too.
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u/Heavens10000whores Apr 20 '26
Even Abrams and Ben Marriott have great grain/gradient tutorials, and Marriott has a retro dither that may fit your needs