Tutorial 191: Grid Generation

Sorry for the delay on this one. We're working on something currently and the client has changed direction on our client a ton. So, because Sev was mainly dealing with that—and the fact that everyone in his family seems to be born in August—and it was his week to do a tutorial so I had to scramble a bit! Luckily, I was already working on this for something else and it just so happens it might find its way into a project I'm working on now, so two birds meet one stone!

I've experimented a ton with the effect in this tutorial, but I think this might be the most perfect version of it. And because of that, there's a bit more that can be done with it since it relies on a lot less processing power.

We start by building tiles to replace our sources with. Sources are our gradient maps and tiles are our final output. We're basing our system on a 20 x 20px grid, but you don't even have to use a grid if you don't want to. And if you don't, you might want to add some slight noise to your sources because that can have interesting effects when the tiles are mapped to the source.

The basic idea is that we're using an intermediate comp—Piece—to take our source maps and our tiles and composite them together. With some input from our main comp, like piece number and total number of pieces, we drive an extract effect to crop our source to a range of luminance that will fit that piece, and when we combine all of the pieces with different tiles, we get this effect.

I haven't messed around with this particular idea, but you can also add a Master Property in the Piece comp to change what channel the extract effect looks at. It can't be added directly to a Master Property, but you can put a slider on your controller that the Channel parameter looks at. And then you can add that slider to your Master Properties. 0 and 1 are both Luminance. Red is 2. And so on.

Using this idea, you could add tiles according to certain colors which makes your source maps way more powerful. So, as always, there's a lot to be explored. Have fun experimenting and tweet us @workbench_tv if you make anything with this!

For more information, please see the following tutorials. Some are made somewhat obsolete by this technique, but you might be able to glean other interesting information from them.

Tutorial 65: ASCII & Text Generation

Tutorial 67: Glitch Mapping

Tutorial 120: One Comp to Rule Them All

Tutorial 122: After Effects Multi-shader

Tutorial 129: 8-bit Glitches

Tutorial 131: Generative Elements

Tutorial 152: Procedural Circuitry

Tutorial 160: Mechanical Text

Tutorial 165: Generative Art

Tutorial 190: Cicada

Expression code can be found on our website here.