3.1 How to Use Fractal Noise. Hi everyone, and welcome back to Create Modern Glitch Animations in After Effects. In this lesson, we'll be going through how we can use fractal noise to animate or text here. So let's start of by removing these guidelines. Fractal Noise Technique. Created By: Aharon Rabinowitz of Red Giant Price: Free. This technique pioneered by Aharon Rabinowitz of Red Giant shows us how to create a distorted glitch box effect using native tools in After Effects. The technique is essentially a combination of the fractal noise effect mixed with a displacement map. Click to tweet?:Fractal Noise or Turbulent Noise? What's the difference and when should I use each or either of those effects? Never and always.

Fractal noise is a well-known effect in After Effects. Probably one of the most used too, it’s ver­sa­tile enough to cre­ate all kinds of effects. Users com­ing to Blender from an After Effects back­ground might be won­der­ing if there’s a sim­i­lar effect or at least some way to ani­mate noise. Let’s see how we can repli­cate it in Blender.

Let’s look at what Fractal Noise real­ly is first. The idea behind frac­tal noise is to com­bine sev­er­al “lay­ers” of noise with increas­ing scales. Usually decreas­ing inten­si­ty as well. If you look around for frac­tal noise algo­rithms you will find these lay­ers being called Octaves, the scale called Frequency, and inten­si­ty as Gain. This increas­ing of the scale makes the noise small­er and small­er, which is why we call it “Fractal”, the noise will be the same just smaller.

Fractal noise is used in many places even out­side the field of com­put­er graph­ics, as part of DAWs or ana­log syn­the­siz­er to gen­er­ate sounds or con­trol oth­er effects for instance.

Making the fractal noise effect in Blender

Making frac­tal noise in Blender is easy.

1. Add sev­er­al noise nodes with dif­fer­ent scales
2. Combine them with a math node set to multiply

You mix as many lay­ers of noise as you want. More lay­ers of noise will add more detail, but will affect Blender’s per­for­mance. With Eevee you might also hit the tex­tures limit.

You can also mix the nodes with a RGB Mix. This let’s you con­trol the fac­tor for each lay­er, which is anal­o­gous to the Gain (or inten­si­ty) para­me­ter in frac­tal noise algo­rithms. This is use­ful because some­times the small­er noise lay­ers are too over­whelm­ing, spe­cial­ly if you have too many lay­ers or a very small scale. Blender’s noise also has one cool extra set­ting: dis­tor­tion. Try play­ing with it to make the noise more flu­id or fiery. I also rec­om­mend adding a col­or­ramp to con­trol the contrast.

Fractal Noise 3d After Effects

Make it move

There are two ways to ani­mate noise, we can change the seed or the coor­di­nates. At the moment Blender does­n’t give us access to the noise’s seed. No prob­lem, though. Changing the seed would make the noise vary com­plete­ly every frame with­out any con­sis­ten­cy over time, so let’s look at door num­ber 2.

What we want is to ani­mate the coor­di­nates. To be more spe­cif­ic, we want to move through the noise. Note that we don’t want to shuf­fle the noise around, but have it stay in the same place and move as if fly­ing through it. All we need to achieve this is an extra dimen­sion. For instance, if we are ani­mat­ing the noise on a plane flat on the ground our tex­ture coor­di­nates would be X and Y, so we need to move on Z. Likewise if we have a 3D object we’ll need a 4D texture.

There weren’t any options for 4D noise out­side of OSL until the noise node got it in 2.81. When you select the 4D option you get an extra para­me­ter called W, the fourth coor­di­nate. Unfortunately 4D noise is heav­ier on resources than good ol’ 3D. Depending on your hard­ware you might not be able to mix more than a cou­ple of layers.

For most uses of frac­tal noise (VSE/Compositor/VFX) hav­ing it on a plane is enough. That means we can take advan­tage of using only 2 dimen­sions and use the third to move the noise. We can ani­mate the noise with keyframes or using a sim­ple expres­sion like #frame / 1000.

Fractalize anything!

Fractal Noise After Effects Tv Static

Traditional frac­tal noise uses Perlin (the noise node) but there are oth­er tex­ture nodes we can try.

Here are some exam­ples of oth­er frac­tal textures:

Have you made some­thing cool with frac­tal noise? Let me know in the comments!

Fractal noise is a well-known effect in After Effects. Probably one of the most used too, it’s ver­sa­tile enough to cre­ate all kinds of effects. Users com­ing to Blender from an After Effects back­ground might be won­der­ing if there’s a sim­i­lar effect or at least some way to ani­mate noise. Let’s see how we can repli­cate it in Blender.

Let’s look at what Fractal Noise real­ly is first. The idea behind frac­tal noise is to com­bine sev­er­al “lay­ers” of noise with increas­ing scales. Usually decreas­ing inten­si­ty as well. If you look around for frac­tal noise algo­rithms you will find these lay­ers being called Octaves, the scale called Frequency, and inten­si­ty as Gain. This increas­ing of the scale makes the noise small­er and small­er, which is why we call it “Fractal”, the noise will be the same just smaller.

Fractal noise is used in many places even out­side the field of com­put­er graph­ics, as part of DAWs or ana­log syn­the­siz­er to gen­er­ate sounds or con­trol oth­er effects for instance.

Making the fractal noise effect in Blender

Making frac­tal noise in Blender is easy.

1. Add sev­er­al noise nodes with dif­fer­ent scales
2. Combine them with a math node set to multiply

You mix as many lay­ers of noise as you want. More lay­ers of noise will add more detail, but will affect Blender’s per­for­mance. With Eevee you might also hit the tex­tures limit.

You can also mix the nodes with a RGB Mix. This let’s you con­trol the fac­tor for each lay­er, which is anal­o­gous to the Gain (or inten­si­ty) para­me­ter in frac­tal noise algo­rithms. This is use­ful because some­times the small­er noise lay­ers are too over­whelm­ing, spe­cial­ly if you have too many lay­ers or a very small scale. Blender’s noise also has one cool extra set­ting: dis­tor­tion. Try play­ing with it to make the noise more flu­id or fiery. I also rec­om­mend adding a col­or­ramp to con­trol the contrast.

Make it move

There are two ways to ani­mate noise, we can change the seed or the coor­di­nates. At the moment Blender does­n’t give us access to the noise’s seed. No prob­lem, though. Changing the seed would make the noise vary com­plete­ly every frame with­out any con­sis­ten­cy over time, so let’s look at door num­ber 2.

What we want is to ani­mate the coor­di­nates. To be more spe­cif­ic, we want to move through the noise. Note that we don’t want to shuf­fle the noise around, but have it stay in the same place and move as if fly­ing through it. All we need to achieve this is an extra dimen­sion. For instance, if we are ani­mat­ing the noise on a plane flat on the ground our tex­ture coor­di­nates would be X and Y, so we need to move on Z. Likewise if we have a 3D object we’ll need a 4D texture.

There weren’t any options for 4D noise out­side of OSL until the noise node got it in 2.81. When you select the 4D option you get an extra para­me­ter called W, the fourth coor­di­nate. Unfortunately 4D noise is heav­ier on resources than good ol’ 3D. Depending on your hard­ware you might not be able to mix more than a cou­ple of layers.

For most uses of frac­tal noise (VSE/Compositor/VFX) hav­ing it on a plane is enough. That means we can take advan­tage of using only 2 dimen­sions and use the third to move the noise. We can ani­mate the noise with keyframes or using a sim­ple expres­sion like #frame / 1000.

Fractalize anything!

Traditional frac­tal noise uses Perlin (the noise node) but there are oth­er tex­ture nodes we can try.

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Here are some exam­ples of oth­er frac­tal textures:

Fractal Noise After Effects Not Working

Have you made some­thing cool with frac­tal noise? Metabase sample dashboard examples. Let me know in the comments!