30(ish) Clicks — No. 6

Hey Fablers, welcome back to another Fable Academy 30(ish) Clicks. In this series, we try to make some really cool looking motion with as few clicks as possible using Fable.

In this one we're going to make this kind of cool procedural looking, it could be bubbles, could be ripples. You can use this as a background for your social content. You can use this as a background for a presentation. Lots of cool uses for something like this.

Let's just jump right in. As always, we're going to try and keep it as close to 30-ish clicks as possible, just to show you how quickly you can make something really cool inside of Fable.

First things first let's set our canvas here. Make sure it's set to 1920 by 1080. Make sure that our background is turned on. Let's give it a nice color, do like a little bit of a darker gray here. Just so it's nice and easy to see what's going on.

Our lines will be white, make sure that your anti-aliasing is turned off. Usually when you want nice crisp blinds anti-aliasing is a great setting to have. In this case, it actually becomes detrimental to what we're trying to do.

The first thing you're going to do is grab your rectangle shape tool up here on the toolbar on the left. Make a rectangle that is the same size or slightly larger than your canvas.

Now, very important in this particular 30 clicks, all of the effects will be applied directly to our shape layer.

With our shape selected, let's go up here to the right, to the effects panel. We're going to search for noise. Click, drag, and drop. We're going to go down. You're going to make sure that "use as displacement" is turned off. This will reveal the visibility of the noise texture.

Now we're going to set the noise type here to Perlin. We're going to set the noise scale to 95. Gives us this nice big kind of chunky looking noise.

Then we're going to go back up to our effects layer, apply the current time, click drag and drop.

We're going to click here on a little gray dot and we're going to drag this property and link it by dropping it on top of time of the noise effect. Cool thing about Fable is you can build all these core relationships where effects become procedural.

What that means is that they're non-destructive, that we can modify one parameter and others will change.

It's actually the main theory behind a lot of these 30 clicks, is that we can use these sort of behind the scenes links to really control our animation easily.

Once your current time is connected, we're going to set the timescale to 0.5.

Then we're going to come back up here. Let's try the threshold effect. Click drag, and drop. Once again, dropping the bottom here. We're going to set our threshold value to 100%. And we're going to set our soft value here to 0%.

Then from here back up to the effects panel, we're looking for a right alpha. Click, drag and drop. Then lastly, back up here in effects panel, we're going to go to apply edge here.

This is going to be our base look for the effect. If you scroll through, we've got this pretty cool looking noise texture. You could leave it just as is, but we're going to take it one step further, cause we're still under in our click count.

Next we go up here to our effects panel, type out math.

These are in our utilities. Click, drag, and drop the math. We're going to set the operator to subtract. Set A to 100. Leave B at zero for now. Then we're going to link the result of the math node to our threshold value. Once again, creating these dynamic links where they all drive each other.

With that, basically the math that will now control how everything else moves.

Select your layer over here. You're going to duplicate it. And on this new layer, it brings all the effects with it. And you're simply going to take our math effect and we're going to increase the B value to 5.

As soon as we do that, you can see what's starting to happen up here, where we now have these cool offset lines. We're going to this a few more times, each time increasing the value of the B variable in the math by five.

Now we're moving into the 15. Fifth rectangle, this is going to be 20. Six rectangle will be 25. And finally, our seventh rectangle, we will set it to 30.

Just like that. Now, when you hit play, you've got this really wild looking animation.

So there you have it. I believe we hit exactly 32 clicks in that exercise.

Some of the really cool features of Fable here are that we can in very few clicks, make some really unique and non-destructive effects.