Noise

Hello Fablers, and welcome back to another episode of Fable Academy. In this episode, we're going to look at the Noise utility.

With our layer selected, let's go to the top right here to our effects library and let's type in noise. There's noise logic, which we'll get into in a later video and noise. We want the plain and simple noise. Click, drag and drop.

Immediately some things start happening here. Got a couple different settings. Now, the type , which you can get into and explore on your own pace here, basically defines a different pattern for how this noise is generated. Noise can be used for many different things in motion design, the most common one being to drive animation that's really organic and fluid, kind of liquidity.

That's some pretty cool stuff. So let's get into it here. You can choose the types of colors, basically black being totally opaque and white being completely transparent.

From here, we have a fixed scale ratio setting, which means this scales the size of the noise particle equally on the X and the Y.

If we drag our skill slider here, you can see that everything kind of grows all at the same time. If we turn this off, it unlocks the scale in horizontal and the vertical.

Time here is going to allow us to animate this over time. These smaller values will give us very smooth animation. Let's say this is set to 2.

Set a keyframe there. Move forward. Let's set this at at 4. Now if we play this back, you'll see that immediately there's some animation happening here.

The next tab here is the modifier A and B. These basically refer to how this noise is behaving. You can see here that depending on which direction you move it in, A is going to be the angle and the position, possibly similar to the phase and other effects. Modifier B is going to be the overall sharpness of the effect. All the way to the left, being a 100% sharp edge and all of the way to the right, being a completely blurred out edge. Each of these will have its own context. Use them at your own discretion.

The next one here is called the displacement panel. Now, what does this mean? If you use as displacement, it unlocks a whole bunch of other options. Basically once you do that, it's being directly applied to the image underneath it and displacing it based on those black and white values.

The angle here is going to rotate the angle at which the effect is applied. The distance is going to be just how much does the actual image underneath get distorted. Offset X will push this effect on the X axis. Offset Y will push it on the Y axis.

Which here, for those of you that are curious, because our layer is selected and rotated 90 degrees, that's why these numbers are being a little bit confusing here. So let's set this back to 0 just to make it simple. We'll make it fit the canvas. And now if you notice again, offset X is the horizontal, offset Y is the vertical.

Lastly, as always, we have our global opacity, which brings it up or down. With this much noise applied, this is where you can see the difference in these types of noises.

So if you go to a perlin, for instance, you get this really cool looking kind of liquidy effect. And once again, this is a procedural effect. One of the personal favorites inside of the Fable effects library.