All right, Next I want to add some stars to this whole scene.
Make it look like it's in outer space.
Again, this is something I'm doing,
you do not have to follow along if you don't want to do a space scene.
But I'm going to show you quickly how to make some stars really easily in after effects.
I'm going to drag that grid precomp into the pre-comps folder,
and I'm going to make a new solid.
Let's just make sure we're in the comp layer,
new solid, and we'll call this stars,
and this can be the comp size.
I'm going to make it the comp size and click "Okay."
I'm going to go ahead and pre-compose this.
So Control Shift C, Command Shift C,
and we'll just call this star's source and leave all attributes, move all attributes.
It doesn't matter at this point.
But then I'll jump into that comp and we're going to add a fractal noise to this solid.
This is going to be the base texture or the base properties for our star field.
We're going to use a levels affect to crush all of
these values so that we can isolate basically tiny little dots.
I'm going to bring the blacks way down,
increase the whites a little bit,
and what we want to do is basically just
isolate tiny dots throughout all of that fractal noise.
Let's play around with maybe the complexity and turn that down a little bit.
You can see higher values are giving us a lot more texture,
but if we turn this down to a smaller number,
then we're going to get more rounded shapes.
We can also take the transform controls and scale it down so
that we have a lot more source information for our stars basically.
That's looking pretty good,
but I'd like to make them more rounded so that they
look like actual stars and not just a texture.
I'm going to add a Fast Box Blur.
This is how we'll soften everything up.
I'm just going to add a little bit of blur here
so that they all get nice and blurred out.
Make sure Repeat Edge Pixels is turned on.
Then I'm going to add another instance of levels to this time crush
the RGB values so that I can get rid of some of the dimmest stars.
But then as I crushed this,
you can see that they turn into much more rounded blobs.
That might have been a little bit too much blur,
so I'll dial that back a little bit.
The overall size of these stars is probably a little too big.
Let's go into the fractal noise and adjust that scale to be down even further,
so maybe five or even four.
Now we have a pretty decent star field.
From here we can play with things like
the original levels to determine how many of those stars are really showing through.
Again, this is subjective,
but I don't want my background to be distracting.
I want the text to be the hero of the main comp,
so I'm going to dial it into something like that,
and then go back to the Chrome Look comp and
move these stars all the way to the bottom behind the grid,
behind everything but the background color,
and change the blend mode from normal to add,
just like everything else that'll blend out all of the black
and make those white dots really stand out.
But I don't want to have just white dots,
I want to add in a lot of color to those stars to
make it fit with the rest of these retro,
kind of vibrant colors that we have on everything else.
Let's go back into that Star's source.
I'm going to make a new solid,
or actually I'll just duplicate this one and delete all of the effects.
I'll press E to bring up the effects.
Click shift, click and delete,
and we're going to add actually another fractal noise.
Let's add Fractal Noise.
What I'm going to do this time is turn the complexity way down,
probably to around two,
so that we just have these big blotches of color.
Maybe increase the brightness and contrast,
and just adjust this so that we kind of have half and half,
half black, half white with a few in-between color.
Then maybe turn the scale up a little bit.
Next, I'm going to add a tint effect,
so tint, bring that over.
This will let me re-map the colors from black and white to anything else.
I want my stars to have kind of a pinkish,
purpley color on a lot of them,
and for the other stars,
I'll do more of a tealish- greenish color here.
Something like that. I realized this does not look like my star.
If I go back to the main comp,
I completely destroyed the stars. What am I doing here?
Well, I just want to use this as a map for the colors of the underlying stars.
I can do that using a blend mode.
If I go into my blending modes,
again towards the bottom is another one that's called color.
If I do that,
my stars come back, but if I zoom in,
you can see that the colors from this layer are now being
blended on top of the colors beneath it.. A lot of my stars are green,
a lot of them are purple or pinkish,
and honestly that might be a little too noticeable.
But let's just go to the Chrome Look comp and see what happened.
Now all of my stars have this color cast
to them and it's a lot more interesting than just white dots.
But I'm not too happy with how black sheet is.
Maybe I pushed that fractal noise a little too far.
If I solo the layer, I can see the texture again,
and I'm going to increase that complexity a little bit,
so that we have more values in between,
and instead of the tint,
I'm actually going to try another effect called tritone,
which is almost identical to tint,
except that you have controls for not just the highlights and the shadows,
but also the Midtones.
With the highlights, I'm going to just grab that green again,
the shadows, I'm going to grab the pink.
But now we can control these Midtones and add in a third color.
Maybe we'll do a bright bluish color like that.
Anything that's 100 percent white gets the pink,
anything that's 100 percent black,
gets the green, everything in between gets this blue,
and I can adjust how harsh these changes are just by lowering
the contrast and decreasing or increasing the brightness to get more variation here.
Now that I have a much wilder looking texture,
let's un-solo it and see how that affected everything.
All right, that looks pretty cool to me.
It might be a little bit too saturated.
What I could do is use this blend with
original slider by turning to a 100 percent you see it takes all the color away.
But I can just turn the opacity basically of this effect down a little bit,
maybe 34, 35, so that the colors aren't quite so vibrant.
I'll get rid of that tint effect while I'm at it.
Then jump back to the Chrome look and see that now my stars have nice,
pretty colors, but it's not too overwhelming.
Very cool. But just like everything else, I love flares,
so why don't we make some of the stars have a nice cool looking flair to it as well.
We're going to do that in basically the same way we did with the other two flares.
I'm going to grab this Star's source,
drag it into new comp,
and rename it stars flare,
and then drag both of these into the pre-comps.
Next, I want to isolate basically just the biggest stars,
so you see this one is much bigger than this one, and to do that,
we're going to use our favorite two effects, Fast Box Blur,
drag that out and levels, bring that out.
Then I'm just going to blur everything out a little bit,
does not need to be a ton,
and then crush these values,
bring the blacks down and bring the whites up.
This is really going to help me isolate those brightest stars.
I could probably push this even further so that I'm left with
just a few compared to before we added those effects.
Now we have this source for just the brighter stars.
I'm going to duplicate that.
Set the blend mode to add and add another Fast Box Blur.
We'll change this to horizontal and streak this out a little bit.
If I zoom in here, we can see what's happening.
I'm going to duplicate my levels here and bring it below that second Fast Box Blur.
If we look at the effects that we have,
the original Fast Box Blur and levels just to isolate stars,
then we have fast box blur for the flare and levels to crush that.
I'm going to reset the effect so I can see it a little bit better.
Remember we're dealing with pixel values.
There's no transparency here,
so switching to the Alpha channel would do nothing.
We're just using the RGB values to shape this flare,
but I'm going to blur it out a little bit more and crush that value.
Let's colorize this too.
Now I can't do a fill because these aren't transparent pixels,
that would just make the entire layer filled with that color.
Instead, let's add a tint effect and just change the map white to,
to whatever color we want,
so let's do this tealish- bluish color for the horizontal.
That looks pretty cool. I'll just rename this flare one,
duplicate it again and repeat the process on
the vertical instead of horizontal blur for our Fast Box Blur.
So switch that to vertical,
maybe make it a little bit bigger,
maybe make it a little bit more pronounced,
and adjust the color to something fun.
Maybe we'll make it purply,
and actually I like that purple color better,
so let's go to this first flare.
I'm going to make that more of a purple color too.
Cool, so the whole goal with this is
just to have some subtle flares on the brightest stars,
and I think that's working.
Just because I really like the diagonal flare on the Chrome text,
I'm going to do that again here.
Remember just duplicate the layer,
get rid of that Fast Box Blur and we'll add in a directional blur just before the levels.
Change the angle and then increase
the flair so that we have something that looks like that.
Then adjust the levels to make it more of an appropriate brightness.
Something like that is looking pretty cool.
I'm just going to change the color of this slightly to maybe
be a little bit brighter, something like that.
Cool. All right, now we have some flares on those stars.
If we go back to our Chrome look,
we need to actually bring that pre-comp in.
Let's go find that pre-comp for the stars
flare and drag that down to just above the stars source.
Again changing the blend mode to add.
Now if I zoom in here and find one, there we go.
There's a nice bright star with a cool lens flare streak to it.
It just adds a lot of personality to the overall design,
and that is a pretty cool-looking start field.