The last thing I want to do to my background is add in some fog basically,
some clouds, some space dust if you will.
I'm going to add another solid layer.
Control Y or Command Y on a Mac is the keyboard shortcut and I'm going to call this fog.
Comp size is fine. Click ''Okay''.
We're going to use the same effect fractal noise to generate a cool fog pattern.
Let's make this maybe a little bit bigger.
We're going to drag this down to probably above the stars,
but below the grid and set the blend mode to add.
Now I can play with the brightness and the contrast
to dial back how much of this fog we're seeing.
I don't want this to be crazy visible,
but this should be a pretty good starting point.
I can always turn down the opacity of the overall layer so that it's not so visible,
and I think I'm definitely going to do that.
But I don't want this to be
a single fractal noise layer because that looks very fractal noisy.
It looks like the effect,
because that's all it is right now.
I'm going to pre-compose this Control Shift C,
and I'll call this fog,
move all the attributes and click ''Okay'',
and I need to make sure I set that blend mode to add again.
But then I'll go back into that pre-comp and I want to add some motion to it.
There's some really cool controls in the fractal noise effect that allow us to do this.
One is evolution and if I just click and drag that,
you can see how it just very organically shifts this texture around and that's great.
I'm just going to set a key frame on the first frame,
go to the last frame and just really increase this.
I went around six times,
I added a whole bunch of change to
this and let's just play it back to see how fast it moves.
That's probably too fast.
Let me press U to bring up the key frames,
and then double-click on this key frame to adjust the value and we'll
change the revolutions down to say three instead of six.
Click ''Okay'', and play that back again,
and now it's moving at about half the speed.
Honestly, I think that's still too fast,
let's change that from three down to one.
Because again, this is a background element.
I don't want it to take focus away,
but I do want to have some of that organic movement to it.
Now that's moving a lot slower,
but it gives a really nice looking effect. So I like that.
But we can also go into the transform controls and adjust this a little bit,
and maybe I'll shift the fog over time.
I'll go to the first frame,
set an offset turbulence key frame,
and then go to the last frame and then shift this over
to the right a little bit and maybe even a little bit up.
It doesn't need to be much I don't want it to be incredibly noticeable.
That probably could be a little bit more.
But just something to give it a little bit of variance over time.
Then I'm going to add an adjustment layer,
go up to Layer, New, Adjustment layer,
and add a new effect one we haven't used yet called turbulent displace.
What turbulent displace does is allows you to
distort what you're applying it to using a turbulent field.
A lot like the fractal noise.
But instead of adjusting the brightness values and giving
us black and white and grays in-between,
we're displacing what's underneath it.
So actually a really easy way to visualize this is to add a grid layer.
Let me add that real quick and I'll make it squares so we can see it nice and square.
I'll put it below that adjustment layer.
So you can see now what this displacement is doing.
It's just really giving a very random turbulent displacement to the overall texture.
But we also have this evolution control,
which allows us to just cycle through very organic looking distortions.
So what I want to do is make the size of the displacement very big and turn the amount.
It doesn't need to be very extreme.
So probably down in the 20s,
somewhere around there and maybe the size is a little too extreme.
I'll turn that down a little bit, somewhere around there.
But what this is going to allow me to do is just oscillate
the shape of this fog over time in a very organic way.
So we're layering on all of these different types of fractals and
displacements to make something much more
unique than the default settings these effects give us.
Let's add an evolution key frame at the start,
go to the end, and then just increase this a little bit.
This one, I definitely don't want to be all that noticeable.
I think that looks pretty good. Maybe you can go a little bit more quickly,
and I think that's looking pretty good.
But we can take this even one more step further and duplicate the fog.
I'll just duplicate it and instead of add,
I'm going to set this to screen and just so it doesn't blow out the highlights too much.
Now we can go into the evolution options and just change this random seed value.
That's going to give us a completely different state for this fractal noise.
So it's totally random,
but it's animating in the same way as before.
But I'm going to change the transform controls so that it's a little bit bigger,
as well as adjusting the contrast and maybe the brightness.
This way we're adding layers of fractal noise on
top of each other so that we're getting something that looks a lot more original.
Maybe I'll turn the complexity up a little bit.
But that just adds an entirely new layer of
fog to this entire animation and makes it much more dynamic.
Now that that's done,
we can go back to our main comp and see that this is obviously way too intense.
So I'm going to just bring up the opacity by pressing
T on the keyboard and really dial this back.
I don't want this to be all that noticeable.
Just give a little bit of atmosphere,
maybe eight or nine percent maximum.
It's just giving that atmosphere to this space void and giving
a little bit of interest to that background as the rest of this animation plays out.
Remember the hero is the text that the chrome effect,
we don't want to take away from that.
To tone down that fog even a little bit more,
I'm actually just going to draw a custom mask using
the Pen tool on this layer and press F to bring up the feather,
feather this out about 300 pixels,
and now that fog is isolated to the center of the frame.
I might bring this out a little bit more so we can see it towards the edges a little bit.
But this way it's not just a flat, evenly distributed fog.
We have something now that just a little bit more organic and unique.
With that, I'd say that our background is finished.