How To Use The Rough

Enough Looping
Texture Pack
The Basics
Both packs use a .MP4/H264 format so they will work just fine whether
you’re on OS X, Windows or Linux. They have a framerate of 12FPS (ie
‘on twos’), because playing textures like these back at 24FPS will
probably make you want to gorge your eyes out. They also look really
good at 6FPS.

All clips are 5 seconds long and can be looped for ever and ever. In After
Effects you’ll want to do this by right/control clicking on the texture video
in the Project panel, selecting ‘Interpret Footage’ > ‘Main’ and then in the
‘Other Options’ section at the bottom of the window entering 999 (or
whatever number takes your fancy) in the ‘Loop __ Times’ box.

You’ll notice that everything except the paper textures are very grey
looking. That’s because they’ve been averaged to 50% Grey (ie RGB
127, 127, 127) which makes them easier to use and more efficient to
compress.

These examples use Adobe After Effects, but the same principles apply
for Final Cut, Premiere, Smoke, Resolve, Motion etc.
Use as an Overlay

Overlaying is an easy way to give you entire composition a bit of a look

by blending your texture layer through and letting it affect everything
below it. Start by chucking your texture layer at the top of your comp, and
in the ‘Mode’ column of your texture layer select ‘Overlay’ so that it looks
like this setup:

The effect will be reasonably subtle at this point. This is because the
textures are averaged to 50% grey. To change this you’ll need to add a
Levels effect to your texture layer and tweak it so as to increase the
contrast a little (ie. less grey, more black and white). You can also adjust
the opacity of your texture layer to decrease/increase the amount of
texture.

And you’re good to go. There are a ton of variations that can be made on
this technique, such as using ‘Screen’ or ‘Multiply’ as your blending mode
and tweaking the Levels effect to get a sweet look.

You can download an After Effects CS5.5 (and above) demo project with
these setups in it here

Use as a Matte
Matting is all about using the luminance (AKA brightness) of your texture
layer to change the visibility of another layer. It’s a great way of layering
up textures and getting a more complex look with a lot more control over
individual objects. Start by dropping your texture layer over top of the
object you want to affect, and then select ‘Luma’ in the ‘TrkMat’ column
of your layer (the one you want to affect), like so:

If everything is going to plan, your matted layer will probably half

disappear. This is because the textures are averaged to 50% grey. To
change this you’ll need to add a Levels effect to your texture layer and
tweak it so as to increase the contrast a little (ie. less grey, more black
and white).

And that’s the basic idea. Layering this look up across multiple objects
can look great (hot tip: offset the timing of your texture layer for each
object) especially when pre-composed and staggered in 3D space.
You can download an After Effects CS5.5 (and above) demo project with
these setups in it here

© Lindsay Horner 2014 http://www.lindsayhorner.com/