Create a customizable grid in Adobe After Effects to enhance your shape animations without relying on static Illustrator files. Learn how to apply and animate the Grid effect for more control over color, opacity, feathering, and movement.
Key Insights
- By using the Grid effect in After Effects, designers can generate dynamic grid overlays directly within the program, allowing for control over properties like size, opacity, line thickness, and feathering.
- Animating the grid—such as scrolling, rotating, or adjusting opacity—can be done using standard layer transformations like anchor point shifts and rotation, making it adaptable for motion graphics workflows.
- Noble Desktop’s training demonstrates how to replace static Illustrator backgrounds with editable After Effects layers, offering greater flexibility when composing complex animations.
This lesson is a preview from our After Effects Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
So to wrap up this shape animation, I want to actually change the grid that's in the background. So I'm just going to solo these last two layers, solo, solo. So this background grid layer is actually just a layer made in Adobe Illustrator and then imported, which means I can't really control it from here.
And that's annoying. I can like rotate it, I can scale it, that sort of thing, but that's it. So I can't change, for example, the number of grid lines, which I kind of want to do that.
So I want to make a new grid, and I can actually do that with a new blank layer. I should be able to do it on this one. Now, if my goal was to just change the color of something, that's easy.
For example, background grid or background color, for example. There are many effects that could do this. For example, fill is one of them.
I'll just double click, and now my background color is red, and I can change that color wherever I want right in here. For example, maybe a darker red. That's not my goal.
The blue color was fine. I'll just delete that effect. Highlight it and delete it in your keyboard, backspace in your keyboard.
The grid though, I want to try something else. There is actually an effect called grid, and if I apply it to a layer, it basically replaces the content of the layer and gives me a grid instead. That's all it does, by the way.
That's and I'll just raise the width slider if I want a perfect square, like so. Maybe I want a little bigger. If I wanted to actually have width and height sliders, I could actually control the grid to make it not perfect squares, but in this case, I did want a perfectly square grid, so width slider fine.
I can adjust the thickness of the border, like so. I can adjust the color with some color picker, so again, maybe I'll go with a darker blue and blue, go with darker blue, maybe like that. I can adjust the opacity if it's too solid, maybe I'll knock the opacity down, kind of like closer to the original, like that.
Pretty good, I like that actually. And I can animate all of this stuff, no problem at all. So actually, I'm going to do one more thing.
It's in feather. I'm just going to raise the width feather, let's say about maybe two or three maybe, and I'll raise the height feather as well, and it just basically makes the edge of the grid more faded out, more semi-transparent. I like that, that's actually pretty good.
Okay, now if I wanted to physically move it around, like make the grid kind of like scroll or offset, I could simply animate the anchor right here. So for example, a horizontal anchor like that would slide the grid sideways, and I can also do it vertically if I wanted to. In this case, I'm fine with that, I'm just going to undo that.
If I wanted to animate the grid, like let's say rotating, I could just animate the rotation of the layer itself, like so. I'd have to scale the layer up so I don't see the edges like this, but it's a regular layer, you can animate it the same way you animate anything else. But for this, I just wanted to actually have the grid a little bigger, a little easier to see.
I'll un-solo those two layers, and now I've got that. Okay, now I guess I kind of like that, and I think actually I might want the grid color to be a little darker maybe, so it blends a little more of the background. That's pretty good, I like that.
And now I've got an animation that looks like this. And again, most of the colors I haven't really changed. You can modify them by simply adding a fill or one of the other color correction effects onto each layer itself.
If you want to animate specific layers or specific parts of a precomp, in that case you open the precomp and make your changes. So it's all a matter of figuring out what kind of, or what level of control you need when working on more complex animations. And that is the end of this series of lessons.