From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 14 Shape Layers

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Blending multiple shapes into a texture

Blending multiple shapes into a texture - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 14 Shape Layers

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Blending multiple shapes into a texture

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Here we have our swarm of rectangles. Let's make it a little bit more mysterious. The easiest way to do that is to use a glow and blur effects, and one blur effect you should be familiar with if you are not already using it is Box Blur. I will select my shape layer and apply Effect > Blur & Sharpen > Box Blur. At its default of 1 iterations, Box Blur performs a very rough blur rather than something that's very smooth like a Gaussian blur. As a result, you get something it's a bit more geometric shaped. If you increase the iterations to like 3 or 4, which gets you in a range of Gaussian blur, you get a much softer, more ghostly shape, and you keep increasing it till you just get a cloud of pixels like that. So this one blur effect has lots of different looks. I am going to go down to one, just to create something interesting and geometric, and I can always add another blur later on if I want to. I want to tweak the Blur Radius to get the look that I like. Let's cut it down a little bit…

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