How to add User Presets – Fractal Noise Browser

01

Overview

The User Presets tab is a place for you to store and apply your own Fractal Noise, Turbulent Noise and Curl Noise presets with thumbnails and animated previews. It's designed to give you the same controls and flexibility as the built-in presets - it stores non-animated presets so that you can use Fractal Noise Browser's Evolution animation options, as well as the Randomize Seed and Application settings.

02

Making a preset

You might want to start with one of the built-in presets and play around with the parameters, or start from a default Fractal Noise, Turbulent Noise or Curl Noise effect. When you have settings you're happy with, select the effect in the Effects Control Window or the Timeline panel.

Selecting any part of the effect is enough - even if you have just a single parameter selected, Fractal Noise Browser will still save the whole effect.

Click on Fractal Noise Browser's + Save Preset button. This will open the Save Animation Preset dialog, typically in After Effects' default User Presets folder, which is:

Mac OS

/Users/[Username]/Documents/Adobe/After Effects [Version]/User Presets

Windows

C:\Users\[Username]\Documents\Adobe\After Effects [Version]\User Presets

Note: If the dialog opens in a different folder - perhaps because you've been saving presets elsewhere during this session - navigate to the folder indicated by the Mac or Windows file paths shown above. Alternatively, save your project and restart After Effects. Save Animation Preset will then return to the default location.

The first time you click + Save Preset, Fractal Noise Browser automatically creates the Fractal Noise Browser subfolder inside your User Presets folder. This is where all your user presets need to live in order for the panel to find them. Navigate into this folder in the Save dialog before naming and saving your preset. The preset will be saved in .ffx format - After Effects' standard preset format.

Save User Presets dialog - FNB subfolder

You can also organise presets further using subfolders. For example:
Fractal Noise Browser/Water
Fractal Noise Browser displays each subfolder as a collapsible subcategory. Up to two levels of nesting are supported - for example, this works:
Fractal Noise Browser/Water/Calm/
but anything nested deeper will be ignored.

03

Reloading presets

Whenever you add new presets to the folder, click the ↺ Reload button in the User Presets section and Fractal Noise Browser will re-scan the folder and display any newly added presets.

04

Effect type badges

Every preset carries a badge in the bottom-right corner of its thumbnail showing which noise effect it contains:

FN Fractal Noise

TN Turbulent Noise

CN Curl Noise

This is automatic. Fractal Noise Browser reads the effect type from the .ffx file itself, so there's nothing you need to do and no particular way you need to name your files.

Upgrading from v1.1? Earlier versions asked you to append _FN or _TN to the filename to get a badge. That's no longer necessary. Presets named that way continue to work exactly as before - the suffix is now only a fallback, used if the preset file can't be read.

05

Thumbnails and video previews

Thumbnails are recommended but not required - they make presets much easier to browse. Video previews (which play on hover) are also supported, just like the built-in presets.

Thumbnails and videos must share the identical base name as the .ffx file and be saved in the same folder or subfolder. For example, these three files would go in User Presets/Fractal Noise Browser or in a subfolder of User Presets/Fractal Noise Browser:

mypreset.ffx mypreset.png mypreset.mp4

Thumbnails

.png .jpg

PNG takes priority if both exist.
Recommended size: 192x192 px

Video previews

.mp4 .mov .webm

MP4 takes priority, then MOV, then WebM.
Recommended size: 96x96 px

Thumbnail and video creation is not an automatic feature - it's up to you to create them manually - but it's very easy to do:

Make a new comp with a solid layer
Apply your preset to the solid
Save the first frame as a PNG or JPG in the same folder as the .ffx, with a matching base name
If you also want a video preview, add animation to the Evolution parameter
Render as MP4 or MOV to the same folder, with a matching base name

Note: WebM is not natively available as an output format in After Effects.

06

Tips for good thumbnails and video previews

Aim to show a part of the noise pattern that clearly represents what the effect looks like. Apply the effect to a large solid and reposition it in your comp to find a visually representative area. Scaling the solid down to 50% lets you see more of the noise pattern in a small thumbnail.

For the built-in Fractal Noise Browser presets, we used a 3840x2160 solid at 50% scale in a 192×192 comp. We saved the first frame as a PNG for the thumbnail. For the video preview, we applied the expression time * 50 to the Evolution parameter and rendered 4 seconds at 15 fps as a MOV, with the output resized to 96x96 in the Output Module. We then used Shutter Encoder to convert to WebM - but MP4 and MOV are also supported and can be rendered directly from AE.

Best practice is to keep thumbnails under 500 KB and videos under 5 MB and 30 seconds in duration. Non-square thumbnails and videos will be cropped to a central square - use a 1:1 aspect ratio for best results.

Curl Noise and layer shape

Curl Noise sizes its pattern relative to the layer it is applied to. This is different from Fractal Noise and Turbulent Noise, where Scale is measured in pixels and is unaffected by the layer's dimensions.

Curl Noise fits the same number of cells across the width of a layer as it does across the height, whatever the layer's proportions. On a 16:9 layer each cell is therefore stretched horizontally compared with the same settings on a square layer. Only the proportions matter, not the pixel dimensions - a 3840x2160 solid and a 1920x1080 solid give identical results, because both are 16:9.

So for a Curl Noise preset, build your thumbnail and video preview on a layer with the aspect ratio you are most likely to apply the preset to - for most people that's 16:9. If you mostly work square or vertical, use that shape instead. A preview made on a square layer won't represent what the preset looks like on a 16:9 layer, and the reverse is equally true.

This is why the solid described above is 16:9 - the built-in Curl Noise presets were created and previewed on that shape.

07

Known limitations

Curl Noise requires After Effects 26.3 or later.
FFX files are version-specific. FFX files created in a newer version of After Effects will not work in older versions. If you upgrade After Effects, copy your Fractal Noise Browser folder of presets into the new version's User Presets folder - they should continue to work normally.
If there are FFX files in the User Presets/Fractal Noise Browser folder that don't contain a Fractal Noise, Turbulent Noise or Curl Noise effect, they will be hidden from the User Presets section, since there would be nothing for Fractal Noise Browser to apply. A note at the top of the section tells you how many were hidden. They remain in your folder and can still be applied with Animation > Apply Animation Preset.
Keyframes, expressions and other effects in FFX files in the User Presets/Fractal Noise Browser folder will be ignored by Fractal Noise Browser. To apply the full saved .ffx including any additional effects, use Animation > Apply Animation Preset instead.
If an FFX file in the User Presets/Fractal Noise Browser folder contains more than one noise effect, only the last one in the stack will be loaded. Again, you can use Animation > Apply Animation Preset if you need to apply them all.

08

Accessing this page

You can return to this page at any time by clicking the How to add User Presets button in the User Presets section of Fractal Noise Browser.