2D smoke effect | 3 different ways!

welcome to xp i'm cameron and today we're gonna level up your 2d smoke game in after effects so you can do things like this in order to create successful smoke animations in after effects there's one simple technique that you need to master in this tutorial i'm going to cover three different examples so that instead of just copying the technique you learn how to apply it creatively in unique situations for your own projects okay so we're in after effects now and this is our final composition and in this composition you can see i have three different references for the smoke and inside of this comp we have two nested comps the character and vehicle and the background layer the character in vehicle comp is where we're going to be doing most of our work so inside of here what i've actually done is i've just shied all the layers so if i unshy using this button you can see all my layers are there still we're starting with the exhaust smoke so i'm going to dive right into that and that is actually inside the vehicle composition okay so now i'm going to click on my exhaust reference layer i'm just going to drop the opacity to 30 so we can see what's going on i'm also going to solo the tailpipe and exhaust reference layers so i can just focus in on what's important okay so the first thing we're going to want to do is get one of these circles going so we can start our animation now you could come in to after effects and grab your lips tool and create this yourself however i'm just going to jump into illustrator and because i use overlord it's very easy to just push this in overlord is a plug-in i highly recommend if you want if you're doing a lot of illustrator to after effects workflow it just really saves a lot of time and makes your life very easy and i'm just gonna give this a name and i call it smoke one because naming your layers is super important always do it don't be that person who doesn't okay i'm going to bring that behind the tailpipe i'm just going to change the color as well go yellow the next thing we're going to want to do is start adding our animation i'm going to drop in a position animation at 2 seconds and another one at three seconds i want to make my animation span one second so it's easier to loop later i'm going to drop another keyframe for position and i'm just going to edit the position of these so we get something starting to happen okay let's take that a bit further out and then our final keyframe this is where we're animating it out i'm also going to add some curvature to these so our animation is just a little bit more interesting you can see how useful this reference layer is we're getting this close to what we want then i'm going to add some scale animation and i want this to scale up this point and i want it to scale out at this point okay so let's just preview that now you can see there's something funny happening with the speed between this part of the animation and this part of the animation so what i'm going to do to fix that is just right click on this keyframe and go rope across time and you can see that just smooths that out really nicely i'm also going to add an easy ease to the scale animation just so it loops out really nicely i think i'll take that up to about 160. okay now it's interfering a little bit with the edge of the tailpipe especially at this point so i'm just going to drop that down to 80. okay so now we have the basis for our whole animation at this point so the next thing i'm gonna do is duplicate this probably about six times and then i'm just going to open the animation of all of those and i'm going to edit the the scale on each one because i want to create a bit of variation so it's not the same boring animation over and over okay so i'm just gonna take that up to about 180 okay so now we have some scale variation now we're going to add some position variation okay so now you'll see what's starting to happen we're getting this nice separation so that when we offset these animations it's really going to look lovely okay so the next thing i'm going to do is pre-comp these layers so if i use ctrl shift c it'll bring up this pre-compose menu and i can just give it a name and let's call it exhaust smoke pre okay now i'm going to jump into that and uh we created all our animations over one second i'm going to come to three seconds here and i'm just going to hit n to change my work area to one second so the next thing we want to do is make the smoke animation loop and because we've created our animation over one second and there are six layers what we can do is take our frame rate which is 24 frames per second divided by the number of layers which gives us um four frames so what we want to do is offset each one of these animations by four frames but before we do that i'm just going to duplicate them send another set to the to the top and i'm using motion tools for my sequencing but you can manually change these if you like i just like to use tools like this because they make it much faster and easier so i'm going to hit sequence after changing my offset ball and i'm just going to drag this back and you can see that just creates a perfectly press now we can go back and we can delete our exhaust reference okay so the next thing we want to do with this is make it loop because right now it's only looping internally and we want to make it loop out in this precomp so the way we can do that is actually add a time remapping so if we go enable time remapping just drop in some keyframes two seconds three seconds and then just remove the keyframes on the outside what we can then do is add another expression called loop out and that'll just loop these exhaust fumes really nicely what we have right now are some very hard circles and they're not interacting with each other in any way and in order to create a certain sense of interest and realism we've got to do something so if i click on my exhaust smoke what i'm going to do is i'm going to come up to my effects panel i'm going to type in fast to get my fast box but drop that in increase the blur radius to about 5 and you'll see what that does it just creates a bit of blur around our objects and we're starting to get some transparency the next thing we want to do is go to the levels effect so if i click on the layer again add my levels we can come in and change um the channel to alpha and you'll see when i start dragging in these handles it starts to crunch in on that alpha channel and we're getting these objects starting to kind of meld into one another and that's exactly what we're looking for now you can see when i really crank this in it it adds this pixelation that's okay at this stage because the next thing we're going to do is add a roughen edges which is just going to perfectly smooth that out we're going to get rid of the fractal influence and now you can see we have this much more interesting smoke with these these pieces of smoke are kind of popping off from one another and this is really what we're looking for and the last thing we want to do there is just parent that mic to the tail pipe oh you'll see it just moves with the tail pipe and we have something really interesting happening so we're back in our character in vehicle comp and the next animation we're gonna tackle is the smoky darth trail at the back so i'm gonna solo the layer grab my ellipse tool and if i click and hold control and shift it will scale the circle from the center i'm just gonna make it about the height of that trail then i want to drop in some keyframes the position keyframe on two seconds and three seconds and i'm going to just change the initial keyframe to about there and the final position keyframe to about there then i'm going to go inside of my ellipse transform properties these are the internal transform properties of the shape layer so i can come in and drop another position keyframe on 2 seconds and three seconds and another one at 12 frames in what i'm going to do is i'm going to select both the start and end position keyframes and i'm just going to drop them down below smoke layer and if i add an easy ease to the center central keyframe you can see i get a lovely arc that's been created of course we need to name this layer so let's call it dust one let's give it a color as well okay so now i'm just going to duplicate this twice select u to open up my keyframes and i just want to adjust the scale of these two so i want to give this a scale of about 70 and this scale of about 80 just so there's some variation the next thing i want to do is come up to my rectangle tool and i'm going to create a rectangle just below my dust reference layer and i'm going to call this base now this might not make sense at this point but you'll see later why i'm putting this in so now i'm just going to grab all three of these layers and i'm going to pre-compose them and i'm going to call this dust free now i'm going to jump into dash 3 hit u to open up my key frames and i'm going to change the work area to 3 seconds and again we want to create a loop we have our animation happening over 1 second again and we have three layers so if we divide 24 by three that gives us eight so we know we need to sequence these with a space of eight frames so if i select all three layers duplicate with ctrl d bring them to the top change the color hit you to open up the keyframes select all of them sequence by our 8 frames drag it back you can see we now get a perfect loop however we have no visual interest none of the layers are interacting there are these sharp gaps in between it's very vectory and uninteresting so in this case instead of adding the effects to the the composition itself i'm actually going to stay inside of the composition and come and drop in an adjustment layer and what an adjustment layer does is applies any effects that you apply to it to the layers below now i can come up to my effects drop in a fast box blur change it to something like 15 grab my levels punch the alpha channel now you can start to see why we have this base layer because we're getting this lovely interaction between the base and these circles so once again we have some jaggies some pixelation on the outer edges here so once again grab our roughen edges drop it in get rid of the fractal influence now if i go back to this comp i can come up to my rectangle tool again because we want to get rid of this base so when you have your rectangle tool selected with the composition it automatically creates a mask so i can just come in and create a mask now you can see that topper is cut off the next thing i want to do is make this look a bit more like our reference layer so if i look at the reference layer it has this nice angle this nice tilt to it so if we have a look at our dashboard again we can come up to our effects panel and look for an effect called cc slant and you'll see if i change the floor to the base of our smoky layer and change the slant you can see exactly what starts to happen so i'm going to change that to about 80 and now we have something much closer to the original and much more interesting um the one thing i do notice is that adding the effect here creates a bit more transparency on the edge of the smoke layer or the smoke trail so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to cut this with control x go into our dust layer and i'm just gonna drop it inside of our adjustment layer and take it to the top so that we can use our extra adjustments to just crunch the alpha out of that okay now if i go back into this composition we need it to loop so we can go to enable time remapping drop in our keyframes remove our in and out keyframes add our loop up now we have something that's looking great we can also use these primary remap to change the speed of the animation so i'm just going to crunch this down to about well so it's a really fast smoky trail and the final touch is just going to be adding the blending mode overlay changing the opacity to 50 just so it matches our dust reference now we can actually delete our dust reference because we have exactly what we need right here okay so the final smoke animation that we need to tackle is this one here which is the smoke coming from the fire on our character's head so i'm going to solo this and in order to create this effect i'm going to start all dropping in a solid let's just call this smoke solid okay then i'm going to take this down i'm going to duplicate our smoke reference because i want to pre-comp both these layers i'm going to call this so now we can go into smoke pre and you can see we have our smoke solid and our smoke reference now i actually want to recompose smoke started again and let's just call this smoke creepery and now if i come into smoke creep re if i hit control k and come up to advanced to change my anchor to the left and change my width to 1500 basically change the size of my comp and this is what i need for this particular animation now if i hit ctrl r click on this layer i just want to get a ruler at the midpoint as a guide so now if i come up to layer new shape layer and i grab my rounded rectangle tool this time i'm just going to draw a shape on top of this solid you can see it has these rounded edges if yours aren't as rounded as this you can actually hit your right arrow key so you can see if i had my left arrow key it takes away the rounding completely i hit my right it rounds the circle completely and that's what i'm looking for in this case it's going to change the color of this so we can see it a bit easier if i come into rectangle and rectangle path and i right click and go convert to bezier car i can come in and manually adjust these points [Music] that's kind of what i'm looking for okay let's give this a name let's call it smoke one so now i want to click on my path again and grab these end points if i uh select these points and i double click i get this bounding box around them and if i click and hold ctrl it allows me to squash both ends like this i'm just looking for a nice taper nice consistent tape on this and even come in and adjust these handles slightly the next thing we want to do is use the smoke one layer as a mask or the solid so the way we do that is using the track matte function after effects so if i click on this layer and uh i can just click on alpha matte and you can see that the solid is now being masked by the layer above okay so the next trick i'm gonna use is an effect called wave warp and this technique that i'm gonna apply is something i learned from jake bartlett in one of his videos and i'll link to that video below because his video goes into a lot of detail and depth when it comes to creating variation with the wave warp effect so you don't end up with something that's very mechanical and consistent so if i come up now drop in an adjustment layer drop our wave or perfect pop of the adjustment layer and you can see what starts to happen and this automatically animates okay so for starters i'm going to change the wave do about 350 and i'm going to change the wave speed for 2 and i'm going to change the wave height to 60. the next thing i want to do is stop these edges from moving because for this effect i don't want them to be wiggling too much i want them to not be locked in place so the way we can do that is change our pinning to vertical edges and you can see exactly what that does lovely so now we want to add a bit of variation to this animation because right now this wave bulb is very consistent so the way we can do that is duplicate our wave bump effect and we can change our wave speed so i'm going to make it one already there's a bit of variation but you can see the waves are cancelling each other out the way to fix that is using your wave width and adding some variations i'm going to make this 500 now we get something that's a little less consistent we can also come in and change the direction so if i make this 80 and make this 100 we get even more variation and that can be really nice so now if we go back into our smoke pre if we look at our original reference you can see that the wavelengths are kind of almost on par with one another and that's not what we have though what we can do is we can actually come in here move this over to the left slightly then i'm going to grab my rectangle tool we're just going to mask the top of this layer just like that now if i duplicate this hit m and change our mask to subtract so what you can do at this point is change the timing of your smoke of one of your layers that you get these layers to be animating more at the same wavelength now i want to go back into my character and vehicle layer if i hit y i can change this anchor point right about there and now i just want to make sure that i have something similar in size and and width to our reference okay so looking at that we can scale it down just on the one axis just slightly let's make it 53 so take it down by exactly 10. yeah that's looking good i'm gonna go back into my pre-comp i'm going to click on this layer and drop in a null take it above parent this layer to the null as well this now what i want to do is create a scale animation to get again a bit more variation so what i'm going to do with this middle keyframe is just on the x-axis minus this by about 80 drop in some easy ease by hitting f9 we're gonna loop this out okay so now we have this scale animation and if i change the timing of this you start to get something interesting happening and you can actually time this with the wave warp effect to get something interesting the next thing i want to do to add some more visual interest is add in another circle so change the color of this to the magenta let's call this offshoot if i hit position drop in some position keyframes in our usual positions because that also creates a nice consistency in our animation if i come in and have this just pop out let's copy and paste that animation to the end you can see it pops out i'm going to add a scale keyframe to this so that it goes from 100 to zero i'm going to add an easy ease to that first keyframe to slow it down slightly now if i copy and paste both these keyframes to the end here i can again add a loop out if i go right click copy expression only will be on scale you can see that loops out this does its thing again you can change the timing on this to make it something interesting i'm going to duplicate this because i want another iteration of this going i grab my two position keyframes just make this go somewhere else if i change the timing we'll get something more interesting happening okay so now these are interacting together quite nicely the last thing we need to do is our typical technique that we've been using throughout the smoke tutorial and let's go and do that so if i drop in an adjustment layer drop in a blur 15 this time get rid of our smoke reference add the levels up in our ruffin edges get rid of our fractal influence you know the drill at this point i'm going to increase the border to 12. now we have some nice interactions between our offshoots and our wavy smoke this is looking good at this point we just need to put some finishing touches on if we look at our smoke reference let's actually bring it up so we can see it a bit better we have this gradient going on and we want to get that on our smoke pre as well so if i come up to our effects panel typing around we can drop in an effect called gradient ramp this immediately applies a gradient then if we click on our smoke reference we can see that we have this gradient there already so i'm going to come to smoke pre hit the lock button so that it keeps this information in the effects panel if i come up to smoke ref click on full and actually just copy and paste this information right in there [Music] then if i change the start and end points of the ramp yeah i get a lovely gradient the final thing to do is take a look at our blending mode and our opacity so we just need to match that with a multiply and a twenty percent opacity the only thing left to do is get rid of our smoke reference and now we can just preview our smoke animations in all their glory look at them they're beautiful they're wonderful and we've learned so much in the process thanks so much for watching the project files for this animation are linked below so feel free to check that out as well and if you got any value from this tutorial please consider liking and subscribing it really helps out a lot i'm a big believer in free education on youtube as i've used myself countless times to grow my own skills and abilities and i would love to help budding creatives do the same [Music]

Channel: MotionXP

Views: 7,608

Keywords: after effects smoke, after effects smoke animation, animating smoke, how to make smoke animation, looping smoke animation, motion graphics tutorial, smoke animation tutorial, how to animate smoke, 2d smoke effect, motion design tutorial, motion design tutorials after effects

Id: FGtaSGlYWzo

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022