2D Smoke or Hair In After Effects

hey it's Jake and today I'm going to show you how to use After Effects to make this wavy wispy 2d smoke or hair effect that's super complex looking but can be easily controlled and really isn't all that hard to set up let's jump in I really like the way that this effect works because it's super versatile even though it's pretty simple once you actually build it so I've got a bunch of examples that I'm gonna walk you through but first I'm just gonna show you the basics of how it's built and we'll go from there so here I've just got a white solid the size of my comp and I'm gonna pre-comp this and I'll just call this smoke will just call it smoke and then I'll go into that and then I want to add some texture to this so that we can see what's going on so let's add the checkerboard effect so checkerboard and that's gonna show transparency but that's okay I'm gonna make this probably like 100 there we go so we've got this nice tile pattern and I'm going to then make an adjustment layer option command Y and on this I'm going to add the wave warp effect if you haven't guessed already this is the effect that really drives the entire system we're gonna layer some effects on top of it but this is the main driving force behind it you've never used it this is what it does I'm gonna hit the spacebar so we can see that this effect is animated and if we go to rate at one frame before one second it will loop now this is extremely helpful because sometimes you're gonna want to make loops and some of the examples I have you'll see are looped so having that ability to very easily find a looping frame is really just super handy so the the wave warp effect is just distorting this in a nice sine wave that's what this is called you can see the wave type we have other options but we're not going to be playing around with them but be aware they are there if you ever want to try other ones but the sine wave is gonna be what we want for this nice flowing motion and I can do things like adjust the wave height now this is way out of control but if I went to like 25 it's bigger if I went down to five it's much more subtle but I can also control the width so 40 the width right now I could bring this down to 20 now we got more ripples or it could put it up 200 we've got this nice very wide looking wave I'll turn that up to 30 and this almost looks like a flag this is another great use for something that you want to add a little bit of you know wind passing through fabric kind of an effect the problem is this looks very computer-generated it's literally using math to generate a sine wave distortion map over this image so it just looks a little bit too perfect I'm gonna get rid of that checkerboard effect on that white solid and I'm gonna add a mask to that solid and transform it bring it in while holding command so we've just got this nice and bar across the screen so we've got this very wide warp and a decent height now this is moving left to right and the reason for that is because the wave direction right now it's set to 90 degrees so that's the direction the waves are gonna go if I put this to negative 90 it's gonna go in the opposite direction it also changes to be zero so it goes upwards but then we're not gonna see it because of the mask but you get the idea you can put this at whatever angle you want let's leave it at 90 for now and then we have the wave speed right now it's set to one and that's really easy to remember that one actually gives you a looping point at one second and if you just keep that in mind I could increase the speed to say two and now I know that the looping point should be halfway at 12 frames but that frame is exactly the same as the first frame so I need to come back one frame on the timeline set my workout area and now that will loop seamlessly so I want to set this to something probably around three I'm guessing and now the looping point is gonna be a little bit harder to find I'm not gonna bother doing math I'm just gonna look at this frame see that the wave is right about there and I think that or maybe that might be the identical frame so let me just set my out area and on the keyboard press home nothing changed so I know that's the exact same frame okay to go to the out point in my work area page up to go one frame set my work area one more time and now I've got a seamlessly looping wave great that's a good starting point so the next option down here is pinning right now it's set to none if you take a look at the edge you see that this is moving up and down on both edges with the distortion the pinning allows you to do something like say pin the left edge and now that's not going to move up and down and it will gradually yeah you know increase into that Distortion could do it to the right edge now that one's not gonna move I could do this to all edges and now neither is gonna move and the same goes for the top and bottom even though I don't have anything touching those right now could also do you know the vertical edges and that's gonna look at these two edges it looks pretty much the same or the horizontal for now I'm just gonna put it on the left edge okay so this is actually a pretty decent starting point for hair if you imagined this coming off the back of somebody's head this could be hair waving in the air but again this is very digital computer-generated looking so how can we make this look a little bit nicer well first of all let's change the mask shape so right now it's just this perfectly you know symmetrical horizontal bar but if I had it start out smaller by bringing up this point and then added you know some curvature to this and then I brought this one down and rounded it out and I've got something that looks a little bit more unique but that sine wave is still pretty symmetrical you know super super computer-generated looking so to make this look better I can come up to my adjustment layer and duplicate my wave warp command D and now I've got two of the same effect now because they're exactly the same it's just gonna make the distortion larger what I want to do is first change the wave speed and I want to do this in a very precise way because I want to be able to preserve this loop and make sure that it loops seamlessly so I'm gonna take this wave speed and just divide it by two so half of three three divided by two is one and a half there we go and again it looks like nothing has happened but if I play this back things have changed and because this is half the speed I need to double the length of my loop so I'm going to go forward to frame fifteen I believe that's the correct frame and play that back now we've got some very interesting looking happening it still looks very computer-generated but the waves are basically competing with each other and offsetting each other since this one is going half the speed so to make this look a little less symmetrical all I need to do is change the wave width so I could increase this out you know to say something close to 300 and now I've got something that looks a lot less symmetrical I could really punch this out I don't want to go to 400 sorry 400 because that's double the length of 200 so it's pretty much gonna give me a similar-looking result where we get this very oscillating symmetrical motion even though it is a different looking shape but if I you just make this some random number that's a lot different than 200 but nowhere near 400 then those two distortion meshes are going to be different enough that we get a little bit more unique warping so cool we've got something that looks a little bit better and maybe I want to increase the speed maybe the wave speed should be five and two and a half then I'm gonna have to find that looping point again but another quick way to do this is go to your first frame click on the snapshot button and then just try and remember this shape so I'm gonna look for this dip and this bump up as I scrub through ray there I think back one frame and then I'll show my snapshot from before and actually it looks like the next frame is closer now the thing about this effect is that it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned for it to still look like it's looping seamlessly you really can't tell that there's a little bit of difference between the first frame and the looping frame but there we go now we've got something that moves a little bit faster another way that I could change this up a little bit is adjusting the direction so right now they're both set to 90 but if I turn the first one back a little bit to like 75 and I turn the second one forward to maybe 107 then we're going to get something even a little bit more unique now this is pulling the right edge off because those directions are not perfectly horizontal anymore so I'm probably gonna want to change this to something like the horizontal or sorry the vertical edges to pin both of those edges on tight so that looks good now that I have this going I can just have fun playing with the shape of the mask and really just see what I can come up with and that's what's so great about this effect is that you just play around with it and you'll be surprised with what you've come up with so maybe I'll just pull these handles out a lot and make it really skinny on the left side but then large on the right side maybe I'll pull this in even further and I've got something that looks totally different now I could change the direction of everything as well and you know if I rotate this mask and then just resize it to fit the comp a little bit better now it's coming off the bottom so I'm going to need to go into my wave warps and change the pinning from vertical edges to horizontal edges and then I'm also going to need to change my directions I'm just going to subtract 90 degrees from each of these and it's always a good idea to turn these on and off to see how each one is affecting the image so in this case I think the wave height needs to be turned up a little bit on that one and then we can turn it up on this one as well and just see what it does maybe the direction needs to be adjusted a little bit we can just come up with something a little bit different now part of this pinning it does mess with your distortion a little bit as you see it's always gonna look like it's coming up to that edge perfectly usually I only pin you know the top and bottom edges when I'm going off the screen like this and in this case I might even go and say all edges on the pinning so that way it looks like it's just getting so big that it's going off the screen but let's say that you don't like that and you want to be able to preserve the distortion I'm just gonna undo until we're back to where we were going on his horizontal axis okay so here so here we are back to this let's say that I want this edge to be warping not pinned to the right edge I'm gonna need to set this back to just the left edge on both my wave warps but that's pulling this in you can see some transparency showing up right there how do we fix this what we need to stretch that out a little bit and I can't just move the shape over because it's the adjustment layer that's affecting that and I can't pull it back because then it's gonna reveal that shape undistorted so we need to add another effect to our adjustment layer so this time I'm going to add one called bezzie a warp there we go and this gives you points on the corners as well as handles that allow you to distort the image very precisely so all I need to do is grab this top one I'll hold shift so it only moves on the horizontal axis and move it off to the right edge just a little bit there we go just that little bit has taken care of that seamless edge and I still get that Distortion now this is actually something that's pretty interesting with this effect in addition to being able to just fix the edges of of something that's distorting like this we can also make the distortion of the waves look a little bit more interesting so let's say that I wanted these waves to be super wide over here on this edge but closer to the left edge I want them to be a lot tighter right now the the width of all the waves is consistent across the whole thing well I can modify this mesh from the Bezier warp to kind of squash everything up to this and so that the waves are tighter on this end and then they gradually get wider and wider over here so to do this I'm just gonna start moving these handles so I'm gonna leave these ones where they are on the left edge and then grab this handle and hold shift again and just pull this over really far do the same thing for this bottom handle about the same distance then I'll do that for these two handles pull them out and now these waves are much bigger over here and tighter over here that's interesting but because of that it kind of looks like it's tapering off so I could kind of counteract that with the shape of the mask or I could just continue modifying the bezzie a warp so I could pull these handles up a little bit pull this one down a little bit do the same thing for these to make it wider on this end and I could even maybe pull in these ones to get something a little bit more curved and pointed on the left edge let's play that back so this is with the Bezier warp and this is without you can see that it made a really big difference and now that I have that affecting the image I could do stuff like increase the width or decrease the width of the wave maybe I'll turn this down on both of them and now we've got much tighter waves over here and the looser ones over here it looks like I need to modify that warp a little bit pull this out and I know that the edges of this are not looking that great but don't worry we're gonna fix that in just a second there we go now we've got much tighter waves here and they get bigger as you go on and you can keep pushing this you could add more warps on top of each other you could keep it to just one and you can even add some more distortion effects so like turbulent displace is a really great effect for just adding some randomness to it I'm gonna move this to the top of my effect stack and then I'm gonna turn everything else off just for a second so the turbulent displace just warps it kind of in a turbulent way and you can control the amount of distortion and the size of the distortion so you can turn a really far down get kind of like a textured edge or turn it up really far to get this super warp eNOS this is probably too extreme but let's say that I want to just give a little bit of distortion overall to the entire wave and I want to just offset it like this well that's great but let's say I just cycle this forward one revolution see the distortion doesn't line up so that kind of kills my loop ability but if I come down to my evolution options and turn on a cycle evolution now that one full revolution is going to loop so I could set a keyframe at zero on the first frame go to my looping frame which is one frame forward from there and turn that up to one revolution and now that's gonna loop like that now this is probably way too fast so maybe I'll extend this out to be double the length so instead of ten frames it'll be 20 frames and play that okay so that's a little bit better of a speed and then maybe the amount is too big maybe the size is too big this is just something to give a little bit of randomness to that path before we stack on the wave warp before we stack on the second wave warp and before we stack on that bezzie a warp now this might be really difficult to notice because of all the distortions that are going on so maybe the amount does need to be turned up for you to even notice that it's there and there you go now we've just got a little bit more randomness to our it hair or smoke whatever this is going to be and maybe it's a little bit too extreme but I just wanted you to be aware of it so that you can customize your distortions as much as you'd like to I'm going to turn that turbulent is place off and now talk about these edges as you'll notice they're not very crisp and this is just because of the way that the wave warp effect works now you could turn up this anti-aliasing quality from low to high I'm sure that you've noticed by now that the rendering has kind of taken a hit with this you know these effects stacked on top of each other and I just want to point out that increase in the anti hell is seen too high it really did very little I mean you can see it is much smoother but it is not as smooth as it should be and it really adds a lot of time to the rendering so generally I'll just leave that to low and then I'm going to add another adjustment layer and this one I'll just rename soften and we're going to do a little trick that I use all the time so I'm going to add a Gaussian blur and turn this up to say 30 pixels so we've got this nice soft edge I'm gonna repeat the edge pixels so that it doesn't soften off the edges and I'm gonna add another effect levels and switch it from the channel RGB to alpha so I'm only affecting the Alpha and I'm gonna crush the Alpha just like you would crush the Kuran contrast of of any other value so I'm gonna turn this one up to something around like 120 for this one down to around 130 I'll zoom in nice and close and that's just gonna get rid of all of that blurriness now I might have done that a little bit too much you can see that these edges are still a little bit crispy so maybe I'll back this up a little bit and there we go now we've got a nice softer edge and that looks pretty decent again with that off and on you can see that that just cleans up all this kind of junky edges that the wave warps are generating when you stack them on top of each other so now we have something that looks much smoother and I could take this back into our main comp now and we've got this trail of smoke or whatever it is and I'll go to that same frame of 18 frames and loop it we've got this very nice 2d smokey looking thing and like I said we can do apply it to lots of different scenarios before I get to those different scenarios though I want to show you one other cool thing that you can do with it so let's say that I want to have an outline on this well I'm just gonna go right click on this layer styles and add a stroke that's gonna give me that nice stroke edge and I'll probably turn this down to just one pixel and then I'll make the smoke the same color as the background so I'll add a fill and fill that with my same background color there we go and that red obviously is not gonna work so what let's let's pick a different color for that layer style stroke I'll just make that this nice well off-white color and maybe it's a little bit too thin I'll increase that to two and I've got this very stylized outlined version of the smoke and you can push this even further if I were to take out some of the center of this we could put a hole or divide up the smoke so I'm just gonna duplicate this white solid I'm gonna turn up the effects so we can see what's going on for a second and I'm just gonna modify this mask I'm gonna Brett bring this one down a little bit bring this one up and then you know shrink this side a little bit as well and then I'm gonna change the mode from normal to silhouette alpha that's gonna punch a hole through the bottom layer and then I'll turn on the effects again and we've got these two lines maybe I'll push this up further to the top but you can see how this is very easily customizable so now we've got a little bit different look you can go back to the main comp and there we've got two lines I need to clean up some of this probably just because the mask is a little bit too thin over here but I could just bring this one in and there we go now we've got something like that and that gives us a different look and maybe I don't want it to have the outline look I just want to have it filled that's fine like he said this is just one of those effects that you want to play around with to see what you can come up with all right now let's take a look at some of the examples that I've already made this first one was just hair it's as simple as that I'll play it back and you can see that I've got a very simple looping animation it just 28 frames and the way that I created this was just by making multiple instances of basically the same setup keeping the same wave speed so that it all loops the same and then just offsetting them in time and changing the colors so I've got three different instances the first one looks like this and it's set up in a very similar way and you can even see that I originally had this animating out because I was trying this is the first example I made I was trying to come up with a plume of smoke so I was having this being kind of revealed but then I realized it kind of looks like hair so I just ran with that and I just looped the portion of the hair that I needed so it ended up looking like this and like I said there's just three different instances I just modified them slightly this one's skinnier and then this last one right here is even skinnier than that so just three different strands duplicated over and over and then changing the color of each of them offsetting them in time you can see they're all staggered but they all loop within that twenty-eight frames I just put the the front part of the face over and then the back hair layer behind it all and it turned out pretty nice next up I've got this long border example and I did this this style of illustration is 100% Lynn Fritz I'm just a huge fan of her go check her out if you haven't seen any of her work but I just loved her character styles and I thought this would be perfect for one of my examples so I made a character that looks a whole heck of a lot like her style of characters and then I did this wavy wispy hair behind it now this one was slightly different because the hair was a different shape let me take off the adjustment layers and we can see this is the shape that I drew for the hair so it attaches at the head I put the the waves warps on one adjustment layer and I pinned that just the left edge so that that didn't move and that stayed nice on the head it didn't move up and down and then I put this often on top of it that just cleaned up the edges a little bit and it took off all of that choppiness that the distortion generated and once that was all set up I just played around with the shape of the hair until it looked like something that I was happy with and this was the end result so I think that turned out pretty nice next example was this Lamborghini that I made in this kind of faux 3d style literally I was just shifting the paths on this it's just a whole bunch of paths that have been keyframed see there are lots and lots of keyframes but I just moved it from this pose to this pose and then back again and then I looped it for the smoke though coming off the tires will go into that and take a look I split it off into two separate streaks for each tire and to do that I just added a mask hole right there in the middle I'll solo this layer so you can see it looks like that I didn't even do that good of a job with the mask but because of the other effects it just got rid of that extra bit and I lined up those two parts with the tires and then we have the same effects wave warps and pinning all edges this time because it goes off the screen and I wanted to make sure it stayed with the tires and then we've got our softened you know this time I did a very very big blur and you can really play with that as well to see how it softens up your image without it on it looks like that with it it really just softens everything up and that gave me the smoke coming off of the car the next example I have is this rocket and this is a pretty similar to the way that I did the hair on this hair wave one but I used that bezzie a warp we go into the the actual smoke layer we've got the wave warps but then I've got a bezzie a warp which I don't actually need that second copy of anymore but bezzie a warp looks like this so I collapsed or compressed the left and right edges up at the top this is without it on and with it on so it really flattened out this bit right here and then I pulled these handles down and pulled these handles up and that just really made this nice looking shape that I thought was just nice and stylized and then I added some mask set to silhouette alpha so they punch a hole through that main layer on top of everything and again if I turn off the distortion it's as simple as this but with all distortion effects this is what it ends up looking like and on this one I even put the soften directly on top of the the other effects all on one single layer so I can just turn it off and on very easily and that's what my original mask path looked like all of that combined gives you something that looks like this and I just really like the way that stretching out those Bezier handles really straightened out the exhaust coming off of these Rockets and then when to this crazy wavy pattern and then you can see I just duplicated it twice overlap them and offset them just like I did with the hair and we get this very complex looking exhaust coming off the rocket and finally I just want to show you this last example so what I had in mind for this one was kind of like you know Mad Max fury road something in the desert where it's something really fast just zips across the the horizon line and leaves this trail of dust behind it so it's moving so fast you can't even really see what it is I put this little tiny shape layer here at the bottom to represent kind of like this thing super tiny vehicle moving really fast in the distance but it's so quick but you don't even really see it but what was interesting was that I was able to make this smoke that aligns to the ground you know it's cut off and then we have this skull appearing in the smoke and it's kind of you know Moody whatever but if I jump into this I'll show you how I made it so let's take a look there are a lot more layers involved here at the top we've got the softened so the Gaussian blur and then the crushing the Alpha and one way that you can also soften the edge after the fact if it isn't quite as soft as you want is just introduce a little bit more of a blur I probably could've played around with that to make it even smoother but for what I was doing that was plenty soft enough then we've got this skull layer so if I solo this you're not gonna see anything because it's set to silhouette alpha but it's just a solid layer with the masks of this skull and it has turbulent displace wave warps to give it this this distortion and the reason why I have this outside above this warps too dorsen was because if it was below it I'll turn the effects off and put it below the warps it just distorted it way too much so I wanted to have that skull distorted less so I just copied and pasted the effects and turned all the settings down I set it to silhouette alpha so it punched a hole through that white and there we go now on top of that I had some of these other layers punching holes through the background smoke as well let's start at the bottom this is my base layer and I animated this with masks so I'll just press here to bring up the mask paths you can see that I kind of just had it start in the bottom right corner and very quickly grow as if that vehicle was moving across the the desert and the smoke rose highest from where it started and then it just continued to grow and then eventually kind of collapsed on itself and with the effects on top of it it kind of starts to disappear so that's what's going on with that layer and then I just added another one and this one comes in a little bit later and it starts off right here so I just added basically another plume and they meet up eventually then I added a third just to take out a little bit of that gap a little bit more give it a little bit more uniqueness we've got a couple of holes showing up in the smoke then I used a layer to punch a hole into everything this is just another mask don't know it does have some keyframes on it so I guess I animated it a little bit on the position as well as the masks and this is all working together so that it all appears on as if that vehicle moving across the desert is pushing it on and then after a few seconds of showing that skull it all starts to go away so the dust starts to rise those masks start to collapse and then I brought in some more layers which this top one doesn't even have a mask on it it just moves up again they're all set to silhouette alpha so you can't see them they're just taking away from everything and because I have that rounded edges adjustment layer it doesn't cut it off super harshly see what the distortion and the rounded edges off it just gets cut off very very sharply there but with that soften edges it rounds off the corners and the warps you can't even really tell that it's a straight line and then I just used a couple other mats to punch holes in the smoke and kind of break it up and expanded it out and in fact I even animated the mask expansion so I didn't have to move any of the mask paths I just had this one path that was shrunken down on the expansion and expands out to completely get rid of the smoke that's left when you put all that together you end up with something that looks like this putting all of those layered on top of each other stacked together gives you something that's very interesting and complex looking even though all you're really doing is stacking a whole bunch of effects on top of each other so there you go have fun messing around with this effect and see what you can come up with play with the different shapes of the masks try animating them layer them stack different mats on top of each other and mess with all the different effect settings also try putting multiple copies of the same effect on top of each other and adjusting the settings like I did add in that turbulent displace just play around with it to see what we what you can come up with and if you come up with anything interesting and you post it line be sure to tag me anywhere on social media at Jake in motion I would love to see what you made I hope that you found this tutorial useful if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask and be sure that you're following me on Instagram at Jake in motion so that you can see the behind the scenes of when I'm making new content for tutorials and others things like my skill share classes and you can stay up to date with me there thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 218,907

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects, 2D, Smoke, Hair

Id: 0nd1Zs-NINI

Length: 30min 52sec (1852 seconds)

Published: Fri May 11 2018