3D Water - After Effects Tutorial (No Plugins!)

hi I'm Noel Powell from creationfx.com and in this video I'll be sharing the secret to creating 3d water in After Effects so this is what we're going to make and I'll be doing it from scratch no third-party plugins required so you can just follow along with me and with this same technique you can make a variety of different 3d water effects like these more abstract particle animations but this is what I'm interested in I want realistic water so we're going to try to make this as realistic as possible and it is 3D you'll you'll be able to move your camera around the waves or create ocean flyovers and stuff like that now there is more than one way to make 3D water in After Effects without plug-ins and actually at this point I may have spent more time making water than anyone literally many months developing water effects for several templates over the years so depending on what kind of water scene you need you might want to check out ocean for after effects that one is the most realistic option because it uses real water footage and makes a 3D scene from it and my last template is a huge template called landscaper which lets anyone make any kind of 3D landscape that they want and with that one you can create bodies of water like oceans or lakes or Rivers simply by drawing the water on the ground layer with the pen tool and then this tutorial covers another technique I use this for a template called pixel Pusher which has these water presets in them as well as 3D Land and also just a bunch of abstract particle designs that are easy to customize all of them made with the same basic technique that I'm about to show you so I'll leave the links to those templates if you want to check out those products they're inexpensive the work's already done for you and they have a ton of customization options so all right what what is this technique I'm talking about the secret to 3d water is the CC Ball action effect not many people know it can do stuff like this because it's not at all obvious but it's really an incredible effect there are a few limitations though so let me explain those before we get started first the water is not completely smooth so if you look close you might be able to see the individual balls that make up the water but as I'll show you that gets minimized if we increase the resolution of the effect and there are even some effects we can add to make it look smoother the downside of doing that is the effect gets pretty slow so that's the second limitation but we'll keep it low res while we create it to keep it running fast and then we'll increase the number of balls in the end before we render a third limitation is while CC Ball action is a 3d effect that can interact with your camera it's on a 2d layer and that means you can't really have something going through the water or sticking out of it everything has to be either behind it or overlaid on top of it all right let's do this I am pumped are you pumped I'm good I'm I'm going to try to do this quickly all right so I'm in After Effects and I've got this HD comp open it's 1920 by 1080 and the first thing we need is a solid layer so I'll go to layer new and solid and we'll name this water or water tree you know when you're watching a tutorial and the person tries to type a Word and they screw it all up and you're like what's wrong with this idiot why can't he just type a simple word well feel free to say that now I think it's the pressure and you're trying to type real quick anyway it can be any color that you want this layer and the size is going to be bigger than our comp so I'm actually going to make this six thousand by three thousand and click ok and the first thing we need to add to this is a texture so with the layer selected I'll go to effect and in noise and grain We'll add a turbulent noise effect so we need to make a water texture I'm going to set this fractal type to Dynamic and soft linear is fine and we'll invert it so you can already see this is looking more like water let's lower the contrast to 70 and we'll open up the transform properties and I'm going to uncheck uniform scaling so that we can adjust the width and height independently and we'll set the width to 250 and the height to 125 so it's a two to one ratio and that stretches the texture a little bit and that's going to help us make it look like we've got more water it's going to kind of imitate a telephoto lens and make it look like the the water extends further into the distance all right next complexity we can leave that at six but open up the sub settings and we'll just decrease the sub-influence to something like 48 I've got these settings all written down because I've done this before and you should probably just do as I do you can always change the settings later but for now I it's probably better to just put in the same numbers that I'm putting in you can see that that reduced the amount of detail in the waves and that's it for turbulent noise we'll close that and now we can add our CC Ball action effects so we'll go to effect and it's in simulation right here and I'm going to scale down our layer so we can see the whole thing just for now so a lot of people they open up this effect and they play around with these settings and they try and figure out what they're supposed to do with it you can see it it converts your layer into a bunch of little balls and you can scatter them around or or you can rotate This Plane you can twist it and come up with these completely useless Helix structure which I don't know why you would ever need this unless you are making DNA or something but it's it's it's kind of confusing it's hard to see what the application for this effect is and so it's no wonder that people just play with it for a minute and then never open it up again but if you dig deeper there is a hidden setting which completely unlocks the potential for this effect so let me reset all this and in the twist property we're going to set this to brightness and let me rotate this so now when I increase the twist angle it's actually pushing these balls up or down based on the brightness value of those pixels and this is 3D so we can add a camera to this I'll go to layer new and camera and uh make it a 50 millimeter making sure all these settings match and I'll click OK and now I can use my camera tools that's the c key I'll keep hitting the c key to orbit around just by clicking dragging and I'll zoom out so you can see what's kind of Happening Here the balls are being pushed out and uh we've got this crazy looking 3D object now and this is how it was possible for me to make all kinds of abstract particle designs for the pixel Pusher template you can get a ton of different looks just by using different kinds of textures and adding effects to it you can see that in the middle the balls are not being pushed out but the further away from the middle you get the further the balls are being pushed so actually to fix that what we're going to have to do is crop off half of this layer and then this middle line here will become a horizon line so let me reset this effect and I'm just going to rotate this flat so I'll I'll make it negative 90 degrees and we'll just add a little bit of twist to start pushing those pixels up and we got to set this to brightness all right and our camera is in a different position now so I'm going to reset that okay now we're in front of it and I scaled my layer down so I'm going to set that back to to 100 percent and the balls are really big right now and that's going to let the the effect run really fast so we'll just keep it like that for now but uh I mentioned we have to crop the back half so let's do that now I'll rotate this a little bit more so we can see it all right so we want to add a linear wipe effect to this layer so I'll go to effect and in transition go to linear wipe and we'll put the linear wipe effect before all of the other effects and I'll set this to 180 degrees and we'll increase this transition completion to about 48 almost a halfway point and we'll close that and you can see it's starting to come together here if you opened up the turbulent noise and we'll move the texture and it's hard to see because I went low res but the the waves are actually moving because we're moving the texture and the evolution we can adjust the evolution and the waves will change shape we'll do more with that later but for now let's just set the size of our water surface so first of all I'm going to move our camera back I'm opening up the transform properties of our camera our camera is supposed to be and I already know where I want my camera I'm going to put this at negative 200. and negative 8 500 pixels back and then the point of interest um I'm going to set the Y to 1000. to point the camera down a little bit all right so back on our water layer we're going to add one more effect I'll go to effect and then distort and add a transform effect and we're going to move this right above the turbulent noise effect and the cool thing about this is it'll let us easily adjust the width and height of our water so I'll uncheck uniform scale and we'll have to increase the width a little bit just to extend these edges so we'll set the width to 105 and before I do this I'm going to set my rotation back to negative 90 degrees to lay the water flat and we're going to crank up the height until we can no longer see the edge of the water I'll set this to 440. so what that did is it increased the resolution it added a lot of balls which means it's going to run slower now so let's increase the grid spacing in our CC Ball action that's increasing the spacing between balls which means there are less balls and I'm sorry for saying the word balls so many times but not really and now we're ready to animate our waves so in our timeline we'll open up our turbulent noise effect and in these transform properties we're going to be animating the offset turbulence to move the waves and the evolution to change their shape so depending on what you want if if you've got a river you probably want the waves to move from side to side if you're doing a flyover you want the waves to come toward us that's what I'm going to do and I mean there are different ways to do this you could just add keyframes I think what I'm going to do since we might want to adjust this later I'm going to add some expression controls so we can easily adjust the speed later on we'll go to effect expression controls and we'll add a slider control and I'll duplicate it a couple times so this one we can call Evolution speed this one will be X speed and this will be y speed and in case you didn't notice I didn't mess up at all in typing those and I also put my pants on by myself this morning and next we're gonna we're gonna hold down the alt or option key and then click on these stopwatch icons next to those properties and that opens up the expression boxes and now we just need to connect these properties to the correct control up here so we'll do Evolution first and uh we're going to use this pick whip tool here and just drag this and connect it to the slider for the evolution speed so now we've got this reference to that slider and we're just going to write some really quick Expressions to do this so I'm going to basically create an abbreviation for this slider and we'll call it e and I'll Define what e is so E equals this slider and I'll add a semicolon to end that line and then I'll go to the next line and all we'll do for this is e times time and what that's going to do is that each second that our timeline plays it's going to add this amount to our Evolution value so our Evolution will just continue to increase over time set this we're going to have it go at a speed of 350 per second okay next let's do this one this one's a little bit more complex because we've got two values we've got an x value which is horizontal and then a y value which is up and down so first we'll come up with a variable for each of those so we'll just do x equals and then we'll pick whip the X speed semicolon to end the line and then we'll do y equals the Y speed slider and that line and we need this to Output a value that has two different numbers so to do that we put it in Brackets X's first we'll do X times time and then comma and then y times time and that's it so for these values I want to do a flyover so we're going to leave the X alone and for the Y speed since I want it to look like we're flying forward pretty fast we'll use a higher value like 500. all right that should be good we can always change these later to whatever we want I'm going to close this okay we're actually getting kind of close here let's just look at the texture real quick without the CC Ball action and we'll play it back and that's what it looks like before it's converted to a bunch of little balls and we just need to add a few more effects to this uh let's add a some color correction of this this one really doesn't matter you can add whatever the color correction effect of your choice is I like doing the tritone and I'm just going to adjust the mid tones to some kind of blue color and we could also Fade Out this horizon line you don't have to do this but if we play this back you can tell that the horizon line is not that far away so you can see the waves are moving pretty quick right here not really like a horizon line should be so my solution for that was to just fade it out and then it kind of looks like it's a foggy day so what I did for that is I just added another linear wipe effect we can just duplicate this one bring it to the bottom increases a bit I might do one big one with a high feather value and then duplicate it and then do a smaller one just to make it fade out more and more the further into the horizon okay what else uh we could add a background of this we'll go to layer new solid and this one we want to make it comp size call it background and put it underneath your water and on the background layer let's add a linear wipe effect and that's under generate or gradient ramp that's what I meant we can have the gradient start here I can go from white to maybe a sky blue and one of my worst fears right now is is that a bunch of people are watching this and saying that's not sky blue because honestly I don't have a clue I'm really colorblind okay something else we could add to this if we want is some depth of field blurring so we could have the foreground in focus and the background out of focus or vice versa we can't do that in the camera because this is still a 2d layer but we can fake it let's add a new layer this one will be an adjustment layer and we'll call this one depth of field blurring and it needs a camera lens blur effect so right now it's just affecting the whole thing evenly so we need to add a map layer to tell it which parts of the image we want to be in Focus or out of focus so let's add a new solid layer we'll call this one blur map and we'll add a gradient and uh the grading can start down at the bottom and let's have it end about where our Horizon was and we can turn this layer off now we don't want to see it and then in our camera lens blur effect we need to set the blur map so we'll set this to our blur map layer and make sure this says effects and masks so right now the background is in focus and foreground is blurry let's turn it up so we can see but if we change this blur focal distance we'll just crank it all the way up so now the foreground is in focus we can set it to somewhere in the middle let's turn this down so that could be a cool effect you could put some text and have it look like it's floating right here in the middle of your scene it's totally optional you don't have to use this if you don't want and I guess the only thing left to do is to is to add more balls and get this looking nice and smooth so on our water layer we want to open up the CC Ball action we're going to set grid spacing all the way to zero and this is lighter than I expected and I think it's because of the ball size so if let me turn off this blurring so a couple things I discovered first of all you might not be able to see it sometimes you'll see gaps in between the rows of balls and then also you can see some weird Stripes here and up here as well this just the patterns that it makes because we've got all these these rows of repeating balls but I discovered if you make the balls bigger I'm going to make this 150. it does a good job of of taking care of those patterns as well as filling in the gaps between balls so now that's much smoother and uh depending on how high you want your waves you could turn up the twist angle a little bit and again that might have the result of of creating gaps in between the rows something else you can do to help smooth out this texture is you could add a cc Force motion blur effect and increase the shutter angle and you only need four or five motion blur samples and that'll smooth out the whole thing by giving it a little bit of motion blur you can't just turn on motion blur here because uh the layer is not really moving so it this wouldn't work I'm going to delete this because I don't think we need it so I mentioned that you can play with a Twist angle to adjust your wave height or you could increase the contrast of your texture that would have the same result and you can also get different kinds of waves so if I change this to something like basic basic is a smoother texture so now we don't have those sharp Peaks it's more rounded out and we could even decrease the complexity or the sub influence and that would make it smoother or we could increase the scale I'll keep the two to one ratio and make this one thousand five hundred maybe increased contrast so that's a very different look it almost looks like clouds or Rolling Hills if you change the color I'm gonna undo all that and there you go you see I told you we didn't need any plugins you didn't believe me but uh don't you feel silly now After Effects isn't really designed for this kind of 3D stuff but there's almost always a way to do what you want by hacking one of the built-in effects so hopefully you learned a few things and again if this water doesn't do what you need there are three good options at creation effects that look great and the work is already done so it'll save you a ton of time um pixel Pusher the one that uses a cc Ball action effect and really pushes the limit of that effect it has all kinds of particle animations included and they're easy to customize or you could create your own without dropping a ton of money on a particle Plug-In or the ocean template that one has over 60 different water texture clips from which you can easily build realistic 3d water scenes in After Effects and that one will let you stick stuff in the water like a boat or a whale or whatever you want and then my favorite is landscaper which lets you make awesome landscape animations with Waters rivers or oceans it has 30 finished Landscapes included and automatic sunsets and lighting and you can create time lapses and add custom fog or clouds or waterfalls and wind and shooting stars auroras it's got everything you need to quickly create cool nature scenes and if you want to browse through the other effects at creationfx.com there's a lot of useful and creative stuff there all designed to be easy to customize creation trippy effects has a huge collection of trippy effects so you can just drop in your footage and get some crazy psychedelic or mesmerizing looks or you can create a variety of hypnotic animations with it infinite Horizon lets you turn your footage into a custom perspective bending scene micro lets you create your own custom microscopic animations that imitate what things look like under a microscope there are a bunch of animal templates that let you easily animate animals and add them to your scenes there's flocks which is a popular template for creating custom flocks of birds in After Effects or part of that same series as swarms for making swarms of insects or schools for creating schools of fish the creation artifacts template lets you give your footage the look of animated artwork and it includes just about every medium that you could think of so you can make your footage look like claymation or a pencil sketch or a van Gogh painting and over 50 other art styles so those are just a few of the templates you'll find there I've been doing this a long time and hopefully for a long time more in the future or until AI takes my job but until then I'll keep pumping out the effects and free after effects presets and tutorials so subscribe for those and I'll see you guys next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Creation Effects

Views: 39,195

Keywords: water, after effects, adobe after effects, 3d, 3D water, 3-D, ocean, waves, realistic, real, how to make, no plugins, no plug-ins, without plugins, vfx, water animation, animation, animate, liquid, lake, cc ball action, particles, effect, visual effects, motion graphics, tutorial

Id: l3DE7ErVDuY

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023