After Effects Tutorial - Realistic Water Motion Using Fractal Noise as Displacement Map

hello this is andrew ford and today we're going to look at making realistic water movement on a still photo using fractal noise here's a photo from scotland i've masked out the water so as you can see we have one layer with everything but water and one layer with just the water portion of the photo it's a very rough mask as you can see so next step is to make a new solid and then apply fractal noise to the solid so we'll go to effects noise and grain fractal noise looking at the effect controls you can leave the fractal type set on basic the noise type can be anything except block so we'll use spline i'm going to punch up the contrast here so we have a greater difference between the black and white areas this will affect the displacement of the water later on now let's make this a 3d layer so we can lay it down in 3d space to match the water in our photograph if we don't do this we'll have larger waves in our water but by laying this image down to mimic our photo we're in essence flattening the displacement of the water for more subtle and realistic movement let's also make sure we're covering the area of water you can scale this fractal noise layer as needed next we'll uncheck uniform scaling and bring the width up a bit and the height down a lot this will help us give the water the motion that is accurate for our scene later on the last thing we need to do is work with the offset turbulence let's set a keyframe at the beginning and then go to the end and set another keyframe by adjusting the offset turbulence to have some downward movement and a little bit of side to side movement that looks like it'll be good now let's pre-compose this layer and move all attributes inside we'll call it displacement pc for pre-comp let's move it to the bottom of our composition and next let's highlight our middle layer which is the water portion of the photo let's add a displacement map to this we'll go to effects distort displacement map we'll set the displacement map layer to layer 3 which is our displacement map precomp layer also under displacement map behavior select stretch map to fit now let's render this and see what we have that's looking pretty realistic but i think we can bump up the movement of the water a little more let's go to our map horizontal and vertical displacement and increase the value a little bit while this is rendering i'd like to review a few other ways we can adjust the fractal noise layer to affect how the water moves we can increase the contrast of fractal noise we can change the scaling we can even adjust the angle that we have the layer rotated to but for the most drastic changes adjusting the offset turbulence values will be your best bet now this is rendered let's take a look at our composition i think that's looking pretty nice and fits in well with the scene i remember many small adjustments can be made thank you

Channel: Andy Ford Video

Views: 13,199

Keywords: adobe, after effects, fractal noise, water, displacement, motion graphics, andyfordvideo, tutorial, video tutorial, elements, andy ford, video

Id: GDjcDaRaC3A

Length: 2min 59sec (179 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020