After Effects Tutorial - Underwater scene with light rays and bubbles (Deep Thought Pt1)

hello Lawrence Grayson back again for short form video comm with another art effects tutorial for you to get your teeth into now if you've already seen the preview you'll have a pretty good idea of what's coming up but for those of you who haven't and here's what I'll be showing you how to do today [Music] [Music] now if you watch the YouTube preview at the 360p preset you'll probably have missed out a lot of the details because it doesn't really do it justice at that that level of compression so I'll just run through the effects that will be covered here essentially what I'll be showing you is how to create this deep underwater look with light rays coming down bubbles running up and a nice vignette on it what you may not be able to see all that clearly is the animated texture we've got in the background just to give it that slightly cloudy look and in the second part of the tutorial because I don't think I'll be able to fit it all into one I'll be showing you how to create a lens blur effect with a depth matte which is what we've used to create this gradual blurring effect on the text as it pans from right to left and also although you can't see it all that clearly that's why these bubbles even though they're in a 2d layer sharp in this area and then quite add a focus on that area now as always I won't be using any third-party plugins here not even trapcode particular for these rising particles so you can do this with cs3 cs4 or cs5 and as always I'll be posting the project file for this on my website the short form video comm for free so if you haven't done it already go there sign up and download it okay so that's enough chat let's get started first thing to do create self a new composition using the settings that you want this to be now I'll give you warning in advance the lens blur effect is actually really processor intensive so I'll be sticking to the Powell widescreen square pixel preset the project followed I'll be uploading is actually in the 720p preset but like I say if you're running the lens blur effect particularly on two layers as we will be here be prepared for some fairly extensive rendering times so we'll call this deep thought and leave it at the default duration that I have of 10 seconds and hit OK once you've done that create a new solid and we'll call this our deep blue background doesn't really matter what color you make it because we'll be adding a color effect to it now those of you that have watched my previous tutorials you will know that what my favorite effects is actually the four color gradients so go to your effects and presets panel type in for color drag the for color gradient effect and drop it onto your background solid and it will create these rather garish default colors so next step is to go to your effects controls panel and in color one we're gonna pick a nice cool-looking teal color and I'll just use the eyedropper to match up all the colors so that when I hit the color button I can play with them in the same tonal range now you don't have to do this you can maybe make some of them a little bit bluer a little bit greener depending on the effect that you want to create it's entirely up to you and I'm also going to create a point of brightness towards the top maybe make that one just a little bit darker and I'll increase the blend to about 150 just to soften it all off so once you've done that you've got your base color for your motion graphic the next step is to create the rising bubbles now you may make a mistake of assuming they're gonna go straight for the CC bubbles effect but that's really not what I'm after while it's a handy effect in some circumstances as you can see it's really not that subtle and certainly not what I'm after so I'll just undo that no effect I'm going to use is the CC snow effect now I use this in previous tutorial to create some rising particles and that's exactly what I'm going to do here so apply the CC snow effect to your deep blue background solid and then we'll go to our effect controls panel just to make a few tweaks I'm going to take the amount down to 30 but obviously the number of particles you want to include it's entirely up to you now I'm going to drop the speed down to minus 0.2 and by turning into a negative value essentially reverses the direction so rather than snowflakes falling down we now have bubbles rising upwards now if you want to stop them from wobbling as much as they do here all you need to do is drop the amplitude value down to one and they'll still wobble they just won't do it so fast okay so that's step two out of the way step three is to create the sun light rays coming down from the top and that's actually a lot easier than you might think so right-click and create a new solid or Coy's light rays set it to white make sure it's the composition size and hit OK go back to your effects and presets panel and find the ever-faithful fractal noise effect and drag that on to your light rays solid and it'll give you the default but instead of using the default or actually going to use an animation preset just to save a little bit of time so go to the fractal noise animation presets in your effect controls panel and select the curtain preset and that will give you this nice simple curtain preset just like the name suggests and what we're going to do here is just animate it by using the evolution settings now if you look at the evolution settings you'll find that there's a five second animation built into this preset by default and it gives us this effect so all I'm gonna do it's just drag the keyframes to the beginning and the end of our ten-second project and I'll just change the end keyframe to a value of two revolutions rather than just the one because we'd like it to move a little bit faster across the ten second period now before we move on we need to pre compose the light rays layer so hit control shift + C and I'll just rename it light rays pre-comp make sure to move all attributes into the new composition button is checked and hit OK now that we've done that we can apply all manner of effects to the pre composition without you breaking the fractal noise effect that we've already applied and the fact that I'm looking for in particular is the corner pin so go to the effects & presets panel find your corner pin effect and drag that on to your pre comp I'm just gonna scroll out with the mask wheel so everywhere I can see what I'm doing a little bit better now often corner pinning is used to match objects onto planes in your in your motion graphic here I'm just going to be using it as a simple distortion mesh and to do that I'm just going to drag the position markers for each corner just to create this angled curtain so that's about the effect that I want if I scrub through it you can see where we're going with this now to blend that into the watercolor beneath it you just right-click on the pre-comp go to blending mode and select soft light and that very simply blends the white and black values into the colors underneath but it's a little bit on the harsh side so I just want to tweak that a little bit very simply make sure the pre-comp layer is selected hit T to bring up the opacity and we'll just drop it down to where about 30% and it's looking a little bit better now obviously it's not perfect you may want to go back into your fractal noise pre-comp and tweak the settings a little bit just to soften it off or maybe add a fast blur one of the things I like to do is just add a quick elliptical mask so go to your ellipse tool and with the pre comp layer selected she's going to create an ellipse over the top tall down the mask values and set the feather to about 150 pixels and then you can play around with the expansion values just to soften off the edges I'm just going to lift that path up a little bit and by softening it off it makes it look a lot more effective okay next step is to create some of that texture I mentioned at the beginning of the video so right-click create another new solid and we'll call it texture leave it at white and hit OK go back to your fix with presets panel and once again find the fractal noise effect drag it onto your texture layer right click the texture layer select blending mode and color Dodge now obviously that effect is a little bit extreme so I'm just going to go back into the fractal noise effects and we'll trim it just by dropping the brightness values down and maybe the contrast values down as well and also hit T to bring up opacity and we'll trim the opacity a bit maybe just down to about 50% and as you can see it creates a nice subtle texture layer which makes it look a little bit more like ocean water now again if you want to animate this you go to your evolution settings make sure the timeline indicator is at the bottom because this one doesn't come in with any preset evolution animation check the stopwatch to create a keyframe at the beginning of the timeline hit the end key to take the timeline indicator to the end of your project and we'll just type in one to give it a rotation value of 360 degrees now it's a little bit subtle if I solo that you can see that it's just creating that nice subtle shift between the light and dark again you can probably improve on this with your own bit of experimentation but that'll do just fine for now okay so we're nearly there one more step before I close this down and move on to part two and that's to create a nice simple vignette so you probably already know how to do this by now particularly if you watch previous previous tutorials so we're gonna right click create a new solid make sure it's black just call it vignette and hit OK grab your lips tool I'm going to create a an off-center ellipse go to the mask properties change it from add to subtract feather it to about 250 pixels and then play around with the expansion just to give it the size and coverage that you want and then we'll just drop the opacity down to about 55% and I'll just render them out and we'll take a look okay so that's the render finished looking pretty cool we've got our light rays our texture our particles and our vignette so if you like to find out how to use depth maps and the lens blur effect to finish this project off keep an eye open for the second part coming soon once again when this is all finished I'll be posting the final project file for this on the website short form video comm so by all means go there and grab it when it's ready as always I hope you found this useful thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: short-form video

Views: 370,399

Keywords: after effects, ae, cs3, cs4, cs5, tute, tutorial, water, deep, blue, light, rays, sunshine, particles, bubbles, cloudy, no plug-ins, cc snow, vignette, fractal noise

Id: pjdmXYRzAWg

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2010