Beautiful liquid simulations using Caustics and Wave World | After Effects Tutorial

what is that my friends this is Danny from plug-and-play and today we're going to be learning how to make some super cool realistic liquid animations instead of After Effects we're going to be using the Cossacks effect and the wave world effect we've gotten some feedback from our fans saying that they want to learn about more native effects inside of After Effects so what's wrong with it anyways let's get right into it so I have a new composition here it's 1920 by 1080 at 30 frames per second and we can go ahead and make a new shape layer in here let's look up at an effect called wave world and let's drag this onto this new shape layer now what wave world does it simulates 3d waves instead of our After Effects composition and if we go into wireframe controls and do vertical rotation we can rotate around this to see what it looks like what's going on a simulation and let's crank this grid resolution up to be 150 so now let's rotate back down and what we want to do is make sure that we're maximizing the space in between these two boxes now this top box is going to be representing the white limits and the bottom box is going to be representing the black limits so as you can see we're crossing this threshold on this white limit up here so we can go ahead and go into height map controls and let's crank down this contrast so that everything is fitting inside of these two boxes now if we scrub through our timeline we can see that everything is fitting inside of these two boxes now let's go inside a producer one and let's set the height length to be point zero five and let's set the width to be point zero five as well we can go ahead and let's increase the frequency to be one point five and then let's decrease this amplitude to be about point for now let's scrub through in our timeline and make sure that we're still inside of the bounds of these boxes so as you can see we're pushing the limit just a little bit right here on this white limit let's go ahead and decrease that contrast a little bit more alright let's go to the beginning of our timeline and let's go about ten frames forward and let's set a keyframe on this amplitude in the producer now let's go about another 20 frames forward and we can set this amplitude to be zero now let's go ahead and set a keyframe on the opacity of this layer and let's set that keyframe to be at the ending keyframe of this amplitude and then let's go about 30 frames forward and make this opacity zero so let's switch on over to the height map preview and we can see what this effect is going to be spitting out now as you can see this effect is generating these waves that are represented by black and white values so we can go ahead and less pre-comp this and let's call this map let's make a new shape layer and let's look up an effect called caustics so caustics was designed to be used with this wave world effect and it basically takes the data from this wave world effect and makes it look a little bit more realistic so let's go ahead and let's set the water surface to be map now as you can see we're starting to generate these waves that are dictated by the black and white values in this map layer so we can go ahead and play around with all these different settings here we can increase the wave height we can go ahead and increase smoothing there's all these different things that you guys can play around with and I really encourage you to do so but let's go ahead and let's set the surface opacity to be zero and let's go ahead and make a new shape layer and let's make this the color of what we want the ending water to look like so I'm gonna make it this nice teal blue right down here maybe something like that great let's go ahead and drag in our logo I'm just going to pop on over to Chrome here copy this after effects logo to our clipboard go back to After Effects and I'm gonna pasta that in with copy pasta great let's go ahead and shrink this down a little bit and let's pre-compose both this new shape layer and also this logo and we can call this water let's drag that below this caustics effect and let's set the bottom to be this water layer so if we go to the beginning of our timeline here and we start playing you can see that these waves are affecting this new pre-comp layer here now if we want to reveal this layer on let's go ahead and inside of water let's go to the beginning of our timeline here let's go 10 frames forward and let's make a new ellipse mask on the middle of this logo so we can make it right about here let's cover the entire thing so right there looks good and let's go ahead and jump inside of this mask and let's set a keyframe on mass expansion and let's also add some feathering to this a little bit maybe about 100 pixels now let's shift this keyframe forward about 30 frames and in mass expansion let's crank this down so that we start out with nothing so negative seven hundred twenty five pixels does it for me now let's jump back into our local reveal layer and see what's going on here so as you can see we're getting this nice logo reveal that looks super liquidy and we can go ahead and let's duplicate this map layer let's bring it to the top here and let's set this to be overlay this is just going to give us a little bit more contrast in our effect and let's go inside of this caustics effect and this is where we can really start experimenting so like I said you can experiment with smoothing wave height we can go inside of material and increase this specular reflection a bunch of different stuff that we can do increase classic strength so please experiment as much as you want with this effect because there's a lot of stuff to experiment with alright so a couple last things that I went ahead and did I went ahead and added some key frames to the specular reflection here and I set the any keyframe to be about zero and then the beginning keyframe to be about point two to one and that just adds a little bit more contrast to these waves here so they stand out a little bit more also I went inside of map and I set the frequency of this producer to be one point seven five so I have this new composition set up and inside of that composition I have this bottom layer setup and inside of here is just the After Effects logo that's overlaid on top of this pool tile going on so if we jump back out inside of this main comp we can go ahead and add a new shape layer and let's add a fractal noise to this let's set the fractal type to be swirly and we can go ahead and set the contrast to be about 115 and then let's all click on this evolution stopwatch and let's type in time times 100 so as we scrub through in our timeline here you can see that the evolution is going to be changing based on the time and now let's go ahead and add an effect called box blur to this let's set the blur radius to be about 15 and let's make sure that we have this repeat edge pixels toggled great we can go ahead and pre count this let me call this map again let's send that to the back and let's go to this top layer and let's add caustics to that and instead of water surface let's set that to be mat and right off the bat we have this great look in pool swirly type effect going on and if we scrub through in our timeline here you can see that because the evolution is changing in that fractal noise it's going to be driving this pool effect only on so that's looking pretty cool let's pop on over to Chrome and I have this cool looking sky image going on so I'm going to copy that and I'm going to pasta that inside of our composition here okay cool let's scale down this so it fits inside of the composition and let's send that to the back let's go inside of this cossacs effect again and let's set this guy to be this new sky image we imported now we can play around with the intensity of this so if we want the sky to be showing up quite a bit we have all those clouds in there we can crank up this intensity and so the sky image is going to be overlaid on top of this caustics effect and it's going to be affected by that caustics effect as well so we'll set that back to be about point two and now let's go inside of lighting and inside of here we can play around with all these different parameters if we go inside of the light type we can leave us as this n' source and we can play around with the ambient light the light intensity we can go ahead and change the color of the light so if we wanted this to be more sun-like we could probably change this to be some orange color like this now we can go inside of light type and we can change that to be point source so this is going to be more like a lamp as pointed at this or a spot light as opposed to like the Sun and we can play around with the position of this and really mess around with this to our hearts content I'm gonna switch on back to distance source inside a material like we were talking about before we can play around with how the reflections are going to be working how highlighted these white points are play around with that I'm going to be duplicating this map layer and let's send Matt to the top let's look up an effect called levels let's add a levels to this unless just increase this contrast by sliding in these sliders together let's look up an effect called shift channels and we'll set take alpha from luminance and now let's go ahead and add an effect called vector blur let's Stello this layer for a second and we'll set the amount to be about 25 can unsolo this layer and let's overlay this layer on top of all this now we can increase this amount if we want to as well and the reason that we're doing this if we go inside of chrome and look up a pool you can see that we have these highlighted points where the sun is converging on the bottom of the pool and we got all these different streaks going across and so that's what we're trying to accomplish with this map layer that we're adding all these effects to so I might turn this down a little bit more I'm gonna set this overlay to be about 50% and that's going to give us more of this effect here so with all these different effects that going on it's going to take a little bit to render but as you can see these results are pretty awesome I mean it looks really realistic and like I was saying before this is an effect where you really need to get in and just experiment as much as possible so we can increase this water depth and that's going to distort this bottom layer a little bit more we can play around with the refractive index and that's going to distort it as well we can change the surface color we can get rid of the surface opacity entirely so that is just going to be showing the bottom layer it's not going to be tinted at all we can play around with the caustic strength and that's going to be providing a little bit more contrast going on obviously you don't want to crank it up too much or maybe you do maybe that's what you're going for so I have another new composition set up and inside of this one I have our After Effects logo that I keyed out the middle and added a fill too and the behind that I have this new shape layer with a black background now we can go ahead and pre compose both of these and let's call this ground ground let's add another new shape layer and let's add a wave world to that shape layer inside of ground let's set the ground to be that new ground pre-comp and what's going set a simulation and we'll set this grid resolution to be about 300 this time we can hide this ground layer and let's see exactly what's going on now so wave world is looking at this ground pre-comp and it's looking at all the different black and white values inside of here now since the background is completely black and since this logo is completely white it's going to be making this height ground map where only the whitest values are the highest so as you can see everything that's black is down here and everything that's white which is the logo is shifted up here and height so let's go inside of this wave world effect and let's decrease the height of this ground and we want it to be right below where the surface is so we can rotate down the wireframe here let's make sure that we're just below the surface I think I actually got it pretty good maybe we can go up a little bit more right there seems great okay let's go about 10 frames forward and let's go into this producer and let's set a keyframe on the amplitude again and we can leave that at point 5 to begin with and we can go about 20 frames forward and let's set this amplitude to be zero what's going through the height map here and see what we're looking at so as you can see we have these waves being generated but this time they're being affected by this underlying ground layer so wherever that ground layer is which is the After Effects logo that's going to be impacting how these waves are moving about now let's like both of these guys and what Spri tempest and let's call this wave world let's make another new shape layer and you guessed it we're going to be adding caustics to this let's go ahead and let's set the surface opacity to be zero and let's make another new shape layer let's make this the color of the background that we want the water to be so again I might do this blue right around tears probably gonna be good and let's jump back into wave world go into ground let's copy this after effects logo or whatever logo you are using let's go back to to our main comp let's paste this in here this time we're going to be getting rid of both the fill and the color and let's pre-compose both the logo and this new blue background layer and we can call this bottom let's drag this new caustics effective atop and let's set the bottom to be bottom and water surface to be wave world now let's go to the beginning of our timeline let's go ten frames forward let's go into this bottom layer and let's set some key frames on this logo I'm going to be key framing the opacity so we'll start it out at 0% and then let's go forward about 20 frames and let's set this to be a hundred percent now let's see what we're looking at here so we have this pretty cool reveal going on where the waves are being affected by this logo but it's happening a little bit long for me I want to kind of wrap this animation up a little bit shorter so let's go back into wave world let's go ahead and click on our wave world shape layer and let's add an opacity keyframe at two seconds let's shift that keyframe about 20 frames back we'll go another 10 frames forward and we'll make it zero here so that's going to just wrap up this effect a little bit quicker and now we probably want to play around with the caustics here as you can see there's not a whole lot of depth going on and these waves aren't really expanding beyond just a logo so let's go inside of here maybe crank up some of the wave height maybe add some specular reflection let's set this smoothing to be about 15 and we're starting to look pretty good now this is going to be different than the first effect that we did because the waves are being affected exactly by what the logo is so we get this really cool liquid logo reveal going on and like I've mentioned every single time please play around these effects as much as you want like you can get some really cool-looking unique effects using this I hope that you guys learned a thing or two about this commonly overlooked effect for how old it is it's a three powerful effect and you can do a lot of stuff with it so please get in there mess around with all those parameters and share with us on social whatever you make we're gonna be doing some more tutorials I made up After Effects effects so if you're into that go ahead and hit that subscribe button anyways this has been Danny from plug-and-play

Channel: Plugin Play

Views: 204,158

Keywords: After Effects, mograph, animation, liquid, water, simulation, aescripts, plugin, tool, script, effect, illustrator, adobe, AE, tutorial, tip, trick

Id: epDaMouy7ho

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019