CC Mr. Mercury | Effects of After Effects

[Music] cc mr mercury can be found under the simulation category and this is a very interesting particle generator i'm going to apply it to this photo because it is reactive to whatever you apply it to as soon as i drop it on that photo you can see that the image is showing through this effect let's back my timeline up to the start and play back and you'll see that it is animated and it's a very thick type of fluid which is why it's called mr mercury it feels like a very blobby almost liquid metal type of substance so let's take a look at what the controls allow us to do first of all we have a radius x and radius y and this is just the size of the emitter of these blobby particles so an emitter is the point in which the particles or in this case the blobbiness is coming out of and currently it's set to five by five and these are percentages of your comp size so we're looking at an emitter that is a ellipse basically that's five percent of the height and width of my comp but if i increase this up to just say 100 then my emitter is going to be 100 the width of my comp and those blobs are going to be coming out all the way across my comp and maybe that's a little too big i'll drop that down and increase the height as well and now i just have a bigger ellipse emitting all these particles or i could turn it all the way down to zero let's set them both to zero and it's going to be a tiny little point that everything comes out of next up we have the producer position this is a point control which i can actually just click and drag and move it around anywhere i want in the comp so if you don't want to see that emitter we can put it at the top and it will be falling down from off screen let me undo that so it's back in the center and next up we have direction and it's defaulted to one revolution i'm not sure why zero would be exactly the same but if i rotate this you can see that it's kind of twisting around the direction that these blobs are being sprayed out of and as i do this you can kind of tell that there is some 3d depth to this effect which is nice i'll reset that back to zero next up is the velocity and this is literally the velocity of the blobs coming out of the producer so if i increase this up to five instead of one they're just going to be much more explosive coming out of that emitter and if i turn it down to zero then there's going to be no velocity at all and it's going to drip out kind of just like it's a thick liquid pouring out of a hole this could be a really good way to do potentially blood if you wanted it to drip down something and what can be really cool about this is if you animate the producer point so let's go to the start and i'll set a keyframe on the producer property and then go forward maybe three seconds or so and move it across the screen and look at how that moves okay i'm gonna press u to bring up those keyframes and press f9 on the keyboard to easy ease them and then play this back so that's pretty cool the reason this is happening is because it's emitting these particles or these blobs at a consistent rate and depending on where your producer is it's going to shape the way that these blobs are actually coming out they're reacting to gravity and falling to the ground in a pretty natural way i'm going to undo back to before i keyframe those properties and turn the velocity back up to its default so right click and say reset and the next option is the birth rate and this is how many particles are coming out what rate those particles are coming out so if i turn this up again to say two it'll have twice as many particles coming out of that emitter or if i turn it down to just point two then we're going to have far fewer blobs and keep in mind that any property that has a stopwatch next to it can be keyframed so you can increase or decrease this birth rate at any point to basically control the drip rate of this effect i'll undo back to where that default setting was next up is the longevity and this is how long the blobs are on screen for so if i turn this way down then those blobs are not going to last very long before they blob out that's what this effect calls the exit is the blob out so watch this one right here drop dripping down it just kind of scales out but the longer i have longevity set the longer they'll be visible the longer they'll last so if i really crank that up then they're going to get all the way to the bottom of the screen before they blob out but they're also much smaller and that's because there's also a blob in time so increasing the longevity not only increases how long it takes for them to disappear but also how long it takes them to up here let me set that back down to its default and the next property is gravity this is simply how quickly these blobs are going to fall to the ground so if i increase it up to three they're going to drop pretty quickly or if i go up to even 10 they're really dropping down fast if i set it to zero they're not going to be influenced by gravity at all they're just going to kind of explode outwards but you can also turn this to a negative number so if i brought this point control down for the producer and decrease the gravity into a negative number they're going to flow upwards instead of downwards i'll reset that property and then the next option is resistance so if i bring my producer back up and increase the resistance you'll see that everything kind of gets scaled back to where that producer is and what's happening is those blobs are kind of getting stuck they're not quite so liquid anymore it feels like a much thicker liquid and it's all kind of sticking together so maybe that is a little bit too strong of a resistance but this feels a lot more like paint to me now like being poured out of a can and dripping down a wall it's kind of sticking together and not dropping so much next up is the extra property but this actually does not apply to the explosive animation type so let me just reset this down to its defaults and move the producer back up and we're going to take a look at the animation types first we've already seen explosive which kind of just goes out in any direction we actually have a lot of different types of animation to choose from the next option is fractal explosive and this is just using a different algorithm for determining how this explosive animation is being produced the next option is twirl and if i play this back you'll see how it's kind of spinning around almost like a vortex so playing around with things like the gravity if i turn that down maybe turn the velocity up and then the resistance up as well we're going to get something that just kind of twirls around the center point of that producer and the higher you crank that velocity the more it's going to go outwards so you're going to want to find a balance between the resistance and that velocity to get what you're after let me reset that effect again and go to the next option which is twirly and this is a little bit confusing since twirl was what we just looked at but i'll play this back and again you'll see what that does so actually let me undo back to where we were with no gravity this is twirl and this is twirly so just a slightly different animation type next up is vortex which is again another way of spinning particles around but this actually looks a little bit more like a tornado let me turn the resistance down to zero the velocity down to one and then move my producer point downwards and take a look at what that does so it's interesting because it's actually moving upwards instead of downwards and my gravity is currently set to zero but if i reset that back to one then this really spreads out into something that looks a lot more like a vortex so if i play around with these settings again maybe turning down that gravity a little bit and turning up the velocity then we can get something that is a little bit more shaped like a tornado and this animation type actually handles the direction a little bit differently if i increase this it looks like it's rotating the vortex around but what's actually happening is it's using the direction value as a speed control so if i turn this all the way down to zero remember it was defaulted to just one revolution and then play this back then we're not really getting any kind of spinning around or twirling around but if i increase this direction up to say five you can now see that this is actually spinning like a vortex i could really crank this up to say 15 and then it's going to be moving even faster and just like the other animation types if i were to add some animation to this producer so that it moves around the screen a little bit then it's going to shape that vertex a little bit more so i'll play this back you can see what's happening so maybe 15 was a little too high on that direction speed but i could turn it down to eight then it won't be quite so intense and that tornado is just warping around at that producer point very fluidly so that's the vortex type next up is fire let me actually reset this again back to defaults because it's always a good idea to look at the defaults when you're switching these animation types and i'll move my producer down towards the base of the screen and play this back so this is something that's a lot more chaotic it's still kind of moving around in a twirly way but you can see how there's more turbulence to it and it looks a lot more like flames so actually he's looking really cool on that jack-o-lantern and again you can play around with resistance gravity all those settings to customize how this looks but this extra control actually changes the way that the fire moves a little bit so if i increase that extra amount it's going to push the blobs further outwards but what it's really doing is changing how much they oscillate back and forth so if i play this back you can see these blobs are moving back and forth much more chaotically or if i turn the extra way far down then we're going to get something that's much tighter like a smaller flame that's coming out of a smaller source so if i go to that animation drop down again you'll notice there are some dividers here this is kind of separating out the types of animation looks this first set is much more explosive right like these particles are being emitted pretty violently but then we have this next section that's full of direction by direction and this is going to be a little bit more controlled so if i go to direction and move my producer back up go to the beginning and play it looks a lot like the explosive animation but what's interesting about this is that i can rotate the direction and now we're going to see that this is actually a little bit more 3d so where before it was blasting these blobs directly at us or directly at the camera if i increase the velocity and then adjust this extra amount i can actually kind of narrow this down almost like a garden hose think of this water spraying out of the nozzle it's coming out at the direction i have set here and it's fanning out more or less based on this extra amount so if i really crank up that velocity maybe crank up the birth rate and lower down that extra then we're going to get something that's much more like it's being sprayed out of a hose and the gravity might be a little bit too strong i could back that off too so that it doesn't fall down quite as much and the next option is direction normalized and this is exactly the same except that every single blob is going to be shot out at the exact same velocity there will be no variance between any of the blobs like there is in direction so if you don't want these ones that are a little bit slower and drippier you'd go to direction normalized so it all gets shot out at the exact same time and then maybe you increase that gravity again to get something that looks a little bit more realistic next up is bi-directional and just like you might guess it's going to shoot out in two different directions so left and right in this case and if i turn this to 90 degrees then it's going to be directly left and right but again that extra value is what determines how spread out that spray radius is basically and then we also have bi-directional normalized which again just shoots out every single blob at the same velocity so we get something that's much more defined and i can rotate this around to any direction i want next up is the jet animation type and this one is actually dependent on the producer moving around so i'm going to animate this one more time i'll put the producer up here in the top left and set a keyframe for that position and then move forward maybe two and a half seconds move it down into the center and then move forward to five seconds and put it up to the top right so if i play this back you can see that these particles are emitting outwards in the opposite direction that the producer is moving so if i press you to bring up these keyframes and zoom in and really move these around so that it has a lot of motion and actually let's just add a few more keyframes in here and i'll have it loop kind of i'll just rove across time for all these intermediate keyframes and then play this back so as this producer is moving around the particles are being jetted out behind it if i turn the velocity down to say 0.5 they'll be a lot more closely attached to that point if i turn the resistance all the way down to zero and maybe the direction down to zero as well then we're going to get something that looks a little bit more like the default settings and to exaggerate this even more i'm going to ease the starting and ending points make sure that i'm on my speed graph and easy ease these starting and ending keyframes and then just crank the influence of each of them and then play this back again so at the beginning it's moving much slower so those particles aren't being jetted off of it very quickly but as it moves further along the line those particles are emitting much faster because the producer is actually moving faster so you could use this as kind of a way to do a cartoony exhaust or smoke or even flames coming off of say a rocket or a jet where they're dynamically being emitted at a higher or lower rate depending on how fast this producer is moving if i increase extra it's going to basically add randomness to those blobs being emitted the next one is jet sideways and the key difference between this inject is that it's emitting these particles sideways rather than directly behind it and as this producer moves faster you can see that they're emitting much more quickly so by sideways i mean left and right in relationship to the direction that the producer is moving so at first it's moving slowly so these particles are not emitting very quickly towards the middle of my animation it's moving much faster so their velocity is greatly increased and then it slows down again as the producer slows down so while the explosive animation type isn't influenced by this extra property some of these others are so be sure to check out each one of those to see how they affect that specific animation type all right i'm going to get rid of those keyframes and reset the effect down to defaults one more time and we're going to look at the blob birth size and blob depth size this is the blob in and blob out basically so the birth size is how large should the blob be when the particle first appears and it's set to 0.15 a very small number but i could increase this number to be much larger and these blobs are just going to kind of really grow out of nothing they're going to be much bigger to start or i could turn them all the way down to zero and they'll just be tiny little dots before growing to size let me undo get that back to its default and just below that is the blob death size and again that is where the blobs kind of disappear so if you look right around here these blobs are smaller because that's where they're dying but if i increase the depth size then they're going to be much larger before they blob out okay so that's just how you can control the starting and ending size of each particle but if we take a look at the properties above it we have the influence map and it's set to blob in and out so this is the default where it kind of grows into the birth size and then it shrinks from its death size into nothing but we could change this to just blob out and then it's going to basically appear out of nowhere there will be no blobbing in they just pop into place at whatever size you have the birth size set to or if i change this to blob in then they will blob in and not blob out they'll just disappear when they die so if i turn the longevity down so we can see them popping off the screen it's just like their bubbles they just pop and they disappear we also have blob out sharp which is just going to be a much quicker scaling down or blobbing out animation so it's not quite as smooth as blob out on its own and then finally we have constant blobs and what this does is maintains a pretty consistent blob size throughout the entire animation so they're not really blobbing in they're not really blobbing out they're pretty much just staying one size okay i'm going to set that back to blobbing and blob out and if you haven't noticed yet when these blobs get close to each other they kind of blob into each other they're melty and kind of forming into each other and this can all be controlled with this blob influence it's set to 100 but if i turn this down then each particle is going to flow into the next one a little bit less so turning it way down will actually completely eliminate it altogether we need a little bit of blob influence to be able to see these but the lower that number the less they're going to blob into each other you turn it all the way up to 100 they'll appear much more and really blend into each other a lot more so those are all the controls for the particle settings of this effect all that's left is the light and shading which determines how we're seeing this depth being applied to this effect so let me go to the light section and walk through these controls first we have the ability to choose what type of light system mr mercury is going to use it's defaulted to the effect light meaning the effect is what's generating it so let's look at those controls first we have light intensity if i turn that up or down it's kind of an overall brightness for the shading of this effect i'll just leave it at 100 i could change the light color to anything i want if i've made it you know a bright blue color then it's going to have a slightly blue tint overall i can change the light type it's currently set to distant light which you can kind of think of like a sun that's very far away and the light height is going to determine how far up above or directly on top of this effect it actually is but this is in combination with the light direction so if i set this to 90 degrees and i turned the light height down you can see that my light is shifting over to the right side so turning that light height way down low we're going to get highlights on the right side because that's the direction that my light is set to but if i rotate this around to say 180 then the light's coming from this direction and i'll increase the light intensity so this is a little easier to see but as i rotate this around you can see that highlight shifting all around the blobs if i increase that light height to be much taller then the light direction isn't going to change anything because the light is basically right where we are from our perspective shining directly at the blobs but we could also change that light type from distant light to point light and that gives us a new point control that we can place wherever we want think of this much more like a light bulb wherever i'm putting this is where the light bulb is and the highlights are going to wrap around that light source based on wherever i place it again i can change the light height so if i turn it down then it's kind of like i'm pointing a flashlight rather than just having this omnidirectional light bulb so you can really dial that in but let's go back up to effect light and change this to ae lights this means we can use after effects 3d lights to actually light these blobs so i'll go up to layer new light and i'll make it a point light and set the intensity to 100 click ok and just grab this light and move it around so as i'm moving it you can see that the blobs are reacting to it if i pull it back a little bit we're going to see more of that light and if i add another light go up to layer new light and make an ambient light that's say 35 brightness click ok that's going to fill in a lot of those dark areas and i can increase that value to whatever i want but it's going to be on top of this light that we've already added so that's the light section of mr mercury next up is the shading and this is where we can control all of the reflective properties of this material of the blobs themselves so i'm actually going to change the light type back to effect light for now and we're going to adjust the ambient so this is just the ambience of the actual blob property next up is diffuse so we can combine that with the ambient maybe i turn the ambient down a little bit and increase diffuse a little bit more we have specular which is going to determine how bright those highlights are we have roughness which affects the shape of that specular metal which also manipulates how those reflections are being displayed and then the material opacity if i turn this down then it's going to kind of be more of a semi-translucent blob so i could turn that all the way down to zero and we're going to basically have no fill we're just going to see the highlighted and shaded edges that are coming from the lighting of this effect but that is the last property of mr mercury it's a very complex particle emitter it's completely capable of making some very cool looking things especially when you apply it on top of an image or graphic putting this on a solid would lose a lot of detail and it would create something that looks much more cartoony and flat but hopefully you now have a pretty good grasp on how this effect works and you should definitely get in there and start playing around with it yourself but that's everything you need to know about cc mr mercury hey thanks for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then check out the other ones here on my youtube channel and if you like my teaching style then definitely check out my longer form content on skillshare and school of motion and if you want to support more tutorials like this one check out my patreon you can find links for all that stuff in the description of this video [Music] you

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 5,286

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: QwzDqLmIKSI

Length: 21min 20sec (1280 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021