Easy 2D liquid in After Effects - Tutorial - Water ripple animation

Hi I'm Ben Marriott today I'm going to show you how to get this super quick 2d liquid ripple effect in Adobe After Effects let's begin alright here's the scene with started with and this project file is going to be available for download down in the description box I've got all the unnecessary layers shied behind here so we can just focus on the layers that are important for this effect we've got our water layout which is a rectangle and it's got no fill with a white stroke, set to 2 pixels we've got our yolk form pre-comp here which is just a yolk falling and we've got our duck rising pre-comp here to that duck animation and at the moment you'll see it's pretty jarring the transition between the two but we're gonna fix that in a moment once we've got our ripple animation sorted because that's going to help us a little bit the effect we're going to use today is actually called ripple I found it completely by accident just searching in the effects panel over here for some effects that sounded related to water when I was working on a similar animation now let's take a look at what that ripple effect does on a shape layer to begin with I'll just make this gradient a little more gradual because that will accentuate the effect of it and if we type ripple into the box over here and at that you'll see that at the start it doesn't do anything at all but once we bump up this radius property you can see these concentric circles appearing and it's sort of warping the edges of the shape and if we play it will see those moving outwards we're just going to focus on this warping that happens on the edge of the shape here that's really what's going to drive our effect so let's get rid of that layer and let's apply that to our water shape layer let's double click on here and we're going to keyframe the radius right as a splash happens so on this layer before the splash we're going to keep in the radius here let's open that property with U on the keyboard and as the splash actually happens let's bump that up to around 40 pixels all right now initially that's a little slow so let's change the speed to three and let's also change the wave width we'll set that to sixty and let's set the height to a little higher seventy-five there that's kind of getting closer and we want these waves to sort of dissipate and fade down so we're gonna keyframe our wave height property here guess you'd open it up and down here and then way over here we're gonna drag this down to zero so now we see it should slowly fade away I'm gonna easy ease that keyframe by pressing f9 and also not quite liking the shape of these waves here they're kind of leaning away from our impact point and that might be how they behave naturally in the environment I kind want more of the graphics sine waves style wave and the way we're going to do that is by altering the center of the ripple center of the ripple is controlled by this point here and if we drag that closer to the center we do get these sine waves appearing but if we play them back you'll notice that it cycles in between the beginning of the wave and the end of the wave and then we get a few these awkward keyframes here where it just looks sharp and you know a bit wrong a bit wrong really so what we're gonna do is instead if dragging it closer we're gonna drag it further away let's say to about up here now here you don't see much of the influence of those angles in the effect now as we play that back that's looking a little better there I think that's pretty good now the reason we used a rectangle for our water layer instead of using just a straight line which would have had the same sort of visual effect here is because we want to use that as an alpha matte for our duck and for our yolk so let's duplicate our water layer I'm gonna give it a fill and doesn't matter what color the fill is, call it water matte because we always label our layers, colour it purple and let's drag that above that duck pre-comp over here now we're gonna select alpha matte for our duck pre-comp here actually the alpha matte inverted is what we want and so we can see now it pops up being revealed by this alpha matt when our yolk does here now we also want to see the bottom half of our duck so let's choose a point where our duck is completely above the water. it's around there. we're gonna duplicate both of these layers with Control D and let's trim them both by holding alt and the left square bracket so that means we won't see them at all before this point and now here we're going to change that from alpha inverted to alpha matte so now it's visible and under that water and to add a little bit more flavor, we're just gonna adjust the scale to 105 percent so now it looks like the water is refracting a duck a little bit and enlarging it. let's play that back ah beautiful we also got this comp here that's been waiting to be shown if I turn that on you can see that that is the egg white kind of dispersing underneath the water. bad news is there's no easy way to achieve this effect I did these frame-by-frame in Photoshop so sorry no hack solution there please make some awesome ripple effects add that to water, milk, Diet Dr. Pepper lien or any of the liquids that are currently popular with you these days tag me at ben_marriott_ on Instagram with what you make so I can share it in my stories thank you so much for watching please let me know down in the comments whether you'd like to see some more of these quicker tutorials I'd love to know and please don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share and absolutely abuse that like button I'll see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 76,225

Keywords: 2D liquid after effects, 2d liquid animation, 2d water animation, liquid after effects, water ripple, liquid animation, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, splash animation, motion design tutorial, motion graphics, adobe, after effects, fluid animation, water splash animation, learn motion design, after effects tips, easy after effects, beginner after effects

Id: YIHN6NtsP8I

Length: 5min 32sec (332 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Gmp5808]

Great video! Nice technique, also your other videos are great. I Subbed.

[u/frippm]

I was looking for this exact thing for the longest time, thank you!

[u/zm_br]

subbed. great style.

[u/[deleted]]

great tut - specially like the 'refraction' offset below water.

10/10 would duck again.

[u/donaldgray85]

Great tutorial bro!! Thanks!

[u/DSkorynko]

This looks really cool. Good job with the video.

[u/toyfantv]

Subbed! Awesome video

[u/ericdanielhaley]

Literally just started watching. Have to say your intro is 🔥🔥

[u/blackmixture]

Dude you got me in the first 17 seconds! Dope dope doooope!!! LOVE that intro 😁😁😁👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾