Flomotion Tutorial: Create a realistic waterfall in After Effects with particles

hello and welcome to this new After Effects tutorial by promotion and today we are going to take a look at something very interesting I just recently found a very nice way on how to create a very realistic looking waterfall inside of After Effects with only built-in effects and of course I wanted to share it with you so let's directly jump into After Effects and let's get started by clicking on the new composition and let's call this our waterfall comp 1920 by 1080 24 frames should be fine let's just make this 10 seconds long and hit OK just for the sake of it that it's a 3d tutorial let's create a solid so basically we are going to create a 3d environment really quick let's create a solid by hip to control Y or simply clicking on layer you solid call this off floor and hit OK just bring out a checkerboard effect I'm just typing this into the effects & presets panel here drag it out make the width a bit wider 44 looks nice for me now let's hit the 3ds switch just here then we hit W which brings up this rotation icon and then we just rotate it until it's flat and if you hold down the shift button it snaps each 45 degrees so it's flat just hit V so we have our normal Mouse back in action and just drag it down to the floor and also create a new camera layer new camera by default I have 50 millimeter focal length which just works fine for me so by clicking see you get all the camera options roll tilt pan zoom and so on so just to prove that we are in 3d space I can rotate this but let's just hit reset here let's create a new layer and that's called this our waterfall and hit OK and in this case as we want to have it as realistic as possible we are playing a bit with particles but to make this a little bit more interesting let's try to just focus on the particle systems that come with After Effects so let's just type in particles and we have a like three different systems and I would go with the particle world by applying this effect and actually clicking on the effect you can see the grid and guides which you can disable and enable here so at first let's just line the floor of the particle world to our floor that we already have in here we could bring the floor back up but just clicking on the floor bring this one up or bringing the floor down here by going into our physics there we have the floor and there we can adjust the floor position so I'm just eyeballing this at the moment but obviously you could create some lines find out the vanishing point and let go with that okay perfect so let's just take a look on what the effect is doing by default so I'm just previewing this and let's go down with the resolution for the playback so I'm just going to half so we can see it a bit better okay by default it's doing what the name is saying it's an explosive effect so let's just change that to something like a direction axis and we're already seeing what this is doing it's going into one direction now so let's think about this as it would be water if our waterfall of our river would be somewhere around here and then the water should drop which should definitely play with our velocity of the water as well as the gravity as both of them kind of interact so as I'm increasing the velocity of course it shoots out more into one direction and if I go down with that you can see that this kind of gets a curve where we want to go for and by playing with the gravity we can also play with that so let's have a look what we have created so far this is kind of the water falling down which is from the angle and the velocity looks quite good at the moment and don't forget we are in 3d space so we can have a look at this from all angles and let's just maybe look at it from the front and now we can go into our producer which is basically the place where the particles get shoot out so this is the emitter of the particles we just want to change the size or the shape of the emitter so let's play with the radius of our emitter you have to think about the emitter in the particle world as it as if it is a sphere so you could stretch it in all directions so let's stretch this out in the z-axis okay and now we could have a look again from all sides and this is starting to look more like the behavior of a waterfall maybe let's just bring this up a little bit so we see it a little bit better and now let's play with our birth rate and the longevity so let's just make it a little bit longer so we see the particles longer in the frame and also play with the birth rate let's also bring this up to four and you may have seen that the color just changed when I'm played with the longevity and that's because the color is changing from if I bring this down it is changing from yellow to red at the moment over time so if I would make the longevity even longer it would become more yellow over here because out of the frame it would get red but let's deal with the color later at the moment we just want to get look right so let's jump back into our physics for the floor we obviously don't want our particles to fall all the way through the floor but for our waterfall we want them to bounce and if I am playing is back now you can see which effect we are creating with that and let me actually bring all of this a bit more to the side and then just bring the floor more on the side so we can see more obvious what's happening there so now let's just play with our settings of the bounce so it looks like all the water is splashing on the ground and we get this nice kind of the wide water effect happening when it hits the floor and we can do that with the bounce settings so once we have set the floor action to bounce we could play around with the bounciness and just bring it low until we get this kind of foam happening over here so maybe even a little bit less and let's play this back maybe make this a little bit more random and spread it a bit more so those small water particles would fly all over the place let's again watch this from a different angle it's starting to look really nice so now let's start working with colors and if you have a look at at a real photographs of real waterfalls you can see it there not with blue water obviously but most of the part where the water is falling it looks like it's almost white because it's reflecting all the surroundings and you can also see a bit through it so the combination of the water falling with the air makes them look almost white but of course there's a little blue in it and at the end it's all white where all the foam gets created and obviously at the beginning you would have more of a blue tone because that's where you would still have kind of a river feel to it so let's go to the color of the particle and there we have what we talked about before they start yellow and end red but we don't want it to be a birth to death but we want to have custom colors and there we have the custom color map and now as I said in the beginning we want to have something blueish maybe a bit darker and as they start to fall down I'll just click the same blue but make this brighter make it even brighter for the next one white where the foam is happening and last one we make it a little bit more blue again and this is what this looks like at the moment for me this while the water is falling down it spreads out a little bit too much to the side so we can go back to the physics and just work on our extra angle here and just bring this a little bit closer to zero so there we have it okay and as we have created all of this white water let's just change the name of this layer to white water but of course we want to have the full river so let's just duplicate that bring it beneath the white water and call it river now I'm just making this a little bit more blue just changing a few of those here make this little more blue and for the physics for the floor I don't make this a bounce particle but ice particle in this way it looks like they are falling down and where they hit the floor they just slide over the floor just like so and there you have it this is just falling down and sliding and when we make the longevity a little bit longer you can see that they will slide more more and now we're almost done but you would say okay this looks like streaks and not really like water at the moment so here comes the tricky part or the fun part let's start with our white water and let's just bring out the vector blur and I'm just zooming in a little bit more here and when I apply the wet Tobler and just go up with the mound you can see that it kind of warps and and smears all of the streaks into each other which will give it the more organic look like if you think you threw water into the air all the particles are in this case all the the water streaks will stick together until a certain point and if there's they are just too far away from each other they will end up separating from each other so when I'm bringing up the amount you can see what's happening there you can also play around with the smoothness a little bit and just find a look that fits for you and let's just copy that effect and bring it onto our river you can see we have some water and the white water on top let's just add it so we can also bring out levels affect to make the white water pop out more and also seed so we don't have two identical particle systems you can find that setting under extra and it will randomly generate a different seed of particles also you could play a little bit with the settings in here just to give them a little a little bit of a different velocity for example as the whitewater maybe would have a different velocity now let's just play this back and as a last step I would maybe just blur the whitewater a little bit with a Gaussian blur let me solo this and just tweak the settings a little bit maybe even going the bounciness again and play with that just slightly you see that change is to look off the white water here drastically let's maybe just darken our River for that let's just copy the levels effect from the white water of course you could also go into the settings and change to colors but in this way I have all the colour ramps set and I have a look that I like and just play with the overall setting so I'll just bring in a levels effect here and darken this and there you have it a realistic-looking waterfall of course you you would still have to tweak a little bit more and just a quick hint in my example I used almost like 8 different versions of the particle effect to create my final look you could find tweak it and also work a little bit on it to get rid of all the extra streaks here for example but basically this is the technique that I used and once again you have to be aware that all of this is fully 3d and you can orbit around your waterfall and let's do a quick Ram preview to see what we have created today and as I said just feel free to add in more of those layers and tweak those for example you can add an extra layer of white water with just a small amount of particles by bringing down the birth rate so you get single streaks of just white water which just add another level of small detail to it and of course that makes it more realistic so for now I hope you learned a little bit and I wish you a lot of fun by creating your own waterfalls in After Effects you you

Channel: flomotion

Views: 44,282

Keywords: after effects water, water after effects, after effect water, after effects tutorial, after effects, after effects water animation, after effects water splash, after effect water flow, after effect water drop, after effects tutorial animation, after effects tutorial beginner, waterfall, particles, particle world, 3d, motion tracking after effects, green screen effects

Id: tDtrgraBSaQ

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018