Flying Liquid Blobs - Adobe After Effects tutorial

this is Evan Abrams and in this after fix tutorial we're going to be creating these liquid teardrop splatting things that are so popular right now we're gonna move them around it's going to be super good here in After Effects let's just have a look at what that thing is that we saw so we're going to be creating this kind of organic liquidy thing as it swirls around we're not going to worry about any of this text stuff for now that's they'll be like the next tutorial let's just do this sort of viscous blob of junk okay so let us go to create a new composition and we'll start fresh from the beginning don't worry about your frame size or frame rate or any of that stuff just be aware that mine is 29.97 frames per second yours might be faster might be slower whatever so just you know just to make yours like mine if you want if not who cares so the first thing to do is to create the path of the motion so this will serve as a guide for us to make manual changes to the blob and it will also serve as a way to guide the motion of this thing and get everything squared away before we start making those manual changes so I've got my pen tool I've turned the fill off I've got the stroke set on too and I'm going to draw out a shape and so I'm going to start off-screen making nice big wide lines okay and so it's going to come up and then down like this so it's going to curve and I'm just kind of drawing out big curves you know you can make it go up here or turn around or however you want so I'm holding down space a space bar whenever I move this thing around kind of like this so I want I want kind of large arcs just so you can kind of get a feel for what's going on this isn't exactly like the the intro but you know hopefully it is interesting enough that you get into it so I'm going to work with a curve like this I'm happy with how this curve you know it's kind of kind of doing whatever for me I might want to just adjust this first point here take this sharp sharp edge off and we go smooth that out so it's going to go like this so let's see how it goes so this is going to be our path let's make a blob so step one done moving on to step two make the blob I make my blob by making like a circle here so doesn't have to be very exact I'm just drawing like this and this will be our blob we'd like it to have a fill in this case I guess it's like a pink whatever don't worry about what it is and we'll take the stroke off okay so that's going to be our blob so you've made the blob step three here is going to be to get the blob to move along our path so this is your last chance to make any alterations to the path maybe like this I don't know I'm less confident now who cares so this is our path let's change this to be a yellow layer let's rename it guide all right and I'm just going to click the shy button here so I can make it to come and go whenever so we're going to go in here go into the contents go to the shape go into the path and select the path you can tell the path is selected because it has these squares on the points so let's pay close attention to where those points are here here here here cool we're going to copy that which is control C command to see edit copy whatever and then we're going to go in here we're going to go to its transform so I'm going to transform position or go to the position and we're going to paste okay now all those points we took from that yellow line are now here on a blue line that blue line is actually the position of this circle blob okay you see how that's working out pretty cool eh so what it's done is it's put linear keyframes at the start and end so that's a keyframe now and that's a keyframe now and these two in the middle are roved keyframes so they will move across time so if I say take this one okay and I go right click and I go key pharmacist and I easy ease them see how those two keyframes moved they move depending on where these two keyframes tell them to be all right so that's you know that's something to think about I guess what I'd like to do is take one of them I think this one and I'm going to make it its own keyframe all right so I want to be able to control when when things are coming in and out of this one so I'm going to easy ease that one like this and I have the end and flat okay now I'm going to go in here and at this stage I'm adjusting the speed and motion of this blob so one thing I never wanted to sort of reach zero so I always wanted to have some kind of motion going on and then I'm going to pull these handles out here to kind of give it a bit of a pause or a slowdown at this stage so it's like mirror and then it speeds up and moves along its way let's see mmm-hmm and not so much there so this I think is too slow so what I'm going to want to do is maybe push this handle a bit like this and you know maybe pull this handle bit like this maybe I even want to bring this handle up so that it's starting fast and then slowing cool cool so these are all things you can edit here in the graph editor so now that's slow and then that's fast or whatever so that's pretty cool I'm into this now I'm going to take these and I'm going to just slide them just sort of shorten up what's going on okay so now I'm good with this motion so I've got it going where I want and now I have it going when I want now I need to take this blob and I want to get the blob oriented along this path now we go layer and we would like to transform the layer to Auto Orient along this path okay so now you can see this is at an angle and this blob here is also at an angle so we look through the rest of its time on this path and you can see that it's always oriented to be along the path which is exactly what we want because it's going to save us some work when we are doing this manual keyframing process okay the last thing I want to do is call up the scale of this thing and I'm going to hit you so I can look at all of the keyframes on here and I kind of want it to be a little bit smaller at the end and I'd like to be quite a bit bigger at the beginning so it's big and it's getting small as it's going off into the distance so am I really happy with this motion yeah I really feel it needs to be a bit faster here yeah I'll probably survive with this okay so pretty much all of the automatic things are done except for making this look a little bit more liquidy so how do we do that well I want it to be more chaotic and liquidy when it's going faster so how do I do that well I go and I add a wiggle pads and the wiggle pads as you can see is messing with the edges of this path so if we go into the wiggle pads it's got a lot of things in here so the size is how big the distortion it is the detail is how many distortions so really really tiny let's leave that it like one is it a corner is it smooth we definitely want it smooth how many wiggles per second zero please I think that would be fine you can set this to whatever you want set this to like 24 and then every frame is going to be bouncing around so you could do that you could set it to zero depends on how chaotic you want that to be now let's link the size to the position so what did i do there well I took the size use the pick whip holding alt to click on the stopwatch here I was going to enter in an expression then you take this pick whip and you move it here to the position now this is saying that this will now equal position part 0 which is 9 5 4 now that's not correct we don't want it to be positioned part 0 delete the part 0 put in a point and type in speed all right now what does that mean well at this point the speed is zero so click on position go to the graph editor and this is showing the speed so the speed at this point is 11 thousand six hundred and ninety three point seven nine pixels per second speed down here is in the 2000s right so you get an idea that's what's going on so we need to do some more things to this so it will be the speed of the position divided by 300 maybe you know that could be good so you see like at its fastest you know it's getting most chaotic if you want to be more chaotic than you know leave it at 200 or 100 or something but I don't know you get the idea that this is now making this a little bit less uniform and it's going to give us a little bit more play when it comes to messing around so that I mean that seems like a really bad relationship advice but you know if you keep it loose you get more play when you're messing around ok so we are going to now go ahead and start animating this path now how are we going to do that well we go here into the contents we go into the shape go into path 1 and let's set a keyframe for the path and then we won't go to the end when it's at rest and I'm going to set a keyframe there as well because I want it to end sort of as a circle also so I mean we'll be tweaking these as it goes but since we are starting at no acceleration it doesn't have much of a tail right on the parts where it has the most acceleration that's when I think it should really have more of a tail to it so let's go through that graph editor again and find some fast parts or just have a look at this thing's position right and you should be able to tell by looking at these dots you know the further apart the dots are the crazier the animation should be all right so these dots are a little bit hard to see so let's change the layer here to be like an orange so now it's a little bit easier to see those dots but you know don't worry don't worry too much about the dots I guess is what I'm saying the point is is you are just going to want to take this thing you're going to want to mess around and go into its points grabbed end points pull them out and you want to reform this thing to look more blob ulis and you also want to try to maintain sort of like a curve that matches the curve of this line so you have to do things like pinching the end point here and you want to always have the tip and the tail landing on this line all right so that's one piece of advice but a lot of this section now that you're doing is going to be a lot of manual labor and it's going to be a lot of things like you go into the corner you want to go in and make sure that this point is on the curve and that the rest of the points makes sense along the curve and you know maybe you got to stretch it out a little bit and there's going to be a lot of manual work in here for you but hit you to call up all these things the easiest way to do it is to go to points where there's going to be a lot of change and make make sort of small adjustments as you go so you know we're going from here to here to here the next spot is here and then it's there so at this point remove that tail again along here we know it's speeding up so we're kind of elongated this along this path it's getting thinner perhaps you know and you don't want to to do anything rash you don't want to mess around with moving the the front parts too much but that's because that is the center of mass for this thing so what you're going to do is you're just going to go through you're going to find points where this deviates too far from the line I'm going to speed up all of my adjustments and then we'll go through and we'll talk about them a little bit how does that sound as you can see at this point I have a heap of keyframes good for me and I have this thing kind of blobbin around the screen so that's super good so the things I want you to look out for are things like the tail coming way off the track that's going to look unnatural when viewers have a look at it so in instances where that happens you just want to bring that point on bring it back into line it's fine if a lot of the body kind of comes to the outside of the guide as long as it's not on the inside of the turn we would assume that momentum would pull the blob sort of off the track so I wouldn't worry too much about things like that but you'll be able to tell visually as you go through this process you know you just run through and be like yep that seems wrong or yeah that seemed correct and the big takeaway though is keep the top and the tail on the track that's that's the big thing so as long as the head is on there the tail is on there the rest of it should seem pretty normal right now something else to consider if you want to re-time this mess this is something else that's good to know you can select all of these you can hold down alt and then you can stretch them out so if you want to last longer or shorter but beware that as you shorten this you may be causing it to fall off the track so you'll have to go back in and readjust when you want to re-time it so that's why I said you want to make sure you have the space and time of where you want this blob to be you want that on lock before you go doing other things you know you want to make sure that it's as you want it before you get in here and so doing all this manual work to try to fix it up okay so what happens when we look at this now Wow yeah that's pretty good I mean there are a few things that I should fix like it's too blobby off the jump you know it's not you know it's not spelt like like I think it should be this should already be blob ulis by the time it's coming in so I probably want to shore that up a little bit just so that it's not it's not so crazy you know and you want to reduce like quick changes and stuff like that which is hard to do when you're working keyframe to keyframe but I'm sure you can get it but if you've gone through you've done all these steps and you know you're able to make these these quick little adjustments then you've moved on to sort of the last stage here which is when you want to just watch this back look for any parts that stick out to you is erroneous but now you've got this weird flying fish thing that you can make use of but that is pretty much it this has been a pretty long tutorial and we haven't even covered all of the things I really wanted to talk about so there will be more tutorials on this kind of a subject coming up in the future but you're going to need to subscribe for those so this has been Evan Abrams talking to you about after effects and motion graphics and you know that's what I talk about here on the channel so if you have questions about this tutorial you should leave them in the comments if you want to see some of the other tutorials currently available on this channel I'll put some links to those right here in front of you and if you want to ask questions about you know After Effects in general or suggest some tutorial topics hit me up on the Facebook or on the Twitter at ICI Abrams the links to all these things are in the description and head over to Evan Abrams com there's cool things you can download there like maybe the project file for the intro to this or maybe not I don't know if I'll put it up you'll find out if you look at the links in the description anyway this has been Aven Abrams thank you so much for watching like I said if you have any questions put them in the comments to this video and I'll try to help you out when I'm able and stay tuned for more because there's going to be more about this and other After Effects topics coming up and try to post things every week but sometimes I get busy but you'll have to subscribe to find out so go ahead and hit that subscribe button and I'll see you around the Internet thanks a lot and have a nice day

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 323,522

Keywords: adobe, after effects, after, effects, tutorial, lesson, how, to, how to, tips, tricks, instruction, help, ECAbrams, Evan, Abrams, Adobe After Effects (Software), Adobe Systems (Organization), liquid, blob, wet style, wet look, organic, messy, cartoon, cell shaded

Id: x-SK5sdLwSM

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 06 2014