Liquid Text in After Effects Tutorial - Melt Anything!

Hi I'm Ben Marriott and today I'm gonna show you how to create this liquid melty effect in Adobe After Effects Let's begin! So to start this effect you'll need all of your elements separated so I've got each layer in its own little text box here if you've got a lot of text, plugins like decompose text can help you out with that I've also given them a pretty narrow tracking which is the space in between the letters so ours is pretty tightly squished together and that means that we're just gonna get more of them melting into each other as they sort of melt away We're gonna create a rectangle using a rectangle here to cover up everything below the text that we're going to use as a mat for our text to disappear into and let's label that melt matte because we always label our layers Let's drag that to the bottom Now let's animate our text falling away Now one second in we're gonna select all of our text here and we're going to animate the position property so we're gonna open it up with P click on the stopwatch here and around two seconds in I'm just gonna nudge them all down using my arrow tool so they're just a little bit below this line great now let's also animate the rotation so I'll go to one second in, press R to bring up rotation click the stopwatch to make some keyframes and then at two seconds in we're gonna animate the T turning in this way maybe around 60 60 degrees minus 60 degrees the L about minus 30 or so and then we're gonna do the opposite direction on this side so the E will go about 30 degrees this way and the M minus 60 degrees or they are about, the amount isn't really important now I'm gonna select all of these layers and press U to bring up all of our key frame properties I'm gonna select them all and press f9 to give an easy ease on all of them now let's watch it back. it's a bit fast so let's drag these keyframes back a touch yeah that looks nicer. now with these back keyframes selected I'm gonna click on our graph editor here which brings which brings up this nifty little feature here we're gonna make sure we're on let's get a speed graph I'm just going to drag this handle out a bit and that'll make them just ease into that final position a little bit more, let's play the back yeah that's looking nice okay back to the regular view where the M is selected we're gonna type in set Matte click on that layer and let's drag so we're halfway in between the animation so we can see where the M should be disappearing we'll set the take matte from layer probably up here and select melt matte and you can see now he's disappearing but it's on the wrong side so we're gonna select invert matte over here and now he disappears behind there and we can hide our melt matte layer now we can just copy that effect with ctrl C select that other layer and control V to paste and they'll all disappear nice now we want them to leave a puddle where they disappear so let's go towards the end here and we're just gonna draw a shape layer so we're gonna select that pen tool let's change the fill to white so it matches that text and we're just gonna draw roughly a sort of puddle shape we can tweak this later but I think it's nice to just get a rough shape down first that we can play with okay so that's what a final sort of state is gonna look like let's call this puddle now let's toggle down to find our shape property a shape path and we're gonna keyframe the path property at the end here I have the star I'm gonna select that pen tool I'm gonna move all these anchor points to make our puddle just look quite a bit narrower and smaller cause at the beginning we don't there to be any puddle at all and let's move in the sides so they're about the width of the letters here. now play that back the puddle sort of grows. okay Now let's easy ease those keyframes again with F9 at the end I kind of want it to be a little wider so I'm gonna drag these anchor points out a touch and adjust these a little bit and we're gonna trim this layer too because we don't want to see that at all until that text starts melting alright that looks fine for now but we're definitely going to do some more tweaking soon so to create our melty effect layer we're gonna create a new adjustment layer so we'll go to layer new adjustment layer up here I'm gonna call that let's call that melty effects and we're gonna add to that, the effect Gaussian blur and also levels. Now the start of the animation we're gonna keyframe our Gaussian blur at 0 and press U to open up the property down here and a little bit of the way in we're gonna crank that blur up to let's say 150 oh yeah that looks that's very blurry excellent now we're going to use our levels effect to crunch down on that blur by adding maximum contrast to the Alpha Channel so that means that we're telling anything that's kind of transparent to be fully transparent and anything that's just a little bit transparent to be not transparent at all so let's select from our channel alpha down here and drag both of these points right to the middle and you can see as we're doing that you can kind of picture what's happening now let's get back and watch kind of what it looks like okay so we can see here we're kind of getting the effect we want it's starting to melt and they started deciding to get round they lose all their corners and then they kind of merge into each other and then our puddle appears far too late so we can see that you know this element T he they sort of melting into nothing and disappearing and then this sort of puddle appears here so we're going to need to adjust the puddle alright that's looking pretty good one thing I do notice is that when this L sort of starts melting there we get it sort of disappearing into nowhere and we don't want that so what we're going to do is we're going to create another shape on the on the same puddle shape layer so let's say around here I'm just going to draw a round shape and all the effects are gonna be applied to that so you can see it and acting in real time I'm just gonna make that so I'm just kind of drawing what I want this frame to look like and then that's in shape 2 so I want to toggle down go to its path property and over here when our L starts to melt let's click on this and just shrink that shape down at this point that's a little more smooth and animating the physics correctly is really what's gonna sell this effect so if the physics kind of look off if it's not melting at the right speed or if there's puddles where there should or shouldn't be it's not gonna be quite as believable so now I'm just gonna spend a little bit of time tweaking these sort of shapes and the speed of these all right I'm at a point where I'm happy with now that looks pretty good but there's one thing I'm not quite liking how the end of this sort of sort of stops here I want this sort of to ease in really heavily like the end of the puddle will still slightly keep moving still has a little bit of momentum from the melting but I can't find a way to easily do that keyframe by easing it more cause then it's gonna it kind of disrupts the kind of melting speed we've got at the beginning a little hack method I've got to adjust that is to add a Bezier warp to this adjustment layer is a warp and just before everything finishes melting I'm gonna keyframe all of these vertices and then a little bit after that's sort of resting state and the zoom out and I'm just gonna pull these anchor points out a touch so we stretch out that puddle just a little bit give it that extra tiny bit of movement so now we just get a little bit of that puddle sort of pulling out a little bit more let's play that back all right now you can also if we zoom in here we can see that the edge of this puddle is a little bit blurry so what we can do there is that means on our levels our alpha channel levels aren't quite crisp enough so we need to drag those in slightly the more you push this if you push it too hard you're gonna get all this crispy aliasing which we don't really want so we want to make sure that that's just a few a light touches needed just a few few pixels away from that that looks fine that looks good to me this effect with the blurring and in the crunch in the Alpha Channel I use it more often than I thought I would it comes in really handy you just need to round corners on a simple shape or remove some of that crispy aliasing that you get in some places it comes in handy in a pinch and this busier warp effect normally it's best to sort of sort out your easing issues in your main keyframes but sometimes it just doesn't work and you need a little bit of a hack solution on top and here it doesn't disrupt anything for our shading effect I'm gonna render this out and do some frame by frame in photoshop here I'm gonna be using the plug-in annimdessin2 which is 100% free essentially it's a toolbar that has the buttons you wish Photoshop had for doing frame by frame animations now I'm only really gonna be using three buttons this one to create a new layer this one to create a new frame and this one to display my onion skins which is the transparency so you can kind of see a bit of the frame before so your animation lines up I'm gonna add a yellow layer cuz I kind of think I want this animation to maybe look like cheese so I'm just gonna put a yellow fill on this layer and set it to multiply over existing video layer and with this new layer I've called highlight I'm just gonna add a highlight to the top left of every layer using a wider round brush all right I think those highlights are starting to look pretty good now let's move on to the shading I'm gonna create a new layer and on that layer I'm going to select a nice round soft brush select a color that's just a little darker and I'm just going to shade the bottom right of each layer okay and I think that shading looks pretty good now as well let's take this back into After Effects all right so let's import that PSD into After Effects with control I find our file and select import as composition retain layer sizes and click the next okay dialog box now I want to create a new comp that includes our main comp here so we can just drag that onto our new compositions button down here and that creates a comp with the same size and width and is nests that comp inside so let's rename that melt main top and we want to go into our PSD that we imported here and just copy out these two layers here these are our highlights and our shadows let's rename this to shadow which we should have done in Photoshop now we want to color our melt main comp yellow so let's apply the fill effect over here and let's select a yellow color and we want a shadow layer to be meted out by our melting text comp so let's duplicate our main comp here put over our shadow layer and let's rename it melt main comp matte and then on a shadow comp we're going to apply alpha matte here. Great also one thing I want to do is I want to apply a kind of rim lighting to the edges of this shadow layer so it appears a little more rounded and we can do that by applying a choker to our matte here so if we find these simple choker effect over here and we just wrap that up you can see it encroaching a little bit on our shadow layer you can see that it never touches the exact edge of our melts layer here and to make that a little more subtle we can blur that effect so if we type in Gaussian blur over here and just crank that up a bit to kind of feather the edges of that matte alright that's looking pretty good to me it's a little too jittery our shadow layer here so something we can do that is just to apply a blur to that shadow layer so let's add a blur effect and let's give it a 50 pixel blur so that just all make it a little bit more even between all the layers so that's actually still a little too jittery for my liking now one trick we can do though ideally you sort this out in Photoshop when you're drawing these in the first place but I'm just going to duplicate the shadow and the matte here and I'm gonna set them both to 50% opacity and I want to shift the top one over just one frame because most of these were animated on tools it should blend them just a little bit so let's try that all right that's much better that looks a hell of a lot softer now so what that does is it means instead of showing the one image for two frames it's showing showing one image once and then on the next frame it's half blended into the next frame so you kind of get so it's kind of like inbetweening the frames here so there's just a bit of overlap of opacity and I think that gives a pretty nice effect we've got that subtle movement happening but it's not too severe and I think that looks pretty good now you can use this effect and melt absolutely anything -- text army men, our generation -- hope for the future anything at all if you make something melty or use the tricks you learned in this video please share what you've done and tag me at ben_marriott_ so I can share them on my Instagram stories I can't wait to see what you make please let me know down in the comments what else you want to see from this channel join some more tutorials process videos who knows I'd like to know so don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share and absolutely embarrass and humiliate and crush that like button please I'll see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 276,994

Keywords: liquid text tutorial after effects, melt effect, melting after effects, melt tutorial ae, liquid text tutorial, liquid text after effects, animation tutorial, melt animation, melt after effects, after effects tutorial, motion graphic tutorial, learn after effects, visual effects in after effects, text effect, melt, motion design tutorial, motion design process, after effects process, melting transition after effects, after effects morph, after effects transition

Id: MVeVkawiHd4

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/vansebastian]

you. are. a. machine.

the rate of release in these tutorials is wild. thanks for your contributions

[u/simakabrat]

Hi! One of the best 10 minute aae tutorials ever uploaded I see. Useful for anyone and being able to be done by anyone following your steps.

I respect people who do tutorials on aae without any plug-ins, scripts, etc. Kind of simple and creative way to do melting - that’s great.

What I’ve noticed tho is that this community appreciates more complex projects better.

However, you did great job! Please continue uploading. We need more people like you in this type of art for it to become even more valuable!

[u/Astrodott]

Another awesome tutorial, I’ll try it tonight!! Thanks

[u/Hetchbeck]

This is great, man! Starting to up my game from vanilla Premiere to using more graphics like this in projects. Do you have any more content for fluid-like animations in AE? Puddles, drops, waves, etc.? If not, I’d love you to present some, since this was just about everything I look for in a good tutorial - no 1.5 minute intro/outro ramblin, your Voiceover precisely detailed what you were doing on screen, you didn’t push ANOTHER thing people “should buy”, and (most importantly) it’s just a cool, good-looking animation

[u/TheBigScaryBear]

Great tutorial as always, man. So helpful! Thoughts on doing a character animation tut? Or maybe a trapcoder particular tutorial? Or maybe some more about doing some cell animation in PS and adding effects to those lines in AE? Great work!

[u/rattlybreak]

Great thanks, will definitely try this out soon. Nice 1

[u/hassan_26]

Awesome tut dude. You are killing it! Keep up the great work.

[u/myownproductions]

Saw this pop up in my sub box earlier today on YouTube. Great stuff!

[u/HeadoverheelsSH]

very cool effect!