Liquid Transition - After Effects Workflow & Tutorial

I'm gonna show you my workflow for this project and break down the liquid transition let's begin youngblood a brewery in Australia approached me to make a short animation for their beer going to tap with a can transforming into a beer pouring I've made some style frames first using elements that are drawn in Illustrator and put them into Photoshop and added some shading with this grain brush that I've made I did a rough pass of a cell animation in rough animator but you can use any frame by frame software I started off with the frame of the cat and decided I would try swirling from the bottom left whipping up and around and then slamming back down where the next designs would be revealed this would be my guide layer I started drawing a few frames straight ahead creating a new frame and loosely drawing where I think the motion should be about halfway through the transition I had this elongated blob shape and I knew that it would be smooth sailing for the back of this transition because I've done a lot of animation with simple blob shape I knew that I just had to draw blobs following this path up and around more drawn to the top so it slows down and have them getting further apart and stretching so they accelerate towards this sort of explosion at the end I jumped ahead and completed that sort of last section of the transition but I still missed a whole bunch of animation going from where the cans started to warp until this blob so I needed to figure out how to fill those in-between shapes because it's a pretty drastic cut here and I knew that this would be the trickiest part and here it's a bit of try and error I created a new frame in between these frames and try to imagine how this can would be turning into the liquid knowing it was gonna look like this blob shape and a handful of frames because this was gonna be a pretty fast motion I only needed about three frames that were in this tricky state of warping can first of all I pushed out these existing warps to their extremes and started to round out at the top of the can on this next frame I rounded out the left side of the can because these sort of tendrils that were sticking out would kind of be folded and wrapped behind that view anyway and that will help us get us to this round shape going to arrive at shortly and on the right I pushed it further to the left and had the back of the can start to become visible now I was only left with one frame and looking at my onion skins which is the faded view of the previous and next frames I drew in between the edges of where these shapes were going to be this is where the animation was going to be at its fastest so as long as it kind of made sense we were going to be okay and here's what it looks like all together to make those little blobs that trail the main shape I made a new layer and drew a blob where it might separate from the main form like here when it makes a turn and then on the next frame make that blob going the same sort of distance following this main shape again one ball going that same shape and then slowing down just going a bit further away and the shape getting shorter and then I repeated that a few more time until that I felt that there was enough make sure they don't all start and stop at the same time now I worked on that for a little bit longer sort of tweaking and refining these shapes and then I added some more explosion effects at the end and here's what that final rough look like I then exported that just as a movie file and imported that into After Effects to clean up these roughs I used shape layers in After Effects for the main can shape I imported our can from illustrator added some extra points of the pen tool and then every two frames moved it to match the roughs once I go to this blog part I made a new shape so it would be easier working with less points so here's what those cleaned up shape layers look like to add the shading I'm first gonna color them black and I'm gonna create a new shape layer with my pen tool and draw a shape that goes around the edge of our can here let's drag that on top of that can main layer I want to change its color to orange and rename it can main shading gray and I need to add a few effect first let's add set matte and we wanted to take the map from layer 28 our can main front so now it's only visible on that can layer and now let's add roughen edges let's put that above this set matte in the layer stack and to scale down to 10 the border maybe up to a 100 and now we've got this nice sort of grainy look here I want to keyframe its path property and then using the keyframes that we made on this main shape as a guide and every new frame I'm gonna adjust its position slightly that's one side of the can done to do the highlights I'm going to duplicate its layer here rename it shading red I'm gonna change its color I'm gonna make the border a little smaller about 75 get rid of all of these keyframes and then just nudge the path over a bit more to the left so we now have a nice little sort of hint of red on the edge here and then I'm just gonna key frame that path property again just keeping it to the very edge of this can and now we've got the shading on the left of this can and then I did that for every layer now that may seem like a lot of work and it's certainly not super quick but it only took a few hours and I think it was worth it I animated the logo in Photoshop on top of guide layer of those main layers that I'd rendered out I did this in Photoshop so I could edit the logo easily by lassoing a selection going up to edit warp and making adjustments that way I imported that into after-effects added the looping texture onto everything and this was the final result I made a short playlist of some related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week Subtitle： Zoe J Marriott

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 148,372

Keywords: after effects liquid transition, liquid transition animation, motion design workflow, after effects tutorial, cel animation tutorial, cel animation process, frame by frame animation, frame by frame motion design, motion graphics transitions, motion graphics transition tutorial, how to animate liquid, how to animate transitions, shape morph after effects, transform after effects, after effects workflow, Motion Graphics in After Effects, Liquid Effects Motion Graphics

Id: _cjEnGWN3Ug

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019