Ripple + CC Ripple Pulse | Effects of After Effects

[Music] ripple and cc ripple pulse can both be found under the distort category we'll start with ripple and i'm actually going to apply this to an adjustment layer so i'll go up to layer new adjustment layer and apply it to that instead i've set up a grid already because this is a distortion effect it is going to be a lot easier to see with that grid in the background so by default nothing is happening when you apply this effect but as soon as you increase the radius property right here we're going to see ripples going all through our composition now this radius value is a percentage of whatever layer you apply it to so if i want it to affect the entire comp since this is an adjustment layer i need to crank this all the way up to 100 and if i press the space bar to play back we immediately see the ripples going through the entire composition let's take a look at the rest of the controls we have the center of the ripple which is by default right in the center of the layer but you can offset this to be wherever you want so if i wanted it to be coming from the left side that's where the ripples are going to come from and it's a little confusing to look at right now because it almost appears like these ripples are moving towards the center point but that's just because of the size of the width and height so let's skip over these two right here and just go straight to the width and height for a second the wave width is the distance between crests basically in the waves so it's really small right now it's only set to 20. if i increase this up much higher then we're going to get much wider waves if you're just looking at the horizontal lines you can see that pretty clearly this is a lot like the wave warp effect and the width property for that effect but where ripple is different than wave warp is that it's distributing this distortion in a radial way around the center point rather than in a linear way horizontally and vertically so let's reset the center of the ripple back to the center of my layer and now that my wave width is much higher i'll play this back and we can kind of follow these ripples across the comp now it's a lot easier to see now the wave height is basically the amplitude of the wave if i just increase and decrease that you can kind of see that the distortion is more or less it's almost like the ripples are taller or shorter they're more or less intense so the wave width is kind of like the scale of the ripple and the wave height is the intensity of each ripple now you'll notice this maxed out at a wave width of 100 which is a little unfortunate you can't get ripples that are any bigger than just this and remember i said the radius is a percentage so if i didn't want this to be adjusting the outer edges of my comp i could just back it off a little bit until we don't see that distortion and since this is perfectly circular i do have to pay attention to just the top and bottom edges since going beyond that is going to start introducing that black distortion the transparent pixels at the edges of the comp so i really have to bring that down so that the circle is small enough to not go higher than the top and bottom of the comp okay let's jump back up to here to the type of conversion and actually i'm going to turn the radius back up to 100 for now the type of conversion by default is set to asymmetric this is a much more realistic looking ripple and much more authentic to the way that it would look if you drop something in a pond or a pool of water if i change this from asymmetric to symmetric then we're going to get something that looks much more symmetric so it really looks like the center point of our layer is what's moving up and down and causing these ripples to move out throughout the entire comp and that might be something you're after since it has a lot less distortion than the asymmetric ripples i'll put that back to symmetric and the next option is the wave speed now just like wave warp this is a value in seconds so with a wave speed of one it means that every one second it's going to loop so this frame looks exactly the same as the first frame of the comp because it's one second down the line and if i go to two seconds same frame all the way so you can think of this as kind of a loop point now where it might be a little bit confusing is if you increase the wave speed to two it doesn't mean that every two seconds there's a loop it means there's two loops for every one second so the best way to think about that wave speed is how many loops per second so if you wanted a two second loop then you need to put this down to 0.5 so if this is our starting frame i'll take a snapshot we'll go to one second you see that it is not identical and then we go to two seconds and i show that snapshot it's exactly the same as the first frame so there's half of a loop every second or one full loop every two seconds and if i turn that all the way down to zero so that this is not animated at all then we can go down to the ripple phase and just increase this value to completely customize how the ripples are moving so if you wanted this to start off at a certain speed i could say put this down to zero set a keyframe go forward a second and set this to one cycle so this is the same as a wave speed of one at this point because those keyframes are one second apart then it's going to animate for a second and then stop but then let's say i go forward two more seconds and then just increase this to a value of say 180 and i'll look at my value graph so we can see what that looks like we're moving at a constant rate from zero to one revolution and then a constant rate from one revolution to 180 degrees past that but if i just grab these two keyframes and easy ease them then i'll hold down alt or option on a mac to just modify this handle so that this is roughly still a constant rate bring this handle in a little bit and then maybe ease this one out quite a bit while holding shift to snap it horizontal and i'll play this back and it starts at a certain speed and then eases into a final resting point where it's completely static now that was pretty noticeable on the slowdown so i'll probably want to increase this value a little bit until we get a nice smooth curve between these two points but you get the idea the ripple phase gives you a lot more control over the speed of that wave and you can even combine that with the wave speed if i turn that wave speed up to say 2 then it's going to combine my ripple phase keyframes with a constant wave speed of 2. so there's a lot of possibilities with combining those two properties but that's really all there is to the ripple effect now i'm going to shut that off and we're going to go to the next effect which is cc ripple pulse if i bring that out onto my adjustment layer again nothing happens by default and nothing will happen until you actually add keyframes so let's just go straight to the pulse level which in parentheses it says animate this is the property that we actually have to add keyframes to in order to see something so i'm just going to add a keyframe at the default value of 100 on our first frame and then i'll go forward maybe 12 frames i'm working at 24 frames per second and increase that up to say 300 and then go forward another 12 frames and we'll go back down to 100. all right so we have these three keyframes here and if i play this back we get a very subtle distortion it's really hard to see so why don't we go down to the amplitude right here which is defaulted to 100 and just increase it quite a bit and now we can see that ripple just pushing through the entire comp now it's obviously not very smooth at all and that's because this is really based on the speed and the easing between keyframes so watch what happens if i pause say right here where we can really see that distortion and i just easy ease them with the f9 key suddenly everything got a lot more smooth if i play this back now we've got a much more smooth ripple pulsing through the entire composition now just like before we have a center control so i could push this to say the top left corner and then the ripple will come from that point i will just undo that so it's back in the center of the composition we have time span which is basically the speed of that ripple so if i turn that time span up it's going to take longer to pulse through the entire composition and if we turn that down it's going to go faster but as you can see that's also affecting the amplitude so the higher that time span is the bigger your ripples are going to be so to balance that out you have to play with both the time span and the amplitude now this last property is actually really useful for visualizing what's happening it's a render bump map rgba if i check that on everything goes white which isn't all that useful let me go back to the first keyframe and i'm just going to decrease the pulse level value a bit and you'll notice that as i get to zero we go from white to mid gray and then down to black so i'm going to put this value at the start right at zero and if i just use my text color picker right here we can take a look at that value and see that it is a brightness value of fifty percent in other words it's a fifty percent gray value and a bump map is a grayscale image that can be used to drive distortion so depending on how bright or dark a pixel is in the bump map a corresponding pixel on what is being distorted will be warped in a certain direction so in the case of this effect basically up or down if we're looking down at a pond of water and a ripple is coming from the center point and with a pulse level of zero we have a 50 percent gray which to the effect is applying a distortion of zero basically unaffected without the bump map on we see that there is no distortion with or without this effect on all right so let me check that back on and then move forward a little bit and we'll notice that as our value increases from 0 to 300 we have a very small gradient from that 50 gray to 100 white and that's what's driving the distortion if i turn this back off you can see that white pixels are basically being pushed downwards or into the composition and then if i turn that bump map back on and go forward again i'm going to change that third keyframe from 100 down to negative 100 and we have a black circle showing up now if i move forward again there's a much tighter gradient between the white and black because the time between these two values is the same as the time between these two values so naturally that gradient is crushed a little bit so if i move that forward a bit we can see a softer transition between those two values now let's turn off the bump map and take a look you can see that where that black circle was those pixels are being pulled toward us so a white value pushes in and a black value pulls out and if we play this back you can see that now we have a very nice fluid looking ripple pulse now i'm going to back up to that second keyframe and turn that bump map back on and just turn the pulse level down until that white dot is basically right in the center of my composition so we basically don't have a clipped out bright spot on this value and i'm just going to very carefully dial this back so just going up to a value of 20 from 0 gets us to that 100 white point in the center of our bump map and if i go to the third keyframe and bring this one down as well to something around negative 20 then we're also getting to that pure black value now in most distortions using bump maps values above or below 100 white or 100 black are basically going to be ignored but as you can see that really dulled down my ripple for this effect so even though that bump map is being rendered out as pure white and black you can increase the pulse level value to increase or decrease the distortion so rendering that bump map as a visual reference isn't all that great but you could use this bump map to drive something else now what i'm going to do really quickly is just turn off the adjustment layer switch so this is just a regular solid layer again and remember this said the bump map is rgba meaning red green blue and alpha so i now have semi-transparent pixels i don't want those so i'm going to add a solid composite effect after the ripple pulse and change the color to 50 gray remember that's the neutral value where no distortion will take place when reading this as a bump map so i'll collapse that up and i can actually turn it off and then i'll make another adjustment layer layer new adjustment layer and i'm going to bring up the glass effect cc glass and apply it to the adjustment layer this effect uses a bump map so for that source i'm going to choose adjustment layer 1 where cc ripple pulse is and i'm going to make sure that this is switched to effects and masks so that it's looking at the affected layer and not the unaffected layer with that applied i'm going to get a similar ripple but with lighting effects because of the added controls that we have in cc glass if i turn my height up we're going to see this a lot more dramatically so let me just increase that size a bit maybe make this a little bit softer and then we'll take a look at this plate back so there you go something that looks a lot more complex than just pushing those pixels around like i said we have more controls over how that distortion looks using cc glass or any effect that uses bump maps so that is the ripple effect and cc ripple pulse and how you might use them to do something a little bit more complex than the default settings hey thanks for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then check out the other ones here on my youtube channel and if you like my teaching style then definitely check out my longer form content on skillshare and school of motion and if you want to support more tutorials like this one check out my patreon you can find links for all that stuff in the description of this video [Music]

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 4,163

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: k5b_kRqgky8

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021