The Best 2D Smoke in After Effects - Animation Tutorial

in this video, I'm gonna show you how to create looping 2d smoke animations all in After Effects let's begin now if you want a really quick smoke animation you can quickly draw a pillar shape using your pen tool, add the effect wave warp change the direction, adjust the height and width and you've got something like this and this can be really useful in some circumstances but if you want a more realistic smoke effect that's just a bit more flexible I'm going to show you how to build this effect over here on the Left which we're going to build with simple shape layers and then add some really neat effects to get this result and we're gonna start in exactly the same way in a new pre comp creating a new shape layer by drawing a pillar shape with our pen tool there's just a little bit more narrower at the bottom now let's add our first plume of smoke making sure that we've got nothing selected by clicking off that layer let's draw a round shape that's not quite an exact circle and let's named that plume o1 because we always label our layers now let's move that down to the bottom of our pillar on the left here and press P to bring up our position properties let's make a keyframe right at the start and then about 14 seconds later let's drag that up off screen a bit so it's completely out of view and play that back that seems like a good speed for this smoke now let's add some scale keyframes by opening up s on a keyboard make a keyframe at the end here and have a start I'm gonna make it pretty small and then maybe move its position in a little bit as well so it can fit completely within that smoke here now let's go up to our pen tool and select the convert vertex tool and we're gonna adjust the animation path of this plume if we just simply click and drag this out here we'll create a new Bezier handle and our plume will now animate in a slight arc and just pop out of the side of the plume a little bit sooner there we go that's looking good I'm gonna trim this at 14 seconds by holding alt and the right square bracket on my keyboard and now we're gonna start making the plumes on the right so I'm gonna select this and duplicate it with ctrl + D and then I'm going to move its position just by clicking and dragging at the start and then at the end here and this last keyframe I'm gonna drag it over to the right so this animation path follows the right side of our pillar there we go and I want to select a pencil back again and I'm just gonna make a few adjustments to the shape of this plume on the right just so they don't look too similar and identical and like we've just copied and pasted them even though we have and I'm going to come back and do this a few times during this project excellent they look different enough now I'm gonna move this layer of cross about two seconds maybe just a bit before so that way it starts animating just a little bit later and we get this nice F shape in a smoke pillar now let's select both of these layers and just get them both with control D I move them up in the effect stack and then slide them over again about the same amount just under two seconds and then make some small adjustments to their shapes again now link is a good point to jump back into our top smoke composition work and compare it to our first example now this comp I've made 20 seconds long and the first 10 seconds is just each of the sort of plumes popping up into the smoke and then slowly getting to the top and then from 10 seconds step 18 seconds we've got a full loop of the smoke here on the left with plumes all throughout the smoke which we're going to duplicate in our second spoke very shortly but the main thing that we need to do is round out our smoke on the right well we don't have all of these sharp corners and it's nice and rounded like this one on the left and to do that we're gonna add a few effects of this yellow layer the smoke to lay here we're gonna add a Gaussian blur we're gonna make the blurriness about 100 so now we don't have much information about the sharpness of this corner to work with which is good and then we're gonna add the levels effect now instead of using the levels to adjust the color the brightness theme I normally do we're going to change its channel from the RGB to the Alpha Channel and we're gonna crush and increase the contrast of that alpha Channel now we do that by taking the two outside triangles and dragging them closer and you can see as we do that we start to lose the gradient of this blur here but we also lose the corner as well which is great so let's continue to drag these close to the center until we get a nice shape that we like now you can go too far and it becomes really crunchy if you pull them in all the way and you get this aliasing which we don't really like so let's just keep that a tiny gap open so there's still the slightest blur there wonderful now the amount of blue you have before you crush the levels is gonna change how round these corners are if we set it to 50 they'll be less rounded and we set it to something much higher it'll be way more blobby I think 100 works well for us here you should know that these two pre comps have been up slightly in this composition that is because of these effects that have got going on here also affect the very top edge of the comp and you can see we get some weird funny results when I smoke reaches the very top so the best thing to do is just hide them above with the composition and pretend they don't exist and just make sure you make your pre comp a little bit bigger than you think you need to and make the smoke plume just a bit taller than you expect and you should be fine and I'm just playing how we get a stroke around the shape a little bit later after we add in some more details and plumes to this smoke we can see that on the smoke on the left underneath the main plumes we have this sort of arc that kind of cuts in towards our main pillar and these little holes that form as well now these are two things that I think really sell this effect and make it look more realistic and believable so we can see on smoke one on the left and underneath these plumes we have this little arc that sort of cuts in towards the main pillar so when the smoke pulls away from the main form a larger pocket of air fills up that space so we maintain the same volume of the smoke as it adapts and moves away and some holes appear as well doing the same thing now these two elements are what I think really sell this effect make it much more believable and realistic so let's jump back into our smoke to comp and make some of those I'm gonna draw another blob with our pen tool creating a new shape layer and this time I'm going to make it a little more elongated and more like a squashed ball and change the fill so it can tablet it's a bit different and I'm gonna call that hole by one and I'm gonna move that just under our first plume so that overlaps our fair bit with that pillar then I'm also going to parent that to a plume on using the pick whip so now it will follow plume on up as it rises and now we're going to set this blending mode to silhouette alpha which will make everything below that in the composition transparent so now it cuts away into the main pillar making a sort of smoke armpit and if we toggle on a transparency grid you can see there is nothing underneath that it is all transparent now what I also want to do is have this increase in scale over time so I'm gonna add some scale keyframes so that it goes from about 50 to maybe a hundred and fifty over its lifetime that's maybe adjusted shape slightly so it's not quite as squashed there I think that's good at the bottom here you can see it doesn't look great but our blur is gonna cover all of that so that'll be seamless so I'm going to duplicate that four times with control D I'm gonna parent whole tube to plume to whole three two plume three etc I'm gonna slide them over to their respective plumes and then I'm gonna move them into place so they sit just underneath where they need to be and then adjust their shapes a tiny bit as well to keep them looking a bit more organic wonderful now we've got four plumes rising up and little hole forming underneath each one that gets a bit bigger as it floats upwards to give these extra little holes it's a pretty similar process so back on our main comp I'm gonna duplicate holo one and remember the whole Oh 1b I'm gonna adjust its shape to be quite a bit more circular and move it over to the right so it starts to eat away at this larger plume here now let's see how that looks this one looks kind of all right but it kind of it's a bit too low so it kind of makes this hole at the bottom here which I don't really like so I'm just gonna go in and finesse that and maybe move it up a bit and do a bit of a trial and error until I get the result that I want but it doesn't take too long to sort of figure out what works and what doesn't now that we're happy with that I'm gonna duplicate that and attach it to another plume and now we've got all of our main forms that we need to loop so to do that I'm gonna select all of our layers in this comp duplicate them with ctrl + D take them to the top of the layer stack and then drag them over at 8 seconds in so they will start appearing after our first ones finish duplicate them again and then slide these ones over to 16 seconds so now we've got enough overlap in the middle here so we've got a full loop happening and we're going to our main comp that should happen between 10 seconds and 18 seconds now to add our stroke to add the stroke I'm gonna duplicate smoke go to and hide the bottom one for now and I'm gonna add the effect Vegas now Vegas adds these sort of cycling kind of trim pathy looking little gradient lights that go around any shape but we can kind of hack this effect to give us a stroke on any layer with an alpha Channel so firstly in a control panel over here change the rendering mode to transparent now we can see the effects a little better and then we need to change the color too I'm gonna choose wipe you can choose whatever you want and then we need to change the end opacity which is sort of the end of these gradient strokes and just change that to 1 and now we have a stroke so let's turn back on ah bottom layer here and tennis transparency down so looks a bit ghostly and I'm also going to add a new adjustment layer and add the effect at least rise time and I'm gonna say that 212 which is gonna lower the frame eight to twelve frames per second and that's just gonna mimic a more traditional frame by frame animation look which I think suits this effect really well now from here you can use these comps do a few more interesting things you could use the filter comp as a mat for a blur adjustment layer to create this nice effect as if your vision is being distorted by the smoke and then of course added to your own 2d or even 3d scenes really interested to see how people make with this effect this effect wouldn't only look good as smoke I think it looks good steam which is you know smoke light and also maybe some rolling clouds as well it could work out or even fire if you want a big blobby stylized fire so please don't forget to tag me had been underscore married underscore on Instagram so I can see all the work you've made and please dig deep into the working files that I've provided and it highly encourage you to take we've learned here and apply it to your own work and your own style and make something new I've 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

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 165,594

Keywords: after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, tutorial, motion graphics shadows, no plugin after effects, adobe after effects, ben marriott, animation tutorial, after effects beginners, looping smoke effect, smoke animation tutorial, how to make smoke animation, animated smoke, smoke animation, 2d smoke effect, how to animate smoke, after effects steam, animating smoke, smoke effect, after effects, looping smoke animation, smoke, effects animation, smoke tutorial

Id: _A1v2Vw4mNE

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/motionick]

This is super dope 🤟

[u/iRamenGuy]

This is great!

[u/BMTyeayea]

Yea great tut 👌

[u/josh8644]

Can't not ever read your username in the Futurama voice...

Great tut as always!