Underwater Scenes in After Effects

Shortformvideo has a new two-part tutorial, Deep Thought, showing you how to create an underwater scene with light rays, rising bubbles, and a cloudy texture. Part 2 will cover using the Lens Blur filter with a depth matte. No extra plug-ins required, so this can be done out of the box with CS3, CS4 or CS5 (he usually posts projects too after a bit).

Here's part1 [with part 2 on the blog]:

Others have similar tutorials, all without using Red Giant Psunami (unrevved for years but still great) but instead Fractal Noise, CC Radial Blur, or Light Burst type filters:

• Underwater Scene and Depth Charge! by Andrew Kramer at Video Copilot (plus a semi-realistic view over the ocean, 32. 3D Ocean)

• Underwater Scene in After Effects by CGSwot - Part 1 and Part 2.

• Volumetric Lights by Maltaannon (gets you close)

• Create an Underwater Scene (with Particle World, Blobbylize, Fractal Noise, more) at AEtuts. There's also a mimic video version, Create an Underwater Scene -- After Effects Tutorial from Richard Williams on Vimeo.

Going up for some air, there are above water effects too.:

• Fire and Water by Aharon Rabinowitz at Artbeats

• A variety of other water effects can be found in tutorials on the Caustics and Waveworld effects included in AE (like this older one by Jim Tierney, Caustics: Dropping the Cow into A Pool of Water), in other tutorials at Creative Cow, by Quinn Stephens, Water Drops in AE with Mr. Mercury, and others that can be located searching AE community Help.

• Here's the Ocean Water Effect presentation by Aharon Rabinowitz at AENY, below:

Ocean Water Effect presentation by Aharon Rabinowitz from AENY on Vimeo.


Update: in an AE-List thread Brian Maffitt had more advice:
"Well, since I designed both Psunami and Caustics, here's my take on when you would use either/both:
Psunami is all about the water. If you want realistic water, based on physics, rendered with ray-tracing, Psunami is the way to go. You can put a "decal" on the surface of the water if you want a logo to behave as if it were a sheet of plastic floating atop water, and you can even put the camera under the surface to get a nice scuba-diver view, but Psunami doesn't handle refractions THROUGH the water.

Caustics is designed to DISPLACE A LAYER as if it is being seen through water. It handles the refraction, can add a reflection if you like, and even render the weird light patterns (the caustics) that you get on the bottom of the pool. And it can be ultra-realistic... but it is strictly a top-down view.

Psunami has all of the geometry controls built in (which is probably why it's a "bear"), while Caustics uses a separate layer's luminance to determine the shape of the surface (which is why we also invented WaveWorld: to generate realistic wave mechanics for Caustics to work with)."