Water in After Effects

Soak In Some Water Tutorials by Adam Everett Miller might come in handy.

Check out also Underwater Scene in After Effects + (other water tutorials) and more posts tagged water here on AE Portal archive. Also, Toby Pitman showed a unexpected way to create Liquid Backgrounds With Shape Layers.

Here's the older Ocean Water Effect presentation by Aharon Rabinowitz from AENY:

Tutorial gap: water drops, stereoscopic 3D, paper cutouts

With so many tutorials, scripts, and filters now available, it's easy to skip over tutorials when screening if you're busy or otherwise distracted. Some of these are pointed out regularly by Todd Kopriva on AdobeAE Facebook and by Lester Banks.

Anyway, AEtuts has had some good tutorials recently. Here's just a few:

• Paper Cut-Out Stop Motion Animation Effect by Matt Freeth
• Convert Regular Footage To Stereoscopic 3D by Jorrit Schulte
• Rendering Photorealistic Water Droplets – AE Premium by Arie Stavchansky

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)."

3D from 2D using Freeform displacement

In 3D from 2D Image Using Displacement Maps Tudor "Ted" Jelescu shows how to create 3D movement that rotates around the subject from a 2D image using displacement maps and the FreeForm filter in After Effects. He uses similar techniques and the same image as another recent Creative Cow tutorial, Advanced 2.5D Animation in AE by Mathew Fuller. It might be good to look at that one first.

Similar work and tools (Vanishing Point, camera mapping, scripts for AE 3D, etc.) are mentioned in posts tagged multiplane animation, camera mapping, and the AE camera. See also Animate the Splash Using Photoshop and After Effects by Corey Barker (up to the end anyway).

Mostly as a note-to-self, here's the demo of a script from Paul Tuersley, pt_Multiplane:

Update: here's some of real time slices with 52 DSLRs and some Macs,

Create water with displacement and particles

Dave Scotland has another After Effects Quick Tip on Premiumbeat.com, How to Create Realistic Water with Displacement Maps and Particles:


After Effects Quick Tip - Creating Realistic Water with Displacement Maps and Particles from Premiumbeat on Vimeo.

Mr. Mercury, blobby text + water drops

There was a question on the After Effects-List about how to go from liquid to your original image using the built-in CC Mr Mercury filter.
Here are a few of the responses:

• Either create a fully covering blast of particles and fade to original or use Blobbylize instead, with Particle Systems II or such and fade in a solid alpha [from Jens @ Cycore]
• try precomposing your sequence and then just reverse your precomped animation.
• yes play it backwards. And do a crossfade. See the old case study... by Chris Meyer from 1998 [Chris and Trish have a ton of stuff buried at PVC]
• if you animate the blob birth and death sizes from small to well past the slider range of 2 to something like 5.4 for death size, the blobs go to form the original image.

There's not much solid info on Mr. Mercury in AE Help or at Cycore, but Andrew Kramer has nice quick tutorial, Video Copilot tutorial 57. Water Drops.

Fractal Noise: fades & more

This post was updated and moved to Pro Video Coalition, as Fractal Noise in After Effects: plus the newer Turbulent Noise.

AENY Ocean Water Effect presentation

Via VizWorld, a nice website with wide-ranging visualization news, is the Ocean Water Effect presentation by Aharon Rabinowiz given at the recent AENY meeting. It was described as "using only tools found in After Effects CS3+ and no footage, I showed how you can create a semi-realistic look of cruising along the ocean at 40 knots (no idea what that means) both with gray weather and at sunset - great for simple motion graphics projects." The project file is available at All Bets Are Off.

Aharon also mentioned the AE filter Psunami, which once shipped with cool training videos by Brian Maffitt.

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

Water purifies art

PrepShootPost notes that with a down economy the New York City art world is going back to the drawing board and links to a NYT article, The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! Looks like many people will now have time for art.

Via Images to Live By is Bill Viola: ‘Ocean without a shore’, where Viola combines analog and high-def digital video of people passing through a water wall, akin to a wall of death. More on this can be found at Images to Live By; other work (and background) by Viola was at SFMOMA, which has interactive and video of all sorts archived.




Also using water to purify and reveal is reverse graffiti; The Huffington Post explained last October in Reverse Graffiti: Activist Art Extraordinaire:

"Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime."