Hi I'm Ben Marriott
and today I'm gonna show you how to create this liquid melty effect in Adobe After Effects
Let's begin!
So to start this effect you'll need all of your elements separated
so I've got each layer in its own little text box here
if you've got a lot of text, plugins like decompose text can help you out with that
I've also given them a pretty narrow tracking which is
the space in between the letters so ours is pretty tightly squished together and
that means that we're just gonna get more of them melting into each other as
they sort of melt away
We're gonna create a rectangle using a rectangle
here to cover up everything below the text that we're going to use as a mat for our text to disappear into
and let's label that melt matte because we always label our layers
Let's drag that to the bottom
Now let's animate our text falling away
Now one second in we're gonna select all of our text here and
we're going to animate the position property so we're gonna open it up with
P click on the stopwatch here and around two seconds in I'm just gonna nudge them
all down using my arrow tool so they're just a little bit below this line
great
now let's also animate the rotation so I'll go to one second in, press R
to bring up rotation click the stopwatch to make some keyframes and then at two
seconds in we're gonna animate the T turning in this way maybe around 60
60 degrees minus 60 degrees the L about minus 30 or so and then we're
gonna do the opposite direction on this side so the E will go about 30
degrees this way and the M minus 60 degrees or they are about, the amount isn't really important
now I'm gonna select all of these layers
and press U to bring up all of our key frame properties I'm gonna select them
all and press f9 to give an easy ease on all of them
now let's watch it back. it's a bit fast so let's drag these keyframes back a touch
yeah that looks nicer. now with these back keyframes selected I'm gonna
click on our graph editor here which brings which brings up this nifty little
feature here we're gonna make sure we're on let's get a speed graph I'm just
going to drag this handle out a bit and that'll make them just ease into that
final position a little bit more, let's play the back
yeah that's looking nice
okay back to the regular view where the M is selected we're gonna type in set Matte
click on that layer and let's drag so we're halfway in between the
animation so we can see where the M should be disappearing we'll set the
take matte from layer probably up here and select melt matte and you can see now
he's disappearing but it's on the wrong side so we're gonna select invert matte
over here and now he disappears behind there and we can hide our melt matte
layer now we can just copy that effect with ctrl C select that other layer and
control V to paste and they'll all disappear
nice now we want them to leave
a puddle where they disappear so let's go towards the end here and we're just
gonna draw a shape layer so we're gonna select that pen tool let's change the
fill to white so it matches that text and we're just gonna draw roughly a sort
of puddle shape we can tweak this later but I think it's nice to just get a
rough shape down first that we can play with
okay so that's what a final sort of state is gonna look like let's call this
puddle now let's toggle down to find our shape
property a shape path and we're gonna keyframe the path property at the end
here I have the star I'm gonna select that pen tool I'm gonna move all these
anchor points to make our puddle just look quite a bit narrower and smaller
cause at the beginning we don't there to be any puddle at all and let's move in
the sides so they're about the width of the letters here. now play that back
the puddle sort of grows. okay
Now let's easy ease those keyframes again with F9
at the end I kind of want it to be a little wider so I'm gonna drag these anchor
points out a touch and adjust these a little bit and we're gonna trim this layer too
because we don't want to see that at all until that text starts melting
alright
that looks fine for now but we're definitely going to do some more
tweaking soon so to create our melty effect layer we're gonna create a new
adjustment layer so we'll go to layer new adjustment layer up here I'm gonna
call that let's call that melty effects and we're gonna add to that, the effect
Gaussian blur and also levels. Now the start of the animation we're gonna
keyframe our Gaussian blur at 0 and press U to open up the property down
here and a little bit of the way in we're gonna crank that blur up to let's
say 150 oh yeah that looks that's very blurry excellent
now we're going to use our levels effect to crunch down on that blur by adding maximum contrast to the
Alpha Channel so that means that we're telling anything that's kind of
transparent to be fully transparent and anything that's just a little bit
transparent to be not transparent at all so let's select from our channel alpha
down here and drag both of these points right to the middle and you can see as
we're doing that you can kind of picture what's happening now let's get back and watch
kind of what it looks like okay so we can see here we're kind of getting
the effect we want it's starting to melt and they started deciding to get round they
lose all their corners and then they kind of merge into each other and then our
puddle appears far too late so we can see that you know this element T he they
sort of melting into nothing and disappearing and then this sort of
puddle appears here so we're going to need to adjust the puddle
alright
that's looking pretty good one thing I do notice is that when this L sort of
starts melting there we get it sort of disappearing into nowhere and we don't
want that so what we're going to do is we're going to create another shape on
the on the same puddle shape layer so let's say around here I'm just going to
draw a round shape and all the effects are gonna be applied to that so you can
see it and acting in real time I'm just gonna make that so I'm just kind of
drawing what I want this frame to look like and then that's in shape 2 so I
want to toggle down go to its path property and over here when our L starts to
melt let's click on this and just shrink that shape down at this point that's a
little more smooth and animating the physics correctly is really what's gonna
sell this effect so if the physics kind of look off if it's not melting at the
right speed or if there's puddles where there should or shouldn't be it's not
gonna be quite as believable so now I'm just gonna spend a little bit of time
tweaking these sort of shapes and the speed of these
all right I'm at a point where I'm happy with now that looks pretty good but
there's one thing I'm not quite liking how the end of this sort of sort of
stops here I want this sort of to ease in really heavily like the end of the puddle
will still slightly keep moving still has a little bit of momentum from the
melting but I can't find a way to easily do that keyframe by easing it more cause
then it's gonna it kind of disrupts the kind of melting speed we've got at the
beginning a little hack method I've got to adjust that is to add a Bezier warp
to this adjustment layer is a warp and just before everything finishes melting
I'm gonna keyframe all of these vertices and then a little bit after that's sort
of resting state and the zoom out and I'm just gonna pull these anchor points
out a touch so we stretch out that puddle just a little bit give it that
extra tiny bit of movement so now we just get a little bit of that puddle
sort of pulling out a little bit more let's play that back all right now you
can also if we zoom in here we can see that the edge of this puddle
is a little bit blurry so what we can do there is that means on our levels our
alpha channel levels aren't quite crisp enough so we need to drag those in
slightly the more you push this if you push it too hard you're gonna get all
this crispy aliasing which we don't really want so we want to make sure that
that's just a few a light touches needed just a few few pixels away from that
that looks fine that looks good to me this effect with the blurring and in the
crunch in the Alpha Channel I use it more often than I thought I would it
comes in really handy you just need to round corners on a simple shape or
remove some of that crispy aliasing that you get in some places it comes in handy
in a pinch and this busier warp effect normally
it's best to sort of sort out your easing issues in your main keyframes but
sometimes it just doesn't work and you need a little bit of a hack solution on
top and here it doesn't disrupt anything for our shading effect I'm gonna render
this out and do some frame by frame in photoshop
here I'm gonna be using the plug-in annimdessin2 which is 100% free
essentially it's a toolbar that has the buttons you wish Photoshop had for doing
frame by frame animations now I'm only really gonna be using three buttons this
one to create a new layer this one to create a new frame and this one to
display my onion skins which is the transparency so you can kind of see a
bit of the frame before so your animation lines up I'm gonna add a
yellow layer cuz I kind of think I want this animation to maybe look like cheese
so I'm just gonna put a yellow fill on this layer and set it to multiply over
existing video layer and with this new layer I've called highlight I'm just
gonna add a highlight to the top left of every layer using a wider round brush
all right I think those highlights are starting to look pretty good now let's
move on to the shading I'm gonna create a new layer and on that layer I'm going
to select a nice round soft brush select a color that's just a little darker and
I'm just going to shade the bottom right of each layer
okay and I think that shading looks pretty good now as well let's take this
back into After Effects
all right so let's import that PSD into After Effects with control I
find our file and select import as
composition retain layer sizes and click the next okay dialog box now I want to
create a new comp that includes our main comp here so we can just drag that onto
our new compositions button down here and that creates a comp with the same
size and width and is nests that comp inside
so let's rename that melt main top and we want to go into our PSD that we
imported here and just copy out these two layers here these are our highlights
and our shadows let's rename this to shadow which we should have done in
Photoshop now we want to color our melt main comp yellow so let's apply the
fill effect over here and let's select a yellow color and we want a shadow layer
to be meted out by our melting text comp so let's duplicate our main comp here
put over our shadow layer and let's rename it melt main comp matte
and then on a shadow comp we're going to apply alpha matte here. Great
also one thing I want to do is I want to apply a kind of rim lighting to the
edges of this shadow layer so it appears a little more rounded and we can do that
by applying a choker to our matte here so if we find these simple choker effect
over here and we just wrap that up you can see it encroaching a little bit on
our shadow layer you can see that it never touches the exact edge of our
melts layer here and to make that a little more subtle we can blur that
effect so if we type in Gaussian blur over here and just crank that up a bit to
kind of feather the edges of that matte alright that's looking pretty good to me
it's a little too jittery our shadow layer here so something we can do that is just
to apply a blur to that shadow layer so let's add a blur effect and let's give
it a 50 pixel blur so that just all make it a
little bit more even between all the layers so that's actually still a little
too jittery for my liking now one trick we can do though ideally
you sort this out in Photoshop when you're drawing these in the first place
but I'm just going to duplicate the shadow and the matte here and I'm gonna
set them both to 50% opacity and I want to shift the top one over just one frame
because most of these were animated on tools it should blend them just a little
bit so let's try that
all right that's much better that looks a hell of a lot
softer now so what that does is it means instead of showing the one image
for two frames it's showing showing one image once and then on the next frame
it's half blended into the next frame so you kind of get so it's kind of like
inbetweening the frames here so there's just a bit of
overlap of opacity and I think that gives a pretty nice effect we've got
that subtle movement happening but it's not too severe and I think that looks
pretty good now you can use this effect and melt absolutely anything -- text
army men, our generation -- hope for the future anything at all if you make something
melty or use the tricks you learned in this video please share what you've done
and tag me at ben_marriott_ so I can share them on my
Instagram stories I can't wait to see what you make please let me know down in
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