Hi I'm Ben Marriott
today I'm going to show you how to get this super quick
2d liquid ripple effect in Adobe After Effects
let's begin
alright here's the scene with started with
and this project file is going to be available for download down in the description box
I've got all the unnecessary layers shied behind here
so we can just focus on the layers that are important for this effect
we've got our water layout which is a rectangle and it's got no fill with a white stroke, set to 2 pixels
we've got our yolk form pre-comp here which is just a yolk falling
and we've got our duck rising pre-comp here to that duck animation
and at the moment you'll see it's pretty jarring the transition between the two
but we're gonna fix that in a moment once we've got our ripple animation sorted
because that's going to help us a little bit
the effect we're going to use today is actually called ripple
I found it completely by accident just searching in the effects panel over here for some effects that sounded related to water
when I was working on a similar animation
now let's take a look at what that ripple effect does on a shape layer to begin with
I'll just make this gradient a little more gradual
because that will accentuate the effect of it
and if we type ripple into the box over here and at that you'll see that at the start
it doesn't do anything at all but once we bump up this radius property
you can see these concentric circles appearing and it's sort of warping the edges of the shape
and if we play it will see those moving outwards
we're just going to focus on this warping that happens on the edge of the shape here
that's really what's going to drive our effect so let's get rid of that layer
and let's apply that to our water shape layer let's double click on here and
we're going to keyframe the radius right as a splash happens
so on this layer before the splash we're going to keep in the radius here
let's open that property with U on the keyboard and as the splash actually
happens let's bump that up to around 40 pixels all right now initially that's a
little slow so let's change the speed to three and let's also change the wave
width we'll set that to sixty and let's set the height to a little higher
seventy-five there that's kind of getting closer and we want these waves to
sort of dissipate and fade down so we're gonna keyframe our wave height
property here guess you'd open it up and down here and then way over here we're
gonna drag this down to zero so now we see it should slowly fade away I'm gonna
easy ease that keyframe by pressing f9 and also not quite liking the shape of
these waves here they're kind of leaning away from our impact point and that
might be how they behave naturally in the environment I kind want more of
the graphics sine waves style wave and the way we're going to do that is by
altering the center of the ripple center of the ripple is controlled by this
point here and if we drag that closer to the center we do get these sine waves
appearing but if we play them back you'll notice that it cycles in between
the beginning of the wave and the end of the wave and then we get a few these
awkward keyframes here where it just looks sharp and you know a bit wrong a
bit wrong really so what we're gonna do is instead if dragging it closer we're gonna
drag it further away let's say to about up here now here you don't see much of
the influence of those angles in the effect now as we play that back that's
looking a little better
there I think that's pretty good
now the reason we used a rectangle for our water layer instead of using just a
straight line which would have had the same sort of visual effect here is
because we want to use that as an alpha matte for our duck and for our yolk so let's
duplicate our water layer I'm gonna give it a fill and doesn't matter what color
the fill is, call it water matte because we always label our layers, colour it purple
and let's drag that above that duck pre-comp over here now we're gonna select alpha matte
for our duck pre-comp here actually the alpha matte inverted is what we want and so we
can see now it pops up being revealed by this alpha matt when our yolk does here now
we also want to see the bottom half of our duck so let's choose a point where our
duck is completely above the water. it's around there. we're gonna duplicate both
of these layers with Control D and let's trim them both by holding alt and
the left square bracket so that means we won't see them at all before this point
and now here we're going to change that from alpha inverted to alpha matte so
now it's visible and under that water and to add a little bit more flavor, we're just
gonna adjust the scale to 105 percent so now it looks like the water is
refracting a duck a little bit and enlarging it. let's play that back
ah beautiful
we also got this comp here that's been
waiting to be shown if I turn that on you can see that that is the egg white
kind of dispersing underneath the water. bad news is there's no easy way to
achieve this effect I did these frame-by-frame in
Photoshop so sorry no hack solution there
please make some awesome ripple effects add that to water, milk, Diet Dr. Pepper lien or any of the liquids that
are currently popular with you these days
tag me at ben_marriott_ on Instagram with what you
make so I can share it in my stories thank you so much for watching please
let me know down in the comments whether you'd like to see some more of these
quicker tutorials I'd love to know and please don't forget to subscribe hit
that Bell icon share and absolutely abuse that like button I'll see you next week