[Music]
[Music] We're going to create a new solid layer it doesn't matter what color and we're going to
call it a lava and the first effect we're going to add to it is fractal noise now this generates
a random noise pattern which will be the base of this effect let's get it a bit more like boiling
fire now there are lots of different fractal noise types I've tried them all and what I think works
best for this effect is smeary this gives us nice big areas of one color and then smaller
more detailed crevices of the other as well now let's check invert so that the black areas are
larger and this will be where our lava or magma your preference it'll be where the lava or magma
has cooled on the surface and is turning into more of a solid rock well not quite solid but
you get the idea now let's increase the contrast a bit to around 130 and we also want to make our
noise a bit bigger so let's open up the transform properties and increase the scale to around 250.
now this is really determining how zoomed in or close to the lava where you want to look next
we need some motion we want this constantly changing and bubbling away and we can do that
by adjusting the evolution property that we have here now we could keyframe that but it's going to
be simpler to add a simple expression so let's hold alt option and click the stopwatch next
to Evolution and that will bring up the expression window we can delete everything in there and we're
just going to add time asterisk 30. time is the time in seconds which increases as we play the
animation and that is multiplied by 30 which just accelerates it if we wanted to go a bit faster we
could change it to time times 300 but I think we want a slower burn for this effect let's go back
down to 30. there I think we'd also like a bit more movement let's see if this lava is Flowing
downwards and we can do that by animating this offset turbulence property now we can click the
stopwatch next to it while we're at the starter back on and then at the end of our comp my comp
is 10 seconds long let's increase the value on the right which is the x-axis the vertical axis for
some vertical motion and let's increase that all the way till it's doubled to 1080 there now we've
got the large mass of lava flowing downwards and then the surface bubbling away with the evolution
property now if you wanted you could also animate the x-axis and we'd get a bit of diagonal motion
but I think vertical works fine for us here now one thing that's going to make this look a
little more Lavery is to add a bit of texture to the motion lava isn't a smooth fluid like water
that's just flowing in and out of one another with ease lava magma it's constantly cooling hardening
and melting and we want to capture a bit of that in this effect and we can do that by having two
different frame rates in our fractal noise now the mass moving around that will be moving smoothly
but the smaller scale boiling that's happening on the surface where we've animated the evolution
that's what's cooling inconsistently so let's adjust the frame rate of that so we can see that
expression window is still open down here if all of your properties are closed on your layer and
you want to quickly get to the layers that have Expressions you can just hit e in quick succession
on your keyboard twice EE and then in this Express expression at the very front before time
we're going to add posterize time and in those parentheses type 12 for 12 frames per second half
of our frame rate of our comp which is 24 and then a comma afterwards and that will set the frame
rate of just this property to 12 frames per second it is subtle but it gives that surface motion just
a little bit of a staggered effect okay we're done with the fractal noise now to make it look
like lava and not HR giger's TV static let's add a curves effect to this layer so we can easily
control the contrast let's drag this so it's darker overall and then drag it up at the end just
to keep those brightest highlights there something like that and this will save us from trying to
tweak the brightness and contrast values in the fractal noise which can be a bit more difficult
okay now let's add a new adjustment layer we're going to call that effects because we always label
our layers and this will sit on top of our other layers and affect everything below it now we could
just add these effects straight onto our lava solid layer but this gives us a lot more freedom
if you want to add additional elements like text in between them later so the first effect we're
going to add will have the most impact and that is to change the color and we are going to do that
with the effect CC toner so this lets us map our highlights mid-tones Shadows to these new colors
over here so our shadows let's keep them black mid-tones we're going to go for a red and for a
highlights a lovely yellow there practically lava already I've chosen a nice warm yellow you could
choose a more orange red if you want to show a more red lava lava comes in all shapes and sizes
from glowing white heart to a dribbly red gray porridge and everything in between be the lava
that you want to be and don't let anyone else stop you now we're going to add some more detail to the
darkest areas at the moment this kind of looks almost like a slow motion explosion and these
are areas of gas that are heated differently we want to make them look a little more like rocks
that are continuously being melted and hardened and we're going to do that when the effect that
no one will suspect CC plastic and honestly I've never found a practical use for it before but here
it does just the trick it's an effect that makes your layer look like it's wrapped in plastic of
some sort but as soon as we add it here on this combination of effects we can see it's already
looking much more solid it's adding some shading but it appears only to be our darker areas and now
it looks like they are raised up from the hotter areas and they have a bit of three dimension which
is great now there's only one thing that we're going to change about this effect and that is in
the shading properties and it's the specular we're going to turn the specular from 100 down to zero
and you can see as we do that we lose a few of the highlights in the red but more noticeably in the
yellow up here the specular highlights are these very brightest little extra hits of shine in these
lighter areas and for me that's just a bit too shiny it makes it feel like this is glue or paint
lava magma it's pretty hot it's the thing that's emitting the light it's not reflecting it like
it's a shiny surface so let's bring that back down to zero now we do need these raised areas to look
a little more Rocky at the moment they're a bit too soft and look just a little bit like smoke so
we're going to do that with another instance of CC plastic so with that effect selected we can press
Ctrl or command D and this time we're going to mess with some more properties to get some finer
detail so let's open up surface bump and first the softness we're going to take this from 20 down
to around two there you can see that's a lot more detailed and more rockier already so before where
we just had those soft gradients it has added some nice ridges to separate those values now for the
light let's open that up and we're going to change the light intensity down from 100 to about 60. so
it's just a bit subtler there now our cool down rocky area are done let's add a bit more of a glow
to the bright yellow hot sections to make it feel more intense and before we do I do want to warn
you this effect is pretty intensive already so be prepared for it to take a while to Ram preview
some volcanoes weight hundreds of thousands of years to show off their lava luckily After
Effects is a bit faster than that a bit now you might have seen this glow technique before we're
going to stack Globes on top of one another to get a more realistic lighting look but first I am just
going to toggle down all the properties of these effects so rfx control panel isn't so overwhelming
and we're going to add our first glow effect let's increase the threshold to 85 so it's only adding
a glow on the very very brightest yellow areas we're going to keep the radius at 10 so it's not
spreading out very far and the intensity bright at one now for another glow again controller command
D and this time we are going to increase the radius to around 75. so the glow is spreading
further out and let's lower the intensity to 0.8 so it's lighting more of the surrounding areas but
less intensely then duplicate that glow once more and on glow number three let's increase the radius
way up let's go up to 300 but bring the intensity down even further to 0.5 there so that is a much
subtler glow that is much fainter and further away from the source there now look at that the heat is
bubbling and it looks even more intense I love how this looks particularly where it looks like
the red is glowing up from underneath I think that's a really captivating mesmerizing result
now with this setup like this it is very easy to make adjustments to a lot of the properties that
we've made and change the Styles significantly or very very slightly we could go back to the curves
effect on our first lava layer and adjust that to give it more or less contrast we could also change
the type of fractal noise and get a completely different result here's what it looks like using
Rocky which is not too bad subscale and terrain swirly there's lots of room to expand environment
and find something unique now for the text I've got these in a separate comp and I'm going to
go through these fairly quickly just talking through the effects I added because otherwise
we'd be here all day so I've got two styles of text here on on separate type layers the first
one is much simpler we have a text layer and I've just copied and pasted the exact same layers from
our lava layer fractal noise and curves and then I've just unchecked invert and that gives it the
opposite result of the fractal layer underneath but then it's run through all those same effects
from our adjustment layer on top this one is a lot more legible but it doesn't interact with
the lava it's just sitting there as a graphic on top which I still think looks pretty cool now the
second text layer effect this is where we get a lot more of that interaction so let's look at
the effects that got us there our first effect is a fill just to make it black then we have a
roughen edges to just do exactly that roughen up the edges and then we have a displacement map I'm
using layer 4 our lava layer with effects and masks as a displacement map and we've got a bit
of horizontal displacement and a bit of vertical displacement too so where our lava layer is the
brightest it is warping this text layer melting it and moving the text around too so it is going to
warp in sync with the lava then I have a compound blur effect now compound blur is like a regular
blur then you can use a different layer to blur it and we are of course using a lava layer with
effects and masks applied of course and a nice big maximum blur of 150. so what this is doing
is really blurring those wider areas as well so it melts really nicely into those Blended spots then
I copied and pasted that same fractal noise from our original lava layer on top and then unchecked
invert so now instead of our text being raised it's cutting out into those darker cooled areas
of the lava and then I change the blending mode of that whole layer from normal to screen so we
let a lot more of those really bright hot areas shine through and this is of course still a live
text layer so we can select it and edit it on the Fly and write down anything we desire again
these are all in the project file that you can download for free so you can mess around
with the settings and get an even closer look at these text effects thanks for watching [Music]