Easy 2D Liquid In After Effects - Tutorial - Water Ripple Animation

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. All right, here's the scene we're starting 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 layer, which is a rectangle, and it's got no fill with a white stroke set to two pixels. We've got our yolk fall precomp here, which is our yolk falling, and we've got our duck rising precomp here, which is our duck animation. At the moment, you'll see it's pretty jarring, the transition between the two, but we're going to 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. Let's just make this gradient a little more gradual, because that'll accentuate the effect of it. If we type ripple into the box over here and add that, we'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 warping the edges of the shape. If we play it, we'll 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. 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 the splash happens. On this layer before the splash, we're going to keyframe the radius here. Let's open up that property with you 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 60, and let's set the height to a little higher, 75. There. That's kind of getting closer, and we want these waves to sort of dissipate and fade down, so we're going to keyframe our wave height property here. Press U to open it up down here, and then way over here, we're going to drag this down to zero, so now we see it should slowly fade away. I'm going to easy ease that keyframe by pressing F9. I'm 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 of want a more graphic sine wave style wave, and the way we're going to do that is by altering the center of the ripple. The 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 of these awkward keyframes here where it just looks sharp and, you know, a bit wrong. A bit wrong, really. So, what we're going to do is instead of dragging it closer, we're going to 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, so if we play that back, that's looking a little better. Yeah, 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, we're going to give it a fill, and doesn't matter what color the fill is, call it water matte because we always label our layers, color it purple, and let's drag that above our duck precomp over here. Now we're going to select alpha matte for our duck precomp here, actually, alpha matte inverted is what we want. And so we can see, now it pops up being revealed by this alpha matte 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, so around there. We're going to 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 under that water. And to add a little bit more flavor, we're just going to adjust the scale to 105%. So now it looks like the water is refracting our duck a little bit and enlarging it. Let's play that back. Oh, beautiful. We've 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. The 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 them to water, milk, Diet Dr Pepper, lean, or any other liquids that are currently popular with the youth these days. Tag me at Ben underscore Marriott underscore 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.