lava lamp blob effect

[Chris Zwar]

Hi,

The problem with “how do I do this effect” questions is that it’s difficult to know your expectations… are you looking to spend weeks aiming for photo-realism, or do you want a 5-minute fix which is vaguely right? There are many ways to get a lava-lamp look with various degress of complexity involved.

I would start by experimenting with fractal noise and go from there, maybe playing with several layers that are different colours and composited together with transfer modes. You could get more complicated and use your fractal noise as shapes for projected 3D lights…

If you need something more realistic, then perhaps playing around with foam may help- you can design a shape for your lamp and have the blobs bounce around inside it and interact with each other.

Click on the After Effects icon at the top of the page and look at all the tutorials availble… I’m sure you can pick and choose from the myriad of techniques demonstrated to find those which will help you come up with a lava lamp look.

-Chris

[Serge Hamad]

Hi,

Here is a small example for you to play with:
https://www.nyc-visual.com/lava_lamp_4.sit

Looks like this:
https://www.nyc-visual.com/Lava_Cow.mov

The example is easy to understand, so I skipp the explanations for now. Let me know if you have any questions.

Just play with the different displacements of the Turbulant Displace effect located in the Adjustment layer.

Salut.
Serge

[Hanrong]

lots of thanks guys…..