Liquid motion

[George Goodman]

That kind of stuff tends to be done frame by frame. Unfortunately, there’s not really an easy way to do it. A lot of people just draw each frame in photoshop by hand

“|_ (°_0) _|”

Sincerely,

George

http://www.vimeo.com/georgegoodman
http://www.linkedin.com/in/georgefranklingoodman

[Max Baxter]

dang it. So there’s no way at all to do it within after effects. That’s a pain.

Thanks

[Brian Charles]

[Max Baxter] “I want to have a 2D circle to fall as a liquid reach the bottom of the frame and them come back up in a square; all in 2D. I don’t know how to do this and I can’t find an example of it.”

I’m having difficulty trying to visualize what you describe.

Do you mean that the falling circle becomes individual drops of liquid (think of ice melting and dripping) or that it pours to the bottom of the frame like water from a container?

In the first case you may be able to use a particle system, in the second a distortion. Otherwise George is correct, you have some frame-by-frame work ahead of you. Welcome to the world of animation.

[Walter Soyka]

There are plenty of ways to do it in After Effects.

You could do a hand-animation of a mask. You could use a variety of effects from the Distort category.

Personally, I’d use a shape layer. Add a rectangle, add a fill, and keyframe the “Roundness” property of the rectangle path to go from a rectangle to a circle.

I’d add on perhaps a Bezier Warp effect that I’d animate for the “liquid” effect as the drop falls.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Joseph W. bourke]

Max –

The one way I can think of achieving it is to use a circle and a square imported from Illustrator. As of CS6, you have the ability to tweak the actual nodes of the Illustrator file. In order for the Circle to “liquefy”, it will have to have way more than the four nodes which usually comprise a circle. I would start with the circle and square in the same screen position, then animate just the circle’s nodes as it moves down the screen and then heads back up towards becoming the square. The trick is going to be getting the next to last frame of the circle as close as possible to the square shape, then for the last frame, make the circle’s opacity zero and pop on the square shape. It’s pretty involved as well. You might do better using morphing software, then importing the clip into AE.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Stephen Wiseman]

This could help you in some way…I quite often morph objects by overlapping their layers by the amount of time i want the transition to take place. Then keyframe the first object with a fast blur to increase over this transition period & take opacity down to zero. At the same time blur and fade the the second one to come appear. Pre comp these layers and add a matte choker to the new comp. Adjust the levels of the choker till you get the required settings for a clean transition animation. There is no reason you couldn’t apply this as your circle falls into the floor and again as a rectangle rises from it.
Hope this helps! I saw a tutorial doing something similar once on youtube but can’t find it now, you may have better luck searching, it’s handy trick!

[Mathew Fuller]

If you own the plugin Newton you can make very convincing 2D water with it. Hard to explain the process quickly, but I found a tutorial that uses a technique very similar to the one I’ve used in the past.

Try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuBFaIFDSSI

My Work:
https://www.morecompletefx.com

[Max Baxter]

I want the circle to fall like a piece of jelly then bounce right back up to be a square.

I’m already in that world of animation studying it for almost 2 years now.

Thanks

[Jp Pelc]

Wow this is a really great technique. Thanks!!

[Brian Charles]

[Max Baxter] “I want the circle to fall like a piece of jelly then bounce right back up to be a square.

I’m already in that world of animation studying it for almost 2 years now. “

I meant no offence by my remark, I hope you didn’t take it that way.

In addition to the other excellent suggestions you might try using CC Flow Motion. I got this result after a few minutes tinkering.

Flo Motion Distortion