 Liquid Text | |||
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How to create text that flows with water or fabric.
By Trish and Chris Meyer |
After Effects 6 Displacement Tips'n Tricks Views: 3392 Permalink | |
Trends in motion graphics design come and go, but distorted text that appears to flow along with water or fabric is a graceful evergreen effect appropriate for many projects. In conjunction with title designer Deborah Ross Film Design, we used this technique to animate the titles for the movie Cold Mountain. We combined displacement mapping with a gradient wipe to make the titles emerge from the shadows of our Artbeats (www.artbeats.com) film-resolution water footage. We also added some wiggle motion to make the titles bob on the surface independently of the water ripples.
The look is relatively easy to achieve, but there are a few tricks to learn and gotchas to avoid. To follow along, you need some text and a clip of some water. We used clip LA133 from the Artbeats Liquid Ambience CD. Our After Effects 5.5 and 6.0 project files and a thumbnail proxy clip can be downloaded by clicking here. If you don't use After Effects, you can adapt the technique to many other programs. Although Adobe's Displacement Map effect is available only with After Effects Professional, you can use a similar effect from the Boris Continuum Complete set of plug-ins. Compounding the effect With displacement mapping, the pixels on the text layer will be moved horizontally and vertically based on the luminance of the displacement map (in our case, the water). If the corresponding pixels in the water layer are 50 percent gray, no displacement occurs. In locations where the water is more black or white, the text is pushed around by an increasing amount, up to a set maximum number of pixels. In After Effects, the Displacement Map and Gradient Wipe effects are considered to be compound effects because they get information from another layer. The difficulty most users face when using compound effects relates to the size or aspect ratio of the layers. For example, a typical title layer is wide but not very tall, so how should it be displaced by a 4:3 aspect ratio video clip? The Displacement Map Behavior pop-up menu presents three options: stretching the text to fit, centering it, or tiling it. But if you try to do everything in one composition, you won't be able to easily reposition the text exactly where you want it or add more animation. You can create a more predictable displacement map effect by setting the text in a precomp the same size as the water. We call this the sandwich rule: It's much easier to make a sandwich with two slices of bread that are exactly the same size. And just as you wouldn't move one slice separately from the other, when you put the layers together in the final composite, they must maintain the same Position in the comp. Another gotcha to avoid occurs when you're displacing a full-frame image (as opposed to text). In this case, the edges of the distorted layer will be unusable. If possible, work with slightly larger layers and precomps than the final output size, then crop during the final composite stage. For Cold Mountain, we scanned at 4K resolution (4096 pixels wide) even though we were outputting at 2K, so we had plenty of room to crop the sources. There are other tips we'll introduce as we go, so let's get started. The base Create a precomp that contains only the background layer-in this case, we're using water-and make sure the precomp is the same size and duration as the clip. If you need to shorten, loop, scale, or otherwise edit the background clip, do it in this precomp, not in the final composite. Name this precomp "Base comp" and set it aside. The map For better control over the map effect, we usually create a custom version of the background layer to use as the displacement and gradient wipe map. Create another precomp exactly the same size as Base comp, name it "Map comp," and then nest Base comp into it. Don't drag in the original movie, or any trimming or changes you made in the Base comp will have to be repeated in the Map comp. The Displacement Map effect is only interested in luminance values; any fully black or white areas will correlate to the maximum displaced areas of the text. Because of this, change the map movie to grayscale using Effect > Image Control > Tint or a similar plug-in. Now you can better tell what the effect will see. Another potential problem is text that appears ragged when displaced by a layer with film grain or video noise. To counteract this problem, apply a small amount of Fast Blur to the treated water. Apply Levels and increase the contrast so you see the full range from black to white. Don't overcrank the contrast, as the gradient wipe transition will be smoother with a full range of gray values in your map. The text In a third precomp, create your text using your preferred method (if you have After Effects 6.x, use the new Text tool). Call this precomp "Text comp," and make it the same size as the Base comp. If you need to reposition, scale, or otherwise animate the text, you must do it in the Text comp. The final composite Once you've created the three component precomps, create the Final comp where you bring it all together. Nest the Base, Map, and Text comps into the Final comp and turn off the visibility for the Map comp layer. The layer order should be Text comp layer on top of the Base comp layer; the Map layer can be in any position because it's turned off. Now it's time to create the displacement map effect. Be sure to select the Text comp layer, not the water, and then apply Effect > Distort > Displacement Map. In the Effect Controls window, select the Map comp in the Displacement Map Layer pop-up menu. Set the Use for Horizontal Displacement pop-up to Luminance (although Red, Blue, or Green will also work), and set the Max Horizontal Displacement amount to taste. Ditto with Vertical Displacement. The Displacement Map Behavior pop-up is irrelevant because both the Text and the Map layers are exactly the same size. The Base layer sits in the background looking pretty, but because the text and water layers have the same Position values, it appears that the water is affecting the text. Move the Text comp layer and you'll see why you need to make a perfect sandwich: Unless the Base and Text layers are aligned, the ripples don't sync. Compound effects read the Map layer at its source, before effects and transformations are calculated. That is why we applied all of those effects in the Map comp. If we applied them in the Final comp, they would have been ignored by the Displacement Map effect. The gradient wipe A Gradient Wipe, common in many applications, is useful for animating the opacity of a layer based on the luminance values of another layer. In your Final comp, select the Text comp layer and apply Effect > Transition > Gradient Wipe. Set the Gradient Layer pop-up menu to the Map comp layer. Scrub the Transition Completion slider and notice how the text fades up and down using the luminance values of the grayscale water. Turn on the Invert Gradient switch and the text emerges first from the shadows, which is what we want. To animate the Gradient Wipe effect, turn on the stopwatch for Transition Completion and animate from 100 percent to 0 percent over a few seconds, as you need some time to enjoy this effect. To fade up the text more smoothly, set the Transition Softness amount to 33 percent or to taste. If the map has a large area of black or white, a chunk of text initially appears too quickly. If so, add ease ins and outs, or add an additional fade up by animating Opacity. For the fade down, set the same keyframes in reverse. The wiggle At this point, the text is being displaced by the moving water and fades in and out in an interesting way. You could stop here, but if you also want the text to appear to bob along the surface of the water, apply some independent movement to either whole words or individual characters. If you work in After Effects 5.5, wiggle individual characters with a little positive Jitter in the Path Text effect. To animate whole words, either set Position keyframes manually or use The Wiggler keyframe assistant on each layer. An even better method is to use a wiggle _Expression to randomize the Position of separate layers, as we did in this month's After Effects 5.5 project. See our Motion Graphics column "More Motion, Less Control" (June '03 DV) to learn a more advanced technique where _Expression sliders control the wiggle. If you have After Effects 6.0 or later and created your text using After Effects's new Text tool, you can easily add a text animator and a Wiggly Selector (there is apparently no limit to Adobe's ability to conjure variations on the word wiggle). Unlike Path Text's Jitter, the new Text tool lets you wiggle either Words or Characters, with a lot of control over speed and other variables. If you haven't wiggled this way before, bring the Text comp forward and twirl down the text layer. In the Timeline window, select Position from the Animate pop-up menu; this creates Animator 1 and adds the Position property. Set Position to a small value-such as 3 X, 3 Y-to define the maximum range the text can wander. From the Add pop-up menu on the right of Animator 1, select Selector > Wiggly. Expand the Wiggly Selector 1 options and choose either Character or Words from the Based On pop-up. Set the Wiggles/Second parameter to 1 for a more subtle jitter effect, as we did in our online After Effects 6.0 project. For the Cold Mountain title sequence, we needed to wiggle parts of whole words and names, so we created the text in Illustrator, chopped up the words in After Effects using masks, and then used the wiggle _Expression technique. So there is no right or wrong way to create this or any effect; use whatever tools and techniques you have that work for you. (Min. Version: After Effects 6, Category: Displacement, Type: Tips'n Tricks) 
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This script will split all selected layers on all markers between their in and out points.
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A great way to take modern footage and turn it into vintage looking aged film, using particles.
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Adobe After Effects Script that takes the contents of a selected text layer and creates new text layers with each word of the selected text layer. The text string is split at space characters.
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posted by vfx007 on Jun 26, 2010
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