How to Create Liquid Animation Effect in After Effects

How to make liquid animations like you see here, I will show you in this After Effects tutorial.

First of all, I’m creating a new composition, it’ll be 1920*1080. It can be a five-second composition with a black background. Then, let’s create our composition by clicking the Ok button. Now we are going to draw a circle on the scene. Let’s select the Ellipse Tool by clicking the icon in the toolbox above. Then we will draw a circle, from the Fill value we can determine its color. Let’s make a white color and draw our circle. In order not to draw disproportionate circles like this, we need to press the Shift key while making this drawing on the keyboard. By pressing the Shift key, we will have created a perfect circle.

After drawing our ellipse, I select the Shape in the Timeline. I press P on the keyboard, P for Position, and it just shows me the Position property. Now we will write an Expression. We are going to write the Wiggle code. So I press the Alt key on the keyboard so I can open the Expression panel.

I click once on the icon to the left of the word position. When I click on that, as you can see, the Expression panel opens and I can type the Expression codes here. Let’s start writing the Wiggle code that can move with the values we will determine.

I write Wiggle and Enter. There will be 2 more values that I need to write in parentheses. One of them is the frequency value. I set the frequency value as one. After pressing the comma, I type 150 to determine the area where it will vibrate. It will create a vibration with a frequency value of around 150 pixels.

The next part will be the easy part. I select the Shape I drew again and press the letter P from the keyboard so that they disappear. The center point is out, I need to get it right in the middle. So by clicking the Ctrl key on the keyboard, I double click on this icon in the toolbox.

When I double-clicked it, it moved the center point to the center of the object as you can see. Now all I have to do is duplicate the circle we created. I press Ctrl + D buttons from the keyboard, d of duplicate. I can press several times.

And then I take the selection tool and change the positions of these copied objects on the scene. Let’s even play with their sizes by pressing the Shift key again. We can arrange something like this, you can do them differently. When I play it this way, we see each one place in itself. Thanks to the Wiggle effect we just made.

Now I select all the objects on the scene and press the letter P again on the keyboard. With the timeline on the left, I click on the icon to the left of the position, and we have given each of them a Keyframe. I’m scrolling the Timeline forward a bit, our goal is here to collect all these objects in one place. So I’m making an effect like this, it is an animation like this. Now I select all with Ctrl+ A again.

And I press the letter P on the keyboard so that the position effect we just opened disappears. I right click on an empty area, select New and create a new Adjustment Layer. As you can see, it created an Adjustment Layer on top of the others. Right now, I need my Effects panel, here it is.

If you don’t see this panel, make sure the Effects option at the bottom of the Window is checked. I will write about the Blur effect here. I am writing a Gaussian Blur effect and dragging it over the Adjustment Layer. I increase this blue level so that the edges are not visible.

Now I need another effect. I’m writing about Matte here. Below the Matte effect, you will see the Matte Choker effect. I’m dragging this to the Adjustment Layer again. You see, there was the effect of doing nothing, when they move close to each other, it looked like we gave it the liquid effect.

The edges still look a little blurry. We will overcome this blur by playing with the parameters of the Matte Choker effect that we have just added. I need to reduce the softness value of it. Let’s do 5, look, the edges are a little sharper. If I do 3, it’ll get a bit sharper.

You can adjust this upon your preferences. Now, when we look at the animation, we have released these liquid animations exactly as we wanted. When you select all the objects on the number again, and press the letter P from the keyboard, you can make these arrangements according to you again, but you have to lock it because there is an Adjustment Layer at the top. If you click, click on the place under the lock icon, to the left of the Timeline area, you will be able to control the objects more easily.