I’ve been doing some fiddling with After Effects and came up with this little number:


I can’t remember what inspired this, but I had fun making it. I borrowed more than a couple techniques from VideoCopilot.net . Not comprehensively, the bump-mapping on the wall and floor (barely noticeable without the light moving, but trust me it’s there), and the displacement map over the whole thing, giving it a watery look.

Then there’s the bubble particle system overlaying the whole thing. The bubbles don’t really look real, and I wasn’t going for realism either.

Another thing I played around with on this one was the graph editor.

For the panning motion, I had to animate a null object (which the camera was parented to), and the Bubbles Comp. The image above shows the speed of the motion (in pixels/sec). As you can see, at first, it moves just under 150 px/sec, but as it nears the end, it makes a not-so-sudden drop down to under 50 px/sec. The default behavior of two keyframes in an animation is to move at a constant rate. But if you want to modify the speed of movement, without messing with a ton of keyframes, the graph editor is a great way to do that.

I then had to do the same with the Bubble layers. With the regular animation, the bubbles seemed to suddenly change direction, as the camera controller reached the point where it was moving slower than the bubbles.

I’m making the project file available, if you’d like to take a closer look at what I did. Also, feel free to use it for any project, commercial or otherwise.

This project was done almost entirely in After Effects. I did make use of one texture, that I shot myself. Feel free to use that texture for any of your projects as well.

Ocean Project File
Yellow Concrete Texture

Bonus: While waiting for the upload to finish, I was playing around with After Effects. I’m not really sure what this is, but you can have this, too:

Project File here:

Wavey Thing

As a warning, for this thing, I didn’t really care about keeping this thing clean, so there’s probably a way more efficient way to do this. Which means this thing is gonna take longer to render than necessary. Now you know.