The Best 2D Smoke in After Effects - Animation Tutorial)

In this video, I'm going to show you how to create looping 2D smoke animations, all in After Effects. Let's begin. Now, if you want a really quick smoke animation, you can quickly draw a pillar shape using your pen tool, add the effect wave warp, change the direction, adjust the height and width, and you've got something like this. And this can be really useful in some circumstances. But if you want a more realistic smoke effect that's just a bit more flexible, I'm going to show you how to build this effect over here on the left, which we're going to build with simple shape layers and then add some really neat effects to get this result. And we're going to start in exactly the same way, in a new precomp, creating a new shape layer by drawing a pillar shape with our pen tool. That's just a little bit more narrower at the bottom. Now let's add our first plume of smoke, making sure that we've got nothing selected by clicking off that layer. Let's draw a round shape that's not quite an exact circle. And let's name that plume 01 because we always label our layers. Now let's move that down to the bottom of our pillar on the left here and press P to bring up our position properties. Let's make a keyframe right at the start and then about 14 seconds later, let's drag that up off screen a bit. So it's completely out of view and play that back. That seems like a good speed for this smoke. Now let's add some scale keyframes by opening up S on a keyboard, make a keyframe at the end here. And at the start, I'm going to make it pretty small and then maybe move its position in a little bit as well so it can fit completely within that smoke here. Now let's go over to our pen tool and select the convert vertex tool and we're going to adjust slightly the animation path of this plume. If we just simply click and drag this out here, we'll create a new bezier handle and our plume will now animate in a slight arc and just pop out of the side of the plume a little bit sooner. There we go. That's looking good. I'm going to trim this at 14 seconds by holding Alt and the right square bracket on my keyboard. And now we're going to start making the plumes on the right. So I'm going to select this and duplicate it with Ctrl plus D and then I'm going to move its position just by clicking and dragging at the start and then at the end here in this last keyframe, I'm going to drag it over to the right so this animation path follows the right side of our pillar. There we go. And I want to select our pen tool back again and I'm just going to make a few adjustments to the shape of this plume on the right just so they don't look too similar and identical and like we've just copied and pasted them, even though we have. And I'm going to come back and do this a few times during this project. Excellent. They look different enough. Now I'm going to move this layer across about two seconds, maybe just a bit before. So that way it starts animating just a little bit later and we get this nice S shape in our smoke pillar. Now let's select both of these layers and duplicate them both with Ctrl D. I'm going to move them up in the effect stack and then slide them over again about the same amount, just under two seconds and then make some small adjustments to their shapes again. Now I think it's a good point to jump back into our top smoke composition where we can compare it to our first example. Now this comp I've made 20 seconds long and the first 10 seconds is just each of the sort of plumes popping up into the smoke and then slowly getting to the top and then from 10 seconds to 18 seconds, we've got a full loop of the smoke here on the left with plumes all throughout the smoke, which we're going to duplicate in our second smoke very shortly. But the main thing that we need to do is round out our smoke on the right where we don't have all of these sharp corners and it's nice and rounded like this one on the left. And to do that, we're going to add a few effects to this yellow layer, the smoke two layer here. We're going to add a Gaussian blur and we're going to make the blurriness about 100. So now we don't have much information about the sharpness of this corner to work with, which is good. Then we're going to add the levels effect. Now instead of using the levels to adjust the color, the brightness that you might normally do, we're going to change this channel from the RGB to the alpha channel and we're going to crush and increase the contrast of that alpha channel. Now we do that by taking the two outside triangles and dragging them closer and you can see as we do that, we start to lose the gradient of this blur here, but we also lose the corner as well, which is great. So let's continue to drag these close to the center until we get a nice shape that we like. Now you can go too far and it becomes really crunchy if you pull them in all the way and you get this aliasing, which we don't really like. So let's just keep a tiny gap open. So there's still the slightest blur there. Wonderful. Now the amount of blur you have before you crush the levels is going to change how round these corners are. If we set it to 50, they'll be less rounded and if we set it to something much higher, it'll be way more blobby. I think 100 works well for us here. You should know that these two precomps have been moved up slightly in this composition. That is because of these effects that we've got going on here also affect the very top edge of the comp and you can see we get some weird, funny results when our smoke reaches the very top. So the best thing to do is just hide them above the composition and pretend they don't exist and just make sure you make your precomp a little bit bigger than you think you need to and make the smoke plume just a bit taller than you expect and you should be fine. And I'm gonna explain how we get a stroke around the shape a little bit later after we add in some more details and plumes to this smoke. We can see that on the smoke on the left underneath the main plumes we have this sort of arc that kind of cuts in towards our main pillar and these little holes that form as well. Now these are two things that I think really sell this effect and make it look more realistic and believable. So we can see on smoke one on the left that underneath these plumes we have this little arc that sort of cuts in towards the main pillar so when the smoke pulls away from the main form a larger pocket of air fills up that space so we maintain the same volume of the smoke as it adapts and moves away. And some holes appear as well doing the same thing. Now these two elements are what I think really sell this effect make it much more believable and realistic. So let's jump back into our smoke 2 comp and make some of those. I'm going to draw another blob with our pen tool creating a new shape layer and this time I'm going to make it a little more elongated and more like a squashed ball and change the fill so we can tell that it's a bit different and I'm going to call that hole 01 and I'm going to move that just under our first plume so that overlaps a fair bit with that pillar then I'm also going to parent that to plume 01 using the pick whip so now it will follow plume 01 up as it rises and now we're going to set its blending mode to silhouette alpha which will make everything below that in the composition transparent so now it cuts away into the main pillar making a sort of smoke armpit and if we toggle on our transparency grid you can see that there is nothing underneath that it is all transparent now what I also want to do is have this increase in scale over time so I'm going to add some scale keyframes so that it goes from about 50 to maybe 115 over its lifetime let's maybe adjust its shape slightly so it's not quite squashed there I think that's good at the bottom here you can see it doesn't look great but our blur is going to cover all of that so that'll be seamless so I'm going to duplicate that four times with ctrl d I'm going to parent hole 2 to plume 2 hole 3 to plume 3 etc I'm going to slide them over to their respective plumes and then I'm going to move them into place so they sit just underneath where they need to be and then adjust their shapes a tiny bit as well to keep them looking a bit more organic wonderful now we've got four plumes rising up and little hole forming underneath each one that gets a bit bigger as it floats upwards to get these extra little holes it's a pretty similar process so back in our main comp I'm going to duplicate hole 01 and rename that to hole 01 b I'm going to adjust its shape to be quite a bit more circular and move it over to the right so it starts to eat away at this larger plume here now let's see how that looks this one looks kind of all right but it kind of is a bit too low so it kind of makes this hole at the bottom here which I don't really like so I'm just going to go in and finesse that and maybe move it up a bit and do a bit of trial and error until I get the result that I want but it doesn't take too long to sort of figure out what works and what doesn't now that we're happy with that I'm going to duplicate that and attach it to another plume and now we've got all of our main forms that we need to loop so to do that I'm going to select all of our layers in this comp duplicate them with ctrl plus d take them to the top of the layer stack and then drag them over at eight seconds in so they will start appearing after our first one's finished duplicate them again and then slide these ones over to 16 seconds so now we've got enough overlap in the middle here so we've got a full loop happening and if we go into our main comp that should happen between 10 seconds and 18 seconds now to add our stroke to add the stroke I'm going to duplicate smoke02 and hide the bottom one for now and I'm going to add the effect Vegas now Vegas adds these sort of cycling kind of trim pathy looking little gradient lights that go around any shape but we can kind of hack this effect to give us a stroke on any layer with an alpha channel so firstly in the control panel over here change the rendering mode to transparent now we can see the effect a little better and then we need to change the color to I'm going to choose white but you can choose whatever you want and then we need to change the end opacity which is sort of the end of these gradient strokes and just change that to one and now we have a stroke so let's turn back on our bottom layer here and turn this transparency down so it looks a bit ghostly and I'm also going to add a new adjustment layer and add the effect posterize time and I'm going to set that to 12 which is going to lower the frame rate to 12 frames per second and that's just going to mimic a more traditional frame by frame animation look which I think suits this effect really well now from here you can use these comps to do a few more interesting things you can use the filled comp as a matte for a blur adjustment layer to create this nice effect as if your vision is being distorted by the smoke and then of course add it to your own 2d or even 3d scenes I'm really interested to see what people make with this effect this effect wouldn't only look good as smoke I think it looks good as steam which is you know smoke light and also maybe some rolling clouds as well it could work as even fire if you want a big blobby stylized fire so please don't forget to tag me at ben underscore marriott underscore on instagram so I can see all the work you've made and please dig deep into the working files that I've provided and I'd highly encourage you to take what you've learned here and apply it to your own work and your own style and make something new I've made a short playlist of some related videos that I think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week