Wave Transitions

Looking for a screen transition to make a splash in your next project? Learn how to make this summery wave animation in this tutorial from Noble Desktop!

Creating a Wave Shape

1. First off, create a new Shape Layer and name it Wave.
2. Move the Playhead to 0;00;00;05.
3. Using the Pen tool, draw out a wave-like shape that takes up half the screen horizontally. Make sure that the base of the wave is placed below the composition window.

Animating the Wave Shape

1. Click the stopwatch next to the word Path to set a keyframe.
2. Move the Playhead to the origin.
3. Click on the words Path 1 in the Shape Layer options to activate editing mode.
4. Click and drag downwards on the top anchor points of the wave shape, so the entire wave is flattened and below the composition window.
5. Now move the Playhead to 0;00;00;15.
6. Repeat step 2 of this section if needed.
7. Click and drag upwards on the top anchor points of the wave, so it now covers the entire screen.
8. Select the first two keyframes.
9. Cmnd-C (Mac) / Ctrl-C (PC) to copy the keyframes.
10. Move the Playhead to 0;00;00;23.
11. Now Cmnd-V (Mac) / Ctrl-V (PC) to paste the keyframes.
12. With those keyframes still selected, right-click on either selected keyframe.
13. Go to Keyframe Assistant > Time Reverse Keyframes.

Refining the Wave Animation

1. We're going to give you two ways of refining the animation. For the first method, select all the keyframes.
2. Right-click on any of the selected keyframes.
3. Navigate to Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease.
4. The other method is to use the Speed Graph. With all the keyframes selected, hit the Graph Editor button.
5. If the Speed Graph is not visible, click the Graph Type And Options button and choose Edit Speed Graph.
6. Deselect the keyframes by clicking anywhere in the interface.
7. Select the first two keyframes.
8. Click the Easy Ease In button on the lower right-hand side of the editor.
9. Select the last two keyframes.
10. Click the Easy Ease Out button.
11. Use the bezier handles on the last two keyframes to make the graph slope shorter, smaller, and less steep than the first slope of the animation.
12. Deselect the keyframes.
13. Click and drag the second to last keyframe until the wave animation moves in quickly and recedes out slowly.

Gradient Fill Color

1. In the Shape Layer options, click on Add.
2. Choose Gradient Fill.
3. Click and drag the new Gradient Fill option until it sits above the Shape Fill option.
4. Open the Gradient Fill options.
5. Click on Edit Gradient, next to Gradient Colors.
6. Click on the white and black boxes, and change them to cyan and blue-green, respectively.
7. Use the dumbbell-shaped Start and End point editor in the Composition window to edit the direction of the Gradient.

Wiggle Paths Foam

1. In the Shape Layer options again, click Add.
2. Choose Wiggle Paths.
3. If the Stroke isn't set to this already, change the color to white and the thickness to 25.
4. Under the Wiggle Paths options, change Points to Smooth.
5. Set Detail to 40.
6. The Size should be 55.
7. Change Wiggles per Second to 5.

Caustics

1. Duplicate the Wave layer by selecting it and hitting Cmnd-D (Mac) / Ctrl-D (PC).
2. Rename the new layer to Caustics.
3. In the Effects and Presets panel, type Fractal Noise and add it to the Caustics layer. The default Caustics effect is a bit too overpowering for this project.
4. In the Effect Controls panel, change the Fractal type to Strings.
5. The Noise type is set at Spline.
6. The Contrast should be 100.
7. Change the Brightness to -80.
8. The Blending Mode should be set at Screen.
9. Move the Playhead to the origin and hit the stopwatch next to Evolution.
10. Move the Playhead to 0;00;01;15.
11. Change the Evolution to 1 x 0 degrees for a complete revolution.

Bubbles

1. Now, create a new white solid and name it Bubbles.
2. Type CC Particle Systems II in the Effects and Presets panel. Add it to the Bubbles layer.
3. Under Particle, change Particle type to Lens Convex.
4. Change the Max Opacity to 100%.
5. The Birth Size is .3.
6. Set Death Size to .5.
7. Under Physics, the Gravity is -2.
8. Velocity should be at 1.5.
9. Change the Physics Animation to Direction Normalized.
10. Under Longevity, set it to .2.
11. Put the Playhead at the origin.
12. Hit the stopwatch next to Birth Rate.
13. Set Birth Rate to 2.
14. Now, move the Playhead to 0;00;01;00.
15. Change the Birth Rate to 0.

Parenting Bubbles to Wave

1. Navigate to Window > Create Nulls from Paths at the bottom of the Windows panel.
2. Under the Wave layer options, select the word Path specifically. This technique won't work if the word Path itself is not selected.
3. In the Create Nulls from Paths window, click on Nulls follow Points.
4. Several new Nulls will appear. Delete all of them except the one attached to the wave's crest.
5. Rename the Null to Bubbles Null.
6. Parent the Bubbles layer to Bubbles Null.

Video Transcription

Hey, guys. This is Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop. And in this tutorial, I'm gonna show you how to make a wave transition in Adobe After Effects. So the first thing that we're going to be doing here is drawing out a wave shape then we're going to be animating it, like flowing up and down, covering the screen in the middle. And after that, we're going to fire the look of the wave by adding a gradient fill and a wiggle pass effect to the edge for some form we're going to duplicate that layer, turn that into a cost X layer.

And after animating that, we're going to finish it off by making bubbles with key particle systems, too. So you can see this is what the product looks like when it's done. So it's useful to learn this kind of thing so you know how to make your own screen transitions. If you've heard me talk about this in our audio bar screen transition tutorial, the already but transitions or wipes are fundamental to editing the guy, the viewer's eye towards what you want them to see and away from what you don't.

Wipes also allow us to switch our scenes seamlessly without a drama. As you can see from screen to screen, be here. This wave transition in particular is very good for anything involving water, any project swimming around the ocean, fishing or anything marine like maybe even like a just a general summer theme or beach theme as well. And yeah, so everything here is internally made.

We're going to be making our own assets. You can use whatever frames you want for the cut. You can see I use these A and B screens. And with that, let's get started. So without the transition, this is what it looks like. It's an abrupt sorry, an abrupt cut between these two screens. But we want to smooth that out with our transition.

So the first thing that we are going to be doing is let's get over to layer now and we're going to be making a shape layer. So we're going to activate our pen tool on our new shape layer. And so let's draw the wave just by clicking and dragging to make these curved shapes. Don't worry about the color right now and I'll show you how after this cut.

All right. Here we are with our wave shape. And also remember a name or new shape layer. I'm going to name it wave. There we go. And the first thing that we're going to be doing is we're going to be setting a path keyframes with that selected, that layer selected. Let's type in path and the search finder over here the search box over here.

And I'm going to set a keyframe for the path about five frames. Then and this is so we are going to be animating the path so washes up and down. So we sort of keyframe here. And this is going to be its midpoint. It's going to take this shape halfway through. And then let's go back to the beginning over here.

And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be pulling this wave downwards and if you want to edit, by the way, your shape, remember to select the path one option over here instead of like path itself. It's a common mistake. I do it all the time and so edit this so it is dragged below the screen like so.

So once that's done, I'll see you after that. Edit Great. Now that we've done that, you can see it's been flattened into kind of a pancake shape over here underneath the screen. So after that, we're going to be moving, let's say about ten frames in a ten. And over here we're going to be just seeing the waves, which covers a whole entire screen, like expanding outwards, like an actual wave does at the beach.

So it's fairly easy enough to do like before. I will see you after that. Edit OK, now we're going to get this wave to recede, so we're going to be copying the first and middle keyframes over here. So I hit command or control C to copy them after selecting them from a couple of frames after. And then I'm going to be pasting them basically as I hit the diamond here to set a keyframe.

And I'm just going to be swapping these guys ahead of time in there to set the keyframe. And then I hit Command V or Control V to paste the old keyframes over here. I'm going to right click and I'm going to go to Keyframe Assistant Time Reverse Keyframes. I actually want these keyframes to be like a little further along here.

So there's more time with the screen being covered here. Now, I'm going to show you two options here for refining animation. Either you can select everything good are keyframe assistant it is easy to do right click on this is what it'll look like or we can refine the animation with speed graph so it's more organic. I'm going to show you how to do that.

If you're not interested in that kind of thing, then you could click ahead to the timestamp of the next section. But for now, I'll show you how to adjust it on the speed graph. So select all of these key frames and over here, hit this graph editor button. If you don't see this, then you want to go over to choose graph, type in options and go to edit speed graph.

And basically, we're aiming here to have it rush in the wave, rush in, hold there, and then the waves slowly ease out. So you want to select these first two key frames hit over there and then over here we want it to ease out but we want it to be slower. So we're going to pull this keyframe out just a bit and we're going to also heighten this one a little bit.

Give it more of a smooth curve because the steeper the curves, the sharper the movement and the softer the curve. Further the more gentle the movement. This is straight over here because we want the speed to remain steady. So let's see what that looks like. That's pretty good. I think it's easing out a bit too slowly.

So let's move this back in here. But after that, I think it's ready to move on to the next step. All right. Oh, yeah. And then the last thing I want to do is kind of like pull this keyframe up here. So again, this hill, the speed hill over here is not as abrupt. All right, let's do color.

raph here to exit there. I'm actually going to pull this a little bit closer because if you work in design, you're always editing tiny little things. So for the film, we're going to be using a gradient film. So open up contents, open up fill and let's hit add gradient fill. And then let's toggle open our gradient fill and edit gradient and so we click the white one.

You can either click the black one or the white one, but I'm starting with the white one, this little box over here that's going to control the gradient. And I want a nice bright sign for one of them, click this black box and then maybe like, oh, look more of a blue-green sign for the other one.

I'm actually going to push that contrast a little more here. Let's move this over so we can actually see what it looks like. And if you're not seeing it, that's because the colors are below this color over here. And so the program is going in a hierarchy. We want the sky to be higher up in the higher hierarchy.

For visual reasons. So grab the gradient so and pull it upwards above the regular. So there we go. And to control the start and end points, we'll see once gradient fill is selected, like this little kind of looks like a dumbbell that controls the gradient. So the direction. So I'm going to pull it down actually I want the green part to be on top and I want the blue bluer part on the bottom.

There we go, nice and soft. OK, we'll close up shape for now, and let's hit add wiggle pass. Now, this is going to be for the foam. So there we go. We will pounds and so wiggle pads, what that does it, it'll take the stroke and a little it looks like it's wiggling. It's pretty much what it says.

If you don't have these settings already, like the structure to what you hit this little box over here and you'll move it over to the right in the head. OK. 33 is actually pretty thick. I'm going to put it down to 25. You see it got thinner and now let's change some settings and wiggle paths after you turn it open.

So I'm going to give you my settings for wiggle powers. You can have it however you want. But this is how I like it. So the points, I want them nice and smooth because right now they look kind of crunchy and that's not what we want for an organic shape like this. I want the size to be quite large.

55 size. So like you really see those wiggly lines because the smaller the size, the more subtle the the wiggle, the detail. I want 40. So a lot of these, a lot of these wiggles kind of all smushed up in here. And wiggles per second. I want it to move about five miles per second, let's say. That's about it.

Let's play it as we add more effects. You can see that it takes longer to preview, but it's still running pretty well. And there we go. I do see that my wave is showing up here at the bottom of the screen. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be editing it. And at the keyframe where it's below the screen, I'm going to pull down just a little bit more.

But after that, I'll see you after the edit. So the next segment we're going to be doing is making cost six, which are those wavy like patterns cast by light reflecting off of water. I usually see them on like on the bottom of bridges over rivers and what we're going to be doing for that, while there's an effect called cost X, we're actually going to be using something called fractal fractal noise.

That's because the cost layer, like the cost is effect, will kind of affect the whole project. That'll even affect like this pink background. If you don't like mess with it enough. So we're going to be using the fractal noise option. And the first thing we're going to be doing is if you haven't done this, really close all your options you can at you to do that and with your layer selected command here, control D to duplicate it, rename it with a return to cost X and over here.

Oh I see I typed in cost X, but over here we're going to be going for fractal noise. So it looks kind of funky at first, but we're going to be changing some stuff. So we're going to be changing the fractal type to strings. OK, you see where I'm heading with this? The noise type is splicing. We want that contrast at 100%, but we want the brightness real down low it -80 and finally and this is important the blending mode and screen now you see what we're getting at.

So finally we're going to be animating these evolution options or actually evolution and that's going to be making the cost six move around. So here at the origin let's just hit that stopwatch to set a keyframe and at the very end of this animation just because we want it to be moving throughout the evolution to like one full cycle it's this leftmost number here you just put in one and let's see how it looks very nice now if you want me to leave it here, but I'm going to show you a really cool way to add some bubbles following the wave as I move them.

So let's go up to Layer New Solid. Well, make sure it's white and name this layer bubbles OK? And we're going to be typing in here. See, see particle systems. And we want particle systems to perfect double click that to edit. And you're like, this doesn't look like bubbles. This is the first furthest thing away from bubbles you've ever seen.

But that's fine because like always we're going to be changing a couple of the settings. So the first thing that we're going to be doing is open up the particle over here and effect controls. And we want to tell this thing that we don't want these lines. We actually want a lens, a convex lens, convex shape to be emitting.

Already it looks like bubbles the birth size. We want it at point three. We want it to come out being that big and the depth size at 0.5 and the opacity, we want it to be at 100 to make it look like foam. So physics moves around. We're going to change that animation to a direction normalized because we want this thing to be swishing upwards.

All right. You see you see how it's changing already to be what we want, the velocity, how fast it's going is 1.54. Our settings over here. Yeah, just like that. And gravity is negative, too. We want negative gravity to have them floating upwards. And let's head over to longevity. How long this bubble last and let's put that at 0.4.

We don't want them to be lasting very long. And let's animate how many bubbles come out. So at the origin, very start over here, set a stopwatch, hit the stopwatch to set a keyframe for birth rate and let's put that at the default. I think that's fine. But at one second, we want these bubbles to start falling off.

So just put in zero for birth rate and we've had them theta mostly. Now, finally, we want to have these bubbles following the wave. So this is pretty cool. Let's head over to wave again. You can type in path to open up those options, select the word path itself. That's quite important for this and what we're going to be doing, we're going to make you know, like an empty layer that follows the wave and then we're going to parent the bubbles to that know.

So it looks like the bubbles are following the wave itself. You'll see what I mean. As we go along. So go to window and you're going to go all the way down here to find create nulls from paths that should be pre-installed in any version of After Effects these days, and we're going to be hitting nose for all points and you can close that window.

And what that does, it makes all these nulls over here in purple and you can see the position at the edge of our path. And as we scroll through the timeline, you see they actually follow our animation. But we don't want all of these. We just want the tippy top one. So go ahead and delete all the wave paths that aren't necessary until you have just the one that you want left great.

I'm going to rename this, by the way, to water now, so I know what it's referring to and click this pick up the swirly symbol from bubbles attached to water now. And this is what it looks like so far, but you can grab the bubbles and you can move them upwards over here. And yeah, now we're done. I actually went ahead and lowered the birth rate of the bubbles over here just to, to, to start out with.

I felt it look nicer, but, you know, it's up to you. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So there's a few tricks in this tutorial for getting that nice wave look, but ultimately it's up to you to pick what you want to use or recycle and then choose your own projects. This swipe would work great in any video revolving around water, like an infographic about the ocean or an ad for pool services.

The wave could even be colored to resemble magma or acid. And you can have the footage underneath, burned or eaten away. So yeah, that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to make your own wave transition in Adobe After Effects. If you have any questions or suggestions for future tutorials, what are some comments? Tell us about any projects we're working on or any topics you'd like us to cover.

So yeah, this has been Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop.