Hey! I need help with a blood effect

[slothm57212708]

I say blood because that will probably be the easiest way to do it.  I want to know how to make a blood like the one from Guardians of the Galaxy.  I will have a screenshot of what I am talking about let me know if you have any questions, thanks in advance

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

You need to do something like that using a 3D app or 3D plug-in. C4D lite, included in AE may be able to simulate something like that on a relatively flat surface but it does not have the animating tools necessary to get a simulated liquid to flow into crevices. There is also Freeform Pro, Element 3D and probably some others.

The basic principals are:

1. Track the movement of the surface
2. Plan the path of the blood
3. Animate the path of the blood
4. Add color and highlights to make the fluid simulation look real
5. Match the color and lighting that exists in the original scene
6. Do the final color correction for the entire composite

You could get close faking it with Trapcode TAO or Mir or Form. Any of the third pare ty effects that are going to be able to handle that kind of fluid simulation effect well will be fairly expensive. The only no-cost option would be to head over to http://blender.org and download a free copy of Blender. It is open source, free, and plenty capable of creating a similar fluid simulation. If you decide to work in 3D I'm assuming that you have very little experience with those apps so you're going to have to spend quite a bit of time figuring out the UI and learning the principals. None of that kind of work is automatic.

The created in After Effects without any 3rd party effects is going to require some illustration skills, animation skills, and a pretty thorough knowledge of the basics. You can supplement by combining some or all of these effects that are included with After Effects: Displacement Map, Fractal Noise, Mr. Mercury, Turbulent Displace, Caustics, one or two of the various kinds of blur, and some of the color correction effects like Curves, Levels, Hue and Saturation and others. You'll also need to know about masking, animating paths, blend modes and probably Channel mapping. There is no one-click solution.

If I had no budget and close was good enough I'd start with an animated mask that follows the path of the fluid, use that animated mask as a shape generator and then start experimenting with Mr Mercury, fractal noise to generate the gradient for Displacement Map, Turbulent Displace, Caustics and other effects to get something that looks like flowing liquid that falls into crevices. If your shot was taken with a moving camera or the surface with the flowing blood is moving count on doing some Camera Tracking or Motion Tracking or Motion Stabilizing to get the effect to stick to he moving image.

I'm guessing that pulling off a 7 second composite of flowing blood on a shot with a moving camera and moving surface that was carefully planned would take me the better part of a day to pull of using a 3D app or doing it all in After Effects.

Let us know your level of experience and maybe we can help you find a fairly efficient and affordable solution. I would suggest looking for similar tutorials on the Red Giant or Video Copilot websites. You've probably got less than a 10% chance of finding a decent tutorial on YouTube about creating fluid simulations or describing the how and why you would go about using any of the standard effects I mentioned.