How to achieve Liquid Blob / 3D Gradient with AE?

[frederika512549]

Hi everyone

I'm new in the forum although I've been using and working with Adobe products for many years. Happy to be here and hope that I can find help and advice.

I work on a project - a short trailer with the currently trendy "Liquid organic gradient Blobs" like this e.g.:

I found amazing tutorials and tricks and how to animate the blobs with various techniques and methods, also a bit similar to a lava lamp.

So the motion blobs animation is perfectly clear.

But my problem is that I really need to figure out the coloring of the blobs in order to achieve the intented look of the final product. I make this kind of graphic in Illustrator and Photoshop - where Gradient Mesh tool is my big friend. But in AE I could only find the standard linear/radial gradient tool, and it simple not possible to get even slightly closer to the final result.

I understand that in most cases this kind of liquid motion effect is made in a 3d program (like this one ), but I am hoping that there are some ways and tricks to come pretty close to it with AE and simulate/imitate a bit the 3d gradient Mesh style? I would be interested to use 4-5 colors in the gradient.

Thank you in advance for any ideas and advice. ❤️

[Rick Gerard]

If you can get grayscale blobs you can make them just about any color using Colorama. Here's everything I did to make animated blobs:

[Roland Kahlenberg · Accepted solution]

Use the Mask Feather Tool and you'll get pretty close. For animation purposes, you should look at Newton 3; a physics engine for AE. Newton3 supports Soft Bodies and collision - should work well for the blobs to react to each other.

I created the image below with two, differently colored Solids. I started off with one Solid; masked it and added a Mask Feather. The I duplicated this Solid and changed its color and adjusted the mask - made it smaller. To tweak the colors, an Adjustment Layer with Curves or your fav Color Enhancing tool should do the trick.

[angie_taylor]

Nice Roland 🙂

[angie_taylor]

Mr Mercury and Colorama should allow you to achieve this. Although not true 3D it can be convincing. Otherwise for true 3D I recommend using C4D’s thinking particles.

You can create 3D particles in AE using the built-in 3D Particle World or 3rd party Particular. But you might be better looking at Trapcode Form or Tao for this;

Buy Red Giant Trapcode Suite | 3D Motion Graphics Plugins for After Effects Including Particle Effec...

[frederika512549]

Hi

I played around with all your suggestions and advice over the weekend and I've achieved the final look that I was aiming for!!

Thank you for your amazing help and input ❤️ I really appreciate this so much.

[angie_taylor]

Can you please tell us which solution you ended up using?

[frederika512549]

Yes of course

I made the blob with (Fast Blur and Simple Choker Effekt) - then I added more shapes in that same shape/Blob layer, - those shapes where masked and feathered, and I placed them in the way that I wanted them to act as shadows and highlights in the desired colors on the blob.

Then I added Turbulent Displace. And finally on top Colorama effect to enhance the colors that i had already picked before.