Making one object 'swallow' another

[JamesK-GD]

Really hope someone can help me with this; I'm a bit of a novice and struggling to find the info I need in the manual.

As the title describes, I'm trying to make a short 6s animation of a large bacteria png swallowing a smaller bacteria. I'm familiar with auto-tracing masks and using the Distortion>Reshape effect to morph from one shape to another; initially I tried having 'source mask' unaltered and edited the 'destination mask' so it was pushed inwards, but it seems to distort the entire image rather than just at the portion where the smaller bacteria 'enters' the larger. Is there an easier / better way to achieve the effect I'm looking for? Any advice greatly appreciated!

*edited to add: I'm on 16.1.1.4, win10

[dj.summitt]

Hi! It may be helpful if you post an example of what you're trying to accomplish. There's a lot of ways to do a task in AE.

[OussK]

Did you try the Liquify effects? you can manually draw the effects

[BartonGarrett256]

What manual?

[Mylenium]

If you want to affect only portions of the image, you have to work with duplicates, pre-comps and masking. Nothing more to it.

Mylenium

[BartonGarrett256]

In Ps I’d build a background image without the objects,

then two layers, one for each object,

then Puppet Warp to morph them, use pins to lock the areas you want to stay fixed.

duplicate the layers and progressively warp them

the more layers the smoother the movement

export into Ae

sequence the layers

Bob‘s your uncle.

[JamesK-GD]

I'm finding a lot of AE is problem solving, I've been engineering audio for about 15 years and it seems like many aspects of AE are similar, but it's quite humbling being right back at the start in terms of knowledge of the tools. I've bought a weighty textbook so perhaps I should work through that before jumping in feet first with my project.
Really appreciate the ideas, I'll have a bash tomorrow with a fresh head and see what pops. Thanks very much for the advice.

[BartonGarrett256]

Good luck.  I wouldn’t hold much hope for the book, I assume it’s one of the tutorials. They are out of date before they get off the press. Coming into the program with decent knowledge of Ps, Pr and Illustrator is, if not absolutely required, it is at least, in my opinion, critical. Illustrator, because it’s vector based, has become a personal favorite, and Ae is not an NLE, use Pr. Get organized and follow naming and file storing conventions.

I’d recommend a subscription to one of the video based tutorial services.  Like Lynda.com. So much of the stuff on YouTube is junk.

Surfaced Studio is good, but he caters to kids, explosions and guns. I do corporate, science and docs.

Adobe‘s error codes are abysmal at best, but Google what you get and you can get somewhere.

There are real experts here, much smarter than I am ( but don’t expect much in the way of bedside manner) and most problems you will find are not new, someone else had the same problem and solved it.

Do not upgrade in the middle of a project.

I make it a practice to every so often peek at this board, I learn from the real masters.

[P.M.B]

Here is an interesting tutorial/technique i came across a few years ago that uses blurring and crushed alpha channels to create a blobby effect.  It works great for organic looking cell divisions.  Maybe you can adapt it for your needs.  All of their tutorials illustrate some very clever techniques, I think.