Use AE to Simulate Water?

[mksalva]

Is there a way that After Effects can be used to simulate a room being filled with water? I want to make a comp that has a photo of a room, and make it look like water rises from the bottom, until the screen is filled.

This is for a silly comedy, so it doesn't have to be too convincing.

Thanks!

[imeilfx]

As usually there is plenty ways to achieve that kind of effect in AE so what I can do to give you idea what is possible - I can point you to some refferences. Hope that help. 

I would make some kind of mix of tools used in those tutorials. Hope that will help you/. If you have any more questions - please ask. 

[mksalva]

Thank you for your reply. I will look over all three of these videos carefully, and see if these will work.

Extra question - If I had a video/photo of a toilet, is there a way to make it look like water is overflowing out of the bowl? (You know, without making an actual flood.)

[Rick Gerard]

There is a way to do almost anything you can think of with After Effects. Some things require 3rd party plugins to do efficiently. Some things require using a 3D app like Blender (http://blender.org), which is incredibly powerful and free, or Maya or C4D and then combining elements in After Effects to make it believable.

An overflowing toilet that is realistic is going to require setting up a virtual 3D space with 3D objects for the water to flow over. You are also going to have to generate a realistic water simulation. Blender has good water simulations and you can actually use AE to build the virtual 3D world. I suggest Blender because I assume that you are fairly new to After Effects and on a budget.

You can also simulate water with effects that come with AE. Wave World and Caustics can generate realistic looking water that you may be able to use for part of the simulation.

The problem with your overflowing toilet and your water filling a room question is that we really need to see the shot you are working with so we can point you in the right direction. No one technique will work for all shots. Show us some sample images or videos and it will be a lot easier for us to point you in the right direction.

Let me throw a few more tutorials at you. Cheap Tricks #4: Aquaman - Red Giant is a great series of tutorials showing some very realistic effects using some 3rd party effects. 

The first tutorial shared by imeilfx is a really good example of how to simulate water with AE's built-in effects but I probably would have added in Caustics to make the water more realistic. This tutorial is pretty good at explaining the basics: Creating Liquid Effects in Ae With Caustics and Wave World

[mksalva]

I wanted to use an angle of toilet that is similar to this. The water starts to run out, the room quickly fills in a comedic manner.