Re: Realistic ink
I replied to this earlier, but I must have forgotten to click "Okay" on the preview. This new system will take a litte getting used to. :)
Anyway, I don't know about third party plugins, but I have had good luck using AE's default plugins to create liquid effects with good success. Try creating some simple overlapping shapes (by drawing masks, with particle playground, or through any other means) then blur them, and apply curves to sharpen them up again. The result is a blobby look that is somewhat akin to metaballs in a 3D app, only 2D of course. You can create any animated shape and make it goop together and drip apart with variable viscosity depending on the balance of blur and curves. The effect isn't totally realistic, but with some finesse it can look quite good, especially if a stylized look is acceptable.
To give the liquid volume, another blur can create a contour, and Emboss will turn this into shading (for this to work you will obviously need to precomp the shape as white on a black background, and then matte the embossed shape using the original). To add a crisp highlight, start by duplicating your layer, set it to Add, blur it a fair amount, then duplicate this blurred copy again and invert the topmost copy. Set the first blurred layer to use the inverted topmost layer as a luma inverted matte, then apply curves to the first layer to create a "donut" highlight (the curve should look like a really steep hill or spike from black to white then back to black). Finally, nudge the luma inverted matte in the direction of your light source (moving the anchor point toward the light source and scaling down a tiny bit can work well, too, depending on the shape). Given some tweaking of the different settings, this should create a crisp highlight around one side of your shape.
I hope this post isn't more confusing than informative. If you like I can post a project file demonstrating what I mean.
Of course this effect looks really great when you toss some compound blur and displacement maps into the mix, as I did for a project that called for oozing blobs of cartoon mucous. I sure do enjoy my job. :)
Aaron
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Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 22:17:58 -0700