3.3 How to Add Color

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Liquid Animation course. In this lesson you will learn how to add color to the liquid swirls. You will also learn how to add some subtle depth using light and shadow effects. Okay, so the first thing that I want to do before we begin doing any of that is, I want to go ahead and change the speed of our liquid swell. So let's go ahead and make this tiny bit faster. So I wants to change the position of our ending animation from this to this. Now in order to do that, we need to highlight all of our keyframes here like so. Just going to move the timeline to the position where I wanted to be. Hold the Alt key on the keyboards, and then just move the end time line here, the end key frame, to the position that you want. Cool, so now we've successfully changed the speed of our animations well, excellent. Now the next thing I want to do because this animation is actually quite fast, I want to have the time of our timeline. So to do this, right-click on the empty space here, go to Composition Settings. And we're going to change the duration of our timeline from 10 to 5 seconds, like so, cool. So now, we've got 5 seconds available to us for our animation, excellent. All right, now that we have our liquid animation working along our spline correctly, let's go ahead and start adding the colors. So to do this, make sure that the liquid strokes layer is selected. So I'll make sure that's selected by clicking on it like so. And then go back to the effects in the control panel at the top here. So let's go ahead to the top here like so. And from here, we want to open up the particle if it isn't open up already. So make sure the particle settings is opened up. And then scroll down where you can see Birth Color and Death Color. I’m just going to move the timeline along here so you can see how this affects our liquid stroke. One click on one of the color boxes here. So I’m just going to click on the Birth Color. And here we can select any color that we want. So let's go ahead and say if we wanted to create a nice sort of blue color for our liquid, we can select a blue color here like so, making it a little bit brighter. Like that and we can do the same with the Death Color. So choose any color that you want here. Like so, so you can also use the eye dropper tool to select the same color. Cool, now you'll see that our liquid stroke has been colored in, although it's still not looking particularly liquidy. So let's go ahead and go over to the Effects and Presets panel here, and we wanted to type in choker in the search bar here. Make sure that the Liquid Stroke layer has been selected. And then double click on Simple Choker to apply this to the layer. So you can see here in our effects and controls panel we've got Simple Choker now added in. Great, now where it says choke met we wants to Increase this to a value of around 40. So let's go ahead and click on that, and type in 40 as the value, excellent. Now, if you scrub back and forth in the timeline, you'll see that the liquid stroke looks a lot smoother And a lot more natural than it did before, cool. Now that we have a good shape for our liquid stroke, we can start to make a few more adjustments to it. For example, if we wanted to make the stroke a little bit longer, we can come up to the particles systems here again. And we can go ahead and increase the longevity here. So let's change it from 0.6 to 1. And you'll see how that's increased the liquid stroke, like so. Let's also go ahead and create a place where the stroke will disappear. So you see that it disappears at around this mark in the time line here. So let's go ahead and adjust that timeline so it's close, just a little bit close to the end of the animation. Not quite the end here but just about here like so. And we're going to add a key frame for the birth rate, so let's go ahead. So find Birth Rate, which is at the top of particle systems here. Make sure you're in the right place for the timeline. So we wants to begin let's begin the disappearance of a stroke about ten frames here like so. Click on the Birth Rates Stopwatch, to create a key frame. I have this open up Effect, so we can see what we're doing. So Birth Rate, we've got here. And let's move forward 10 frames. So let's count this, one 234-567-8910 and then let's change birth rates from 50 to zero, like so. So now you'll find that the stroke disappears right at the end of the animation. Cool. Now let's go ahead and run Preview this just to see what the speed looks like. So click on Preview, let's see what that looks like here. Come on, that's looking good. Excellent, and we can make adjustments to the timing if necessary. So once you're happy with the way it's looking, let's go ahead and add some shadows and depth to the liquid stroke. So to do this we needed to go to the effects and presets panel here. And let's type into the search bar, let's go ahead and remove choker here, let's type in bevel. And from here we can see bevel alpha here. Make sure that we've got the liquid strokes layer selected and we want to double click the bevel alpha here to add this in. Now let's go ahead and adjust these settings over here just to make sure that we can get the look that we want. So from here let's go ahead and change the edge thickness from 2 to 30. And we wanted to change the light angle here to -164 degrees. Change the lights color, make sure the light color is set to white and the light intensity we want to set it to 0.25, like so. Now you'll find that your strokes has some nice subtle highlights and shadows to them. Excellent, now finally, the next thing that you want to do is we want to duplicate and flip the liquid layer. So let's go ahead and let's find out if this stroke. In fact, I think this stroke is a little bit too long, first of all. So let's change the longevity back to, let's say, 0.7. Yeah, like so. Cool, now, making sure that the liquid strokes layer is selected. Press Ctrl+D on the keyboard to duplicate it. Right click on it, go to Transform, which is up here. And then select Flip Horizontal, like so. And you'll see that it has flipped the layer horizontally. So now we've got two liquid stroke layers mirroring each other on the left and the right side of the screen. Awesome, now next thing I want to do here is right click on the duplicate layer again. Go to transform, and instead of flipping horizontally this time, let's go ahead and flip it vertically like so. And now we've got these two liquid strokes following each other like so, awesome. Now let's go ahead and preview the animation to see what it looks like. Excellent. So that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to add liquid splash animations to the scene. See you all there.