{"id":40322,"date":"2014-06-04T16:49:52","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T20:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/?p=40322"},"modified":"2014-09-10T13:01:28","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T17:01:28","slug":"casting-a-water-reflection-in-after-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/casting-a-water-reflection-in-after-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"Casting a Water Reflection in After Effects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dive into the deep end – pun intended – with our water reflection tutorial for Adobe After Effects.<\/h2>\n

The Ray-traced 3D Renderer<\/strong> is a powerful tool that lets you execute a ton of different 3D tasks not available in the regular After Effects 3D render. Today we will keep it simple…I\u2019ll show you how to cast a reflection in a pond with a graphic element. Follow the steps below to realistically float any text or graphic in water.<\/p>\n

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First, you want to switch your renderer to Ray-trace 3D<\/strong>. From the Menu Bar choose Composition> Composition Settings. Be warned that to get really flawless, beautiful results you are going to have to turn the ray-trace quality up to a point where you may consider the render times unreasonably long (depending on your setup).<\/p>\n

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For this project I worked in 2 and pumped it up to 4 before rendering.<\/p>\n

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The first thing you\u2019ll want to do is to motion track (Animation>Track Camera) your footage and create a camera with that tracking.<\/p>\n

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Next, you\u2019ll want to create a new shape layer (Layer> New> Shape layer). Then create a large white rectangle and line the perspective up with the surface of the water.<\/p>\n

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Be sure to turn 3D on for the layer.<\/strong>\u00a0You can toggle the rotation controls with the R key. I like to start by tilting X rotation to 90 degrees and then tweaking things from there so that my shape is lined up with the water surface as closely as possible.<\/p>\n

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Then drop your graphic element (here I chose text) into the project, lining it up so that it’s dipped is partway into the plane, as if it were dipped into water.<\/p>\n

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Next you\u2019ll want to change some settings around on the shape layer (trigger the settings by pressing “AA”). This is what I did for this specific shot. Again, to get things looking flawless you are going to have to turn up the raytrace quality, if you don\u2019t you will get this grain. I went ahead and pushed the text back into the image so that I could see more reflection.<\/p>\n

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Next its just a matter of keying the position of your element. Two cool techniques I like to use with water:<\/p>\n