Ripple

Hey Fablers, welcome back to another Academy tutorial. In this video, we're gonna look at the Ripple Deformer. In our scene, we have a single JPEG image with our layer selected, go up to the effects panel. Let's type in ripple. Click drag, and apply it to our layer. Now, at first, it seems to not do much, the reason being this radius number needs to be drastically increased with a couple of zeros.

Instead of 100, I'm going to start with 10,000. As soon as you do that, you can start to see what happens. The ripple effect essentially mimics the equivalent of a ripple drop and distortion in water.

So let's take a look at some of these settings. Radius we've discussed. You have to really crank this up to start to see the effects. The phase here will shift the distortion and where it originates in our scene. So you can use this and you can animate this as always to get some really cool looking effects pretty easily. Wave width determines just how big of a wave this is. The higher it is the more concentric these circles become.

And once again, once you start doing the phase, you can start to see here, how you get this really cool rippling effect. Let's turn this down a little bit.

The wave height dictates how much the vertical distortion is applied. Center X will move the center of our distortion ripple along the horizontal plane. Similarly center Y will move it in the vertical axes.

"Is symmetric", we turn this off. You'll notice that it does not necessarily function the same way in both directions. "Is symmetric" is most close to reality, in that whatever happens on one side, the behavior of water tends to mimic itself in all directions.

The "is repeating" UV basically says either it's going to finish and layer itself on top of some pixels, or it's not going to extend beyond the bounds, and it will create these sort of holes and tears in your image. Can be really cool if you throw some multiple layers on top of each other. As always to animation properties. So if we go zero here, one second, let's move this forward a little bit. And then we go to play this back. You'll notice that very quickly, you have an animated ripple.

And lastly, we have our global opacity slider, which controls the opacity of the effect on our underlying layer.