Foam

The Foam effect is available from the Adobe Web site (www.adobe.com) after you register your copy of After Effects. This effect generates bubbles that flow, cling, and pop. Use the effect's controls to adjust attributes for the bubbles such as stickiness, viscosity, life span, and bubble strength. You can control exactly how the foam particles interact with each other and with their environment, and specify a separate layer to act as a map, controlling precisely where the foam flows. For example, you can have particles flow around a logo or fill up a logo with bubbles.


Original (left), with Foam applied (center), and with a robot layer used as the Bubble Texture Layer (right)

You can also substitute any image or movie for bubbles. For example, you can create swarms of ants, flocks of birds, or crowds of people.

Note: Foam is an intensely powerful simulation. On a frame-by-frame basis, it renders quickly, but the slightest adjustment in the initial settings is likely to result in very different output a few seconds into the simulation. When making adjustments to Physics controls, the farther into the simulation you are, the longer the adjustments take to render, because each adjustment results in the simulation being recalculated all the way back to the beginning. Not every frame takes this long to calculate; once Foam adjusts to the change, rendering speeds up again.

Related Subtopics:

View controls for the Foam effect
Producer controls for the Foam effect
Bubbles controls for the Foam effect
Physics controls for the Foam effect
Zoom and Universe Size controls for the Foam effect
Rendering controls for the Foam effect
Flow Map controls for the Foam effect
Random Seed control for the Foam effect