FlowEngine
Turn a still picture into a seamless loop that flows along the mesh between two masks: rivers, waterfalls, lava, smoke or a swirling portal.
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Works with
Live demo
Try FlowEngine
FlowEngine's renderer, rebuilt in WebGL so you can try its settings here: drag them, switch the picture, and drag the points of the two masks to reshape the flow. It runs the same per-pixel code as the plugin, which renders inside After Effects on your GPU or CPU.
Layer
Masks
Flow
Loop Blend
Distortion
Edges
Output
About this plugin
Apply FlowEngine to a still layer from Effect > Distort and pick two of its masks. The plugin joins them into a mesh and makes everything between them flow, along the masks or across from the first mask to the second, in a loop that repeats seamlessly: two copies of the picture slide by Travel over each loop and hand over with a linear crossfade, a noise dissolve or a wipe. Set the speed at the start and the end, slow it down near the masks like a river near its banks, and let it vary with noise. Add a distortion that moves with the flow or stays fixed to the mesh or the layer, evolving in whole cycles per loop so the loop stays seamless. Fade the flow in and out at its start and end and toward each mask, and break it up with opacity noise. Closed masks flow around a loop, with Loop Offset B to twist it. Flow Lines, Flow Vectors (a flow map for game engines) and UV Map views and a mesh wireframe show what the flow is doing. FlowEngine renders on the GPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, OpenCL on AMD and Intel) or on every CPU core, in 8, 16 and 32 bpc, with Multi-Frame Rendering. For After Effects on Windows: copy FlowEngine.aex into After Effects' Plug-ins folder and restart After Effects.
What it does
- Seamless loops from a still picture, flowing between two masks
- Flow along the masks, or across from mask A to mask B
- Reverse either mask, or the whole flow
- Closed masks flow around a loop, with Loop Offset B to twist it
- Loop Duration and Travel set the loop's length and how far it flows
- Speed at the start and the end, slower near the masks, and speed variation
- Loop blends: Linear, Noise Dissolve and Wipe, with Crossfade and each copy's opacity
- Distortion that moves with the flow, or stays fixed to the mesh or the layer
- Seamless evolution, in whole cycles per loop
- Fades at the start, the end and near each mask, plus opacity noise
- Views: Result, Flow Lines, Flow Vectors (a flow map) and UV Map
- A mesh wireframe, coloured like the masks
- Layer time or manual time, with a time offset
- GPU rendering with CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL (AMD, Intel), or every CPU core
- 8, 16 and 32 bpc, and Multi-Frame Rendering
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