LiquiFlow

About this plugin

Apply LiquiFlow to a layer from Effect > Distort, pick a tool and paint on the layer right in the Composition panel, the way After Effects' Liquify works, but rendered on the GPU. Ten tools move the pixels: Warp, Turbulence, Twirl Clockwise and Counterclockwise, Pucker, Bloat, Shift Pixels, Reflection, Clone, and Reconstruction, which brings the picture back with Revert, Displace, Amplitwist or Affine. Set the brush's size, pressure and hardness, and resize it right in the panel, protect an area with a freeze mask, Alt-click to set where Clone copies from, and turn on Mirror Painting to paint left and right, top and bottom or all four quarters at once. The distortion is kept in a mesh you can keyframe to animate it, move with Distortion Mesh Offset and scale with Distortion Percentage up to 200%, and View Mesh shows it in three sizes and nine colours; Clear Distortion starts over. Squeezed areas are antialiased from how much the warp compresses them, sampling is bicubic or bilinear, and the edges can stay transparent, so the layer grows past its bounds, or repeat their pixels. LiquiFlow renders on the GPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, OpenCL on AMD and Intel) or on the CPU, in 8, 16 and 32 bpc, with Multi-Frame Rendering. Free, for After Effects on Windows: unzip it, copy Liquiflow.aex into After Effects' Plug-ins folder and restart After Effects.

What it does

• Paint distortions straight onto the layer in the Composition panel
• Ten tools: Warp, Turbulence, Twirl Clockwise, Twirl Counterclockwise, Pucker, Bloat, Shift Pixels, Reflection, Clone and Reconstruction
• Brush size up to 4000 px, pressure and hardness, resized right in the panel
• Mirror Painting: left and right, top and bottom, or all four quarters at once
• Freeze Area Mask: a mask on the layer protects what's inside it
• Turbulent Jitter for the Turbulence tool
• Clone from an Alt-click source, aligned or not
• Reconstruction: Revert, Displace, Amplitwist or Affine
• A Distortion Mesh you can keyframe, with an offset and a Distortion Percentage up to 200%
• View Mesh in three sizes and nine colours, and Clear Distortion to start over
• Antialiasing for squeezed areas (off, normal or high), with bicubic or bilinear sampling
• Transparent edges that let the layer grow past its bounds, or repeated edge pixels
• GPU rendering with CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL (AMD, Intel), or the CPU
• 8, 16 and 32 bpc, and Multi-Frame Rendering