WarpEngine

About this plugin

Apply WarpEngine to a layer from Effect > Distort and it bends the layer with up to 32 waves at once. Each wave folds the picture along itself, squeezing it and mirroring it back when it's strong, and drips it across, so straight lines run, melt and fold. Start from one of 14 presets, from Melting Portrait, Liquid Eyes and Dripping Paint to Wood Grain, Silk, Heat Haze, Glitch Blocks and Kaleido Melt, or set the wave size, strength, fold, drip and direction yourself, with six waveforms (sine, liquid, drip, triangle, square and sawtooth) and variation in size, strength and direction. Iterations warp the warp again for deeper swirls. Evolution, offsets and drift animate it, and Loop makes it seamless. A strength map from another layer decides where it warps, Color Split pulls red and blue apart along the warp, and the edges can repeat, wrap around, mirror or stay transparent. Each pixel is antialiased from how much the warp stretches it, and WarpEngine renders on the GPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, OpenCL on AMD and Intel) or on the CPU. Free, for After Effects on Windows: unzip it, copy WarpEngine.aex into After Effects' Plug-ins folder and restart After Effects.

What it does

• Up to 32 waves at once, each folding the picture along it and dripping it across
• 14 presets: Melting Portrait, Liquid Eyes, Deep Swirl, Mirror Folds, Dripping Paint, Wood Grain, Psychedelic, Heat Haze, Silk, Zigzag, Glitch Blocks, Tidal Smear, Kaleido Melt and Sideways Melt
• Wave size, strength, fold, drip and direction, with an Amount for the whole warp
• Six waveforms: sine, liquid, drip, triangle, square and sawtooth
• Size, strength and direction variation from a random seed
• Up to 4 iterations: the warp warps itself again for deeper swirls
• Evolution, offsets and drift to animate it, with seamless loops
• A strength map from any layer: its luminance, alpha or a colour channel, inverted if you like
• Color Split pulls red and blue apart along the warp
• Edges that repeat, wrap around, mirror or turn transparent
• Antialiasing from how much each pixel is stretched: off, low, high or best
• Bilinear or bicubic interpolation, and a mix with the original
• GPU rendering with CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL (AMD, Intel), or the CPU