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The water is alive! Let’s make some water droplets on a virtual glass window. I’ve had this idea to use liquid footage as a 3D refraction map. This is relatively straightforward to do in Blender but I wanted to stay entirely in After Effects so that I could quickly try out different ideas.

I was thrilled when the Glaze plugin was recently released and allowed me to experiment with pseudo 3D refractions in AE. Interestingly the refractions have a goldilocks zone, meaning the size of the droplets ideally shouldn’t be too small or large, but would distort nicely when a medium size. It took me some experimenting to realize that the Distortion Mode attribute was actually changing how the refractions functioned and so I ended up creating scene variations that used the “Solid” and “Chaos” options and then tweaked the Refraction Index attribute to reach what I was looking for.

The main technique was to effectively create a virtual glass window with water droplets on it. Then I layered various background footage so that it was behind the virtual glass window and the water droplets would have something interesting to refract. It took me some experimenting to make it so that the background footage was only visible to the water droplets and not in the final renders. A small caveat of the Glaze plugin is that the refractions can only work in the screen-space mapping, meaning it cannot refract any footage that is beyond the canvas edge, but it looks great anyways. I did try experimenting with the Environment Map input, but it simply looks too weird in this context to have the same visuals being refracted from beneath and also reflected from above.

The next step was to create a series of template comps so that I didn’t need to waste time remaking the layer stack with each scene variation. This was trickier than expected to streamline and be easy to duplicate, and required that I rely on the Set Matte FX to take care of the alpha channel by the nested luma comp. But it proved to be worth the effort since it allowed me to quickly lay out hundreds of experiments and then spend most of my time curating through the comps and tweaking settings as needed or testing out different background footage. Starting with my template comps, I used the True Comp Duplicator plugin so that the duplicated comps would retain their own respective nested comps, which was vital. Then I used ChatGPT to create the ISO_PopulateCompsWithUniqueFootage.jsx script that would automate the tedious aspect of laying out one unique piece of footage into each luma mask comp. This allowed me to painlessly test out different water patterns and move at the speed of my creativity. Then for the background footage comps I created the ISO_PopulateRandomFootageIntoComp.jsx so that I could randomly try out different clips and test out the refractions for the given scene.

While trying out a bunch of abstract clips for the background footage, I had a happy accident when I accidentally threw in the Liquid Light clips and it looked amazing to have the fluidic visuals refracting within each droplet. So that inspired me to try throwing in the Reef Beyond clips, where I had combined the Liquid Lights clips and Mask Reaction Diff clips into strange watery sights. I also did some “RefractNested” experiments where I refracted the liquid into itself. Liquid within liquid within liquid, what a strange impossibility has been visualized! This proved to be a revelation which was very fruitful and so I explored loads of variations. I always love to revisit prior projects and layering on new techniques so that it becomes extended in ways that I couldn't have envisioned prior. Kind of a brain bender to nest multiple layers of real and simulated liquids together and bring everything to a new level.

Another happy accident was realizing that the Glaze plugin performed slightly differently if the background footage comp was empty and instead only the reflections of the environment light were visible. So I made some “Clear” clips where I animated the light angle so that you can experience the 3D feeling of the droplets. Layering the “Clear” clips on top of the “Refract” clips is delicious to trigger to the beat in Resolume.

I had originally planned on recording a bunch of new liquid light footage using my dual clock glass plates hardware rig, but I had surgery on my foot earlier this month and so I wasn’t able to stand on my feet for long periods of time. Instead I revisited the Liquid Lights clips and Mask Reaction Diff clips to drive the luma masks for these experiments. But I def intend to revisit this idea and use ferrofluid in the mix. Evaporation into condensation into digitalization into precipitation.

Released September 2026