Patreon Peeks 22: Ocean Waves in Animal Crossing (Patreon)

Hello! This week, I wanted to show a little of the After Effects magic that made a simple little effect possible in the Animal Crossing: New Horizons video. The attached video is the isolated effect, but you can also find it at around 1:15 in the original video: https://youtu.be/A4mN7CsAys8

I wanted to animate an ocean wave in a similar way that the game itself portrays it, and if I know anything about Nintendo's texturing work, that's created through textures whose brightness acts as a filter to other textures. Thankfully, After Effects has such an effect, called Image Wipe, that can use information about an image to dissolve another image.

The largest piece of this puzzle is an illustration of the sea wave itself, which I drew in Clip Studio Paint:

I gave that some turbulent displacement to make it wobble, and moved it from right to left, fade-in and fade-out... but it needs the ocean foam on top to look authentic. So, next step was to duplicate this image, but color-filter it to be all white. Then, I just needed to make that white layer ebb in and then dissolve out with a foam-like pattern.

Enter Image Wipe. The first image wipe would happen when the wave crashes in, which would be a smooth wipe from the blue of the water to the white of the foam. So, the filtering texture could just be a blurry gradient, where brighter values represent coming later in the wipe effect.

Then, when the wave dies down, the white foam would have to dissolve back to blue with this unique pattern. I achieved the pattern by creating a new gradient with some added Voronoi noise, and then stretching it to look like it lies flat on the sea wave's surface:

The cool part about this procedural Voronoi pattern is that those "spots" can be animated erratically, allowing the foam pattern itself to move, on top of the image wipe. But these two gradients are hidden, while the foam layer steals the show. And all of this needed to be compressed into its own composition, so it can all move as one, fade in and out, and sync up with the lovely sound of waves crashing in Animal Crossing!