Glass Effect Tutorial | Text Animation in After Effects

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How to create a Glass Effect in After Effects

Create a new composition and call it the Main Comp.

Create another composition and call it a Displacement Map.

Add our video content inside of the Main Comp.

Get inside of the Displacement Map and create a new Solid layer.  

Add a Gradient Ramp effect to it.

Now we need to narrow our Solid, as we do in the example by setting the Scale to 2%.

We place the End of Ramp point on the left side of our solid, to get this result.

We’ll also add a Motion Tile effect and duplicate our Solid in the Output Width parameter.

If we start getting an error, it means that we exceeded the acceptable value. 

To fix that, we’ll set an acceptable value - it’s 1500 in our case.

Duplicate our Solid layer to fill the screen.

Go to the Main comp and add a Displacement Map composition to it. Place it below our video layer.

Create a new Adjustment Layer and add a Displacement Map effect to it.

Link our Displacement Map layer to the Displacement Map composition.

The result we currently have:

Select Effects & Masks from the source list and set Luminance in the Use For Horizontal and Vertical Displace parameters. Set the Use For Horizontal Displace value to 24.

Get inside of the Displacement Map composition and create a new Adjustment Layer. Add a Fast Box Blur effect to it. Set the Blur Radius parameter to 1.

And add the Scatter effect to our Adjustment Layer. In the Scatter Amount parameter, we can do some experiments to get the best result, but in our case, we’ll set it to 4.0 and enable Randomize every frame.

Get back to the Displacement Map composition and copy the Scatter effect. Paste it to the Adjustment Layer of our main comp, to make the result more vivid.

We can see some artifacts on the sides of our composition. To fix this, we’ll add a Transform effect on our Adjustment Layer and drag it on top of the other effect we’ve added. Increase the Scale parameter to 103%.

The glass is ready, but in our case we want it to cover only a part of our video, so we’ll create a new Shape Layer. With the help of the Rectangle Tool, we’ll select only the area we want to have as glass.

Now, set the Track Matte of our Adjustment Layer as Alpha Matte to our Shape Layer.

Move the shape layer as we need it to be and duplicate it.

Place it below the Adjustment Layer and set the Opacity parameter to 5% - now the glass has a white tone and looks more realistic.  

We’ll create another Shape Layer and call it Stroke. With the help of the Pen tool, set the line stroke to 14 px.

Shift it closer to our glass and add a Fast Box Blur effect to it. Set the Blur Radius to 9.  

Duplicate the first Shape Layer we’ve created and set it as a layer mask for our stroke layer, so our divider won’t leave the glass area.

Move to the Adjustment Layer and duplicate the Displacement Map effect. Paste it to the Stroke layer. Make the offset smaller.

Set the opacity on the Stroke layer to 50% and add a Noise effect to make our glass even more realistic.

Set the Amount of Noise to 67 and disable the Use Color Noise.

Now you can place any element or text under the glass.

For further convenience, we’ll link all of the shapes to one, for example to the white background.  

You can additionally experiment with the glass texture, here are a couple of other examples with the Wave Warp effect. Add a Wave Warp effect to the Adjustment Layer, and set the Direction and Wave Speed to 0 degrees. Now you can switch Wave Type modes to get different results:

Finally

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You can also watch full tutorial on Youtube.