School of Fish, Part 2
Time to make the water. We'll be using a combination of Fractal Noise, Wave World and Caustics to achieve this effect.
- Create a new comp called Water. Composition > New Composition or cmd-n (Mac) or ctrl-n (Win). I made mine 640x480 and 11 seconds long.
- Create a new solid and call it FN - short for Fractal Noise. Color is unimportant, but it must fill the screen, so click "Make Comp Size" in the Layer Settings window.
Apply Fractal Noise to the FN solid. You basically want to create horizontally stretched clouds that evolve over the length of the comp. Notice in the settings shown to the right how the scale is not uniform. I also animated the offset turbulence for the duration, moving from left to right. I left the Sub Settings and the Evolution Settings at the defaults.- Create a new solid (follow the procedure in step 2 of this section). Call it WW - short for Wave World. Drag WW to the bottom of the stack in the layer window, under FN.
- Apply Wave World to WW layer.
Effects > Simulation > Wave World. - Change the following Wave World Settings.
View: Height Map
Under Simulation...
Grid Resolution: 23
Uncheck Grid Resolution Downsamples
Set Preroll to .360
Under Ground...
Set Ground to 1. FN
Steepness: .390
Height: .760
Wave Strength: .340
Under Producer 1...
Type: Line - Close the Water comp.
- Create a new comp called Final School of Fish. Mine is 8 seconds, 640x480, 29.97 fps. Background color is unimportant.
- Drag the Water comp into this new comp, Final School of Fish. Turn off the visibility of the layer. We'll get to that in a few more steps.
- Create a new layer called Background. It must be the same size as your comp (follow step two in this section if you've forgotten how).
Apply a ramp to this layer. Effect > Render > Ramp.
I started with a light blue and ramped it to a medium teal. My ramp is on an angle with the light blue in the upper right corner and the teal in the lower left corner. This upper right corner is going to be the area where some light is shining through.- Apply an adjustment layer above the Background layer. Layer > New > Adjustment Layer.
- Apply Trapcode Shine to the Adjustment Layer. Effects > Trapcode > Shine.
This effect will simulate sun beams shining through the water. Set the Source Point to the upper left corner, but not on the corner of the comp. See the settings I used to the right.
Note that I keyframed the phase of the shimmer one full spin from start to finish. 
Apply Caustics to the adjustment layer. Effects > Simulation > Caustics.
You want to make sure that Caustics is applied AFTER Shine so that the beams of light are affected by the water movement and distortion.
The only settings that I changed in Caustics are the Water Settings, shown to the right.
The wave height is low and the smoothing is high to give the water a very subtle effect. Make sure you select the Water layer as the Water Surface to get the wavy effect.
Now for the fun, and the most difficult part... making the school of fish.
- Drag the Fish Comp into the Final School of Fish Comp. Drag it to the bottom of the timeline and turn off the visibility.
- Create a new solid called Fish Particles. Make sure it's the same size as your comp. The color of the solid is unimportant. Make sure this layer is positioned above the Adjustment Layer in the timeline.
- Set the layer mode to Overlay.
- Particular can only be used with a comp camera so we'll do that now. Layer > New > Camera. I used a 28mm camera set to the defaults. Depth of Field is not enabled.
- Apply Trapcode Particular to the Fish Particles layer. Effects > Trapcode > Particular.
- Under Particle, choose Particle Type: Custom. Twirl down the custom parameter below Particle Type. This is where you will choose the Fish Comp Layer. See the settings I used below.
- Alright. Got all that? Let's go back to the Emitter.
- You can leave everything else at the defaults, or go ahead and tweak them.