Abstract liquid chrome background?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

I would love to make some abstract liquid-metalish backgrounds to use for some motion graphics video’s.
Kind of like this one.
What would be a good way to go about doing this?

My first thought was using a displacement modifier and some kind of generated texture, but I’m not really sure how to animate it. Perhaps with blend shapes?

Curious what you people think.

2

These are interesting animations. There is some movement of the “liquid metal” object but you might get a similar effect with this method:

  • Model the reflective metal on a large plane on the XZ axis, camera on the Y axis.
  • Subdivide substantially, use proportional editiing tools to deform the mesh, lattice modifier, etc.
  • Use an HDRI environment image texture and key frame the z rotation.

Basically, this rotates the environment’s horizon around while the camera and object plane are stable. I tried a short animation using a cloudy-day style of hdri and it worked reasonably well. You could even try a similar pipeline using a noise textured sky.

3

While goofing with this I discovered the “ocean” modifier in the simulate category. Apply it to an un-scaled unit plane without subdividing and keyframe the Time value for the animation. Contrary to what I did above, use a less reflective material to speed rendering.

4

That’s a good idea! I played around with your method a bit, and then I experimented with sculpting some different blend shapes.

Anyway, here is my (quickly rendered, noisy) result:

Still not perfect, but getting there.

5

Nice video, it has potential.