Abyss Caustics drops your word into deep water, with light rippling down over the face, god rays cutting through from above and bubbles rising past.
What Abyss Caustics is good for
Ocean and marine documentary titles
Dive schools, aquariums and swim brands
Ambient and downtempo release art
How this animation is built
Caustics are the interesting problem here. The photoreal route is feTurbulence into feDisplacementMap with an animated scale, which is the most expensive thing this renderer can do because a changing primitive forces the filter to reconvolve every frame. Instead the bands are skewed translucent ellipses on deliberately non-harmonic periods — 7.3s, 9.1s, 11.7s, 13.3s — so the pattern takes a very long time to visibly repeat, which is the property that actually sells moving water. They ride over the type in mix-blend-mode: screen, so the light reads as falling on the word rather than behind it.
Tips for Abyss Caustics
Pale, cool colours suit the depth; warm type fights the water.
It is a slow, ambient style — let it run rather than exporting a very short clip.
Abyss Caustics questions
Why do the ripples never seem to loop?
The caustic bands run on periods that do not divide into each other, so the combined pattern takes far longer to repeat than any single band. That non-repetition is what reads as real water.
Related animation styles
Flaming Text — Flames lick upward from letters standing in white-hot fire
Burning Text — Charred letters engulfed in a roaring inferno of tall flames
Blue Fire — Ghostly blue flames rising off cool glowing letters
Smoke Wisp — Pale ghost letters that waver and drift apart like smoke
Molten Rune — Stone-carved letters flooding with molten gold as embers rise
Fire Letters — Letters rise from flames with flickering glow