Liquid Glass is now available as a free download. It is an After Effects plugin that adds a clean, refractive glass effect to any layer with an alpha channel.
Most of the existing ways to fake liquid glass in After Effects are templates and project files stuffed with stacks of displacement maps, blurs, and adjustment layers. They take forever to set up, are a pain to retime or restyle, and even after all that, they rarely match the look you actually want. So I built a single effect that does the whole job.
It uses Snell's law for the refraction, so the background actually bends through the glass like real light does. There are full controls for IOR, blur, edge blur, chromatic aberration, specular highlights, tint, and shadows. Drop it on, get a usable look out of the box, then dial in the specifics.
It is CPU based on purpose. Supporting every kind of GPU reliably would be months of work, which is not viable for a free release. The CPU version runs the same on every machine, Mac or Windows.
It is free. If you make something cool with it, send it over. I would love to see it.