2D Smoke & Explosions in After Effects Tutorial

in this video i'm going to show you how to make this 2d cartoon explosion effect which is 100 procedural in after effects without any frame by frame animation now the effects we're going to learn today will be useful in a lot of your after effects projects if you're wanting to make a lot of your animations look more frame by frame traditionally animated and of course the project file for this video is available to download for free in the description so we're starting in a new comp and the only thing i've got in there is a background layer that is set to 50 gray and we're going to start with the simple animation that is going to drive the whole effect which is two circles creating the original cloud animation so let's go and select our ellipse tool and just draw a circle in the middle i'll change its size to something around 300 although this doesn't matter too much gonna open my align tools and then make sure that's in the very center and for this one i am going to fill white and i'm also going to grab my move anchor point tool and make sure that that is in the bottom right and now we're going to animate its scale property so i'm going to press s on my keyboard keyframe which scale at 100 and let's move this keyframe just around just before a second maybe 22 frames and then at the beginning let's take that down from 100 to zero so now it animates up from nothing out of this bottom right corner great now we want this to feel like an explosion's happening so we want to add some more dynamic easing so it feels like it really punches in so let's select these keyframes go into our graph editor we want to make sure we are in the value graph which we are let's select these again and add an easy ease to them here and i want to create a curve that goes really fast at the start and then really slows down here so it looks very punchy there that is looking pretty good we can see the majority of this animation is in this final sort of stage which will be where our cloud is sort of settling let's get out of the graph editor and now we're going to duplicate this circle first we should rename it because we always label our layers let's go with circle one duplicate it and on circle two we want to change its fill color from white to black we're gonna open up its keyframes with u and i'm gonna drag out the second keyframe so it's a little slower so i'm gonna drag this out to around 28 frames and what i want this to do is to not completely cover this original animation that it is at the moment so let's dive a bit back into the graph editor and make some adjustments here we don't want our red curve to go over our yellow line here so let's check this first handle down and now when we scrub through we can see that our white circle is visible underneath and then it slowly gets covered up i think we want a bit more visible at the start so let's just adjust this busier handle on our black circles eating yeah i think that's pretty good and also when we get to the end of this animation there might be a very slight sort of sub pixel ring that we notice where our white is showing through so we can just fix that by changing the scale to 101 percent at the end here there that is looking pretty good now the next thing we're going to do is pre-comp these layers so let's select them both hold ctrl shift c let's just name this cloud one and at the moment that pre-comps it in a 1920 by 1080 comp and we want to make that a bit smaller tighter around our circle so let's open up that comp and a really quick way to adjust this is to select the region of interest tool draw that around our layers oops that's too small and here at the end of the animation just scale it down until it's tight with our circle and then we can go up to composition crop comp to region of interest so now we've reduced that comp size to just fit our circle all right back into our main comp and now again we want to move our anchor point from the middle of this comp down to the bottom right and we're going to start filling out our explosion and how we're going to do this is just by duplicating this cloud bringing up a rotation with r on our keyboard rotating it and of course adjusting the scale as well to create some variety in our cloud shapes so i'm going to duplicate a few of these rotate them and scale them in various amounts and because our anchor point is in the middle here all the explosions all the clouds will be coming out of this point here i might speed this up and just make a few more of these there we are now we have a variety of cloud shapes all coming out from the middle and make sure that the ones at the front are kind of on top in the layer stack of the ones behind it and this is why we used a black circle instead of a matte because we do want to have these sort of overlapping each other and creating these nice shapes where the edge of this cloud is hidden behind this one in front of it and now that we've got our basic shape made let's actually select these all and drag them to the middle of our comp there and now that we've got our basic shape let's make this look like it was hand animated and i'm going to bring the end of my work area a little bit sooner so this can loop and if you're finding this video useful please give this video a like it really does help to grow the channel so i can keep making these videos every week and also consider subscribing because i've got some really great tutorials that i'm really excited to share coming very soon now one thing we need to deal with with our smoke is that they all look too similar all of these puffs of smoke are so identical and they all come up at the same speed so we want to change that so an easy way to do that is to select a cloud one comp over here here in the project panel and duplicate that with command or control d let's open up cloud two and we're just gonna make some adjustments to this cloud so let's open up its keyframes and let's make this one a bit slower i'm going to drag this keyframe out a little further and maybe this one out a little bit too let's go into the graph editor and maybe tweak the speed a little bit on this one as well there that looks a bit slower now let's go into our main comp and we're going to replace about half of all of these cloud ones with cloud 2. so i'm going to go around and select maybe every other cloud here and with about four of them selected i'm going to grab cloud 2 from over here in the project panel hold alt on my keyboard and just drag that anywhere in our timeline and that will replace all of those cloud ones with cloud 2. so now when we play it back there's a bit more variation of when the clouds sort of finish animating and it's easy to go in and adjust these by diving into those precomps as well now we need to distress this to make it look more irregular so let's create a new adjustment layer with ctrl alt y and name that effect and one thing i have realized is that i don't need this background layer so i'm just going to delete that and i'm going to open up a composition settings and change the background color in here so that way we can see what we're doing but also we can turn the transparency grid on and we can tell that there's nothing there and that is because the first thing we're going to do is remove this black from our clouds so in our adjustment layer we're going to add the effect extract and we're just going to bring in the left edge of this rectangle and that immediately cuts out all of our black areas and now we've got a nice transparent puff of smoke that we can put over the top of any of our animations now to make it look more irregular as if it was hand drawn let's add the turbulent displace effect let's keep the amount at 50 and let's change the size from 100 to 13. so we've got a fair few little bumps around in it and we want this to animate as well so let's alt option click evolution to open up our expression window and just type the simple expression times asterix 200 which will just keep that value animating going up at a constant rate there we are could see they're waving as if there were some nice dust clouds now one other thing that i do want to do is i want these lines to sort of break up as they get thinner here i want these to separate so instead of having one long crescent here we've got a piece of cloud over here and a little bit here and just more gaps sort of come into it and we can do that pretty easily with the help of our extract effect now because our extract effect is removing anything that is black underneath it if we add any black elements under here it is going to cut it out from our whole composition so a really effective way that we can do that is to add some noise so let's turn off our effects layer so we can see a bit more of what we're doing and i'm going to create a new solid with control y and this color doesn't really matter because the first thing we're going to do is add the effect fractal noise and this generates a nice noise for us and let's drop that below our effects and the first thing we're going to do is turn on preserve underlying transparency so now it is going to only cover up our explosion area and we're going to change its blending mode from normal to multiply so it's only going to be visible over the white parts here now let's turn up our contrast around 180 looks good let's open up transform and change the scale down from 100 to 30. now at the end here we've got lots of areas where there's lots of black cutting in over our white areas so when we turn our effects on those are removed so we can see gaps in our clouds and at the moment it doesn't look great because we can still see a bit of gray in there and also we don't want all our noise in our clouds from the start we want it to only appear at the end here so to remove it from the start we can just keyframe its opacity where we want our cloud fully broken apart let's keyframe its opacity 100 let's drag it forward and then drag that down to zero so now we start to have our cloud breaking apart but we can see our extract isn't quite removing all of our areas here that we want it to and it doesn't look very smooth it looks all jagged and it just doesn't look very nice but we've got a couple of really good techniques which are going to smooth this all out and make it look much better so in our effects adjustment layer let's maybe adjust that extract a bit further so it cuts out even more of our grays there we are and to cut out all these jagged parts what we're going to do is we're going to use the good old-fashioned blur and crunch so we're going to add a gaussian blur effect bring that up to 10 to soften everything here then we want to add the effect levels change its channel from rgb to alpha and we just want to bring in these edges here to crush the alpha channel and essentially what we're doing is just sharpening up that blur there we are now it's looking nice and rounded and smooth and a bit more cartoony but we still get a bit of gray going on here so easy fix for that is you just add the effect fill and let's fill it wide for now there now we've got a pretty good cartoon smoke happening and we might want this to start breaking apart earlier so we can just drag our fractal noise keyframes a bit sooner if you want to break it apart more and if you want to make any adjustments we can go into our fractal noise and maybe like turn up the scale if you wanted to break up in bigger chunks and you can make many adjustments in here let's turn this back down to 30 because i think that works well maybe a bit more let's go to 40. nice now i've got a pretty good looking cartoon sort of dust explosion but i want to show you some really cool techniques to elevate this a bit more and get more of a fiery explosion and we want to pre-comp all of these our clouds our fractal noise and our effects adjustment layer and let's call those explosion and let's say we want to create something that isn't just coming from one direction at the bottom what we can do here is go into this explosion pre comp select all of these cloud precomps duplicate them with ctrl d hit r on our keyboard to bring up rotation and if we just drag these all around we can add another layer and now we've got explosions coming from both sides now we can nudge these up a little bit using our arrow tools to make it a bit more round and now we've got more of a fire explosion that could be happening in the air or maybe this is a top-down view of something and there might be a bit too much symmetry in these so you can go and adjust the position of these clouds further to mix it up and make it seem a bit more random adjusting their rotation and scale you get the idea so let's get back into our main comp and i noticed that a lot of cartoon explosions kind of have a really black smoke and then an inner rim of orange or yellow to create a real fiery colour and let's move this up to the middle of our comp as well and to create our outermost sort of black smoky area that's easy we just add a fill effect change that to black and that's done but to make it look more fiery at the beginning here we kind of want to fill all the insides here with orange so we can duplicate our comp and on the bottom one let's change that fill from black to orange and normally a technique i would use would just be to drag this bottom comp here over a few more frames so it starts a bit later and we can see during the middle of the expression this is getting the effect that we want but it doesn't look great towards the end here and it definitely doesn't look good at the beginning when we've got all sorts of gaps in the middle here and that's just because there's just too much motion at the start where it's really fast so one way to make it lag behind ever so slightly this comp is to drag it back first of all we want to right click go to time enable time remapping and oh it looks like it's made this comp very long if that's okay we can just go to where the explosion ends around here one second and i'm going to keyframe it here and then go to an area where we're sort of problematic at the start and i'm just going to drag this keyframe back and now we can see we're still laying it very slightly and i can push it back a fair bit and now when we play it back it is ever so slightly behind our black explosion layer and then towards here it kind of starts to look a bit ugly so around here is the last point where it looks really good so i'm going to keyframe it just a bit before that and then around here i want to start to bring this more forward to clean it up and eventually we want it hidden behind these black layers now we play that back that is looking much better so we get a nice fiery element here and then they disappear and we're just left with the smoke wonderful and if we want another layer we can duplicate this explosion layer again on our bottom layer let's turn this from orange to more of a yellowy orange so we can drag both of these keyframes and just pull them back as well don't go too far that looks pretty good and then let's drag this second one back a bit more forward as well so we get lots of color at the start and then it kind of fades away into these clouds and at around here we can get a bit of color showing through and that kind of looks ugly we don't really need that here so we can just select these two bottom comps press alt and square right bracket to just trim them to this point so then we don't need to deal with them at all and one last thing i want to do is lower the frame on this so on a new adjustment layer i'm going to add the effect posterize time and set that to 12 so it just looks a bit more hand drawn and there that just looks a bit more cartoony and the reason why i didn't do this on the adjustment layer inside the explosion is because it wouldn't really let us time remap efficiently and we wouldn't be able to get these sort of inner colored layers if we were posterizing earlier in our effect stack and of course this is all transparent so you can drag this comp onto any of your footage and you have a nice little explosion and we've taken a really simple animation two circles scaling up and then we've added a bunch of effects to distress it and some noise to make it break apart and learn some timing techniques to slow it down and get layers to your animation and you can take some or all of these techniques and apply them to a lot of your animations to give them a bit more of a traditional cell animated feel and again this project file is free to download in the description so please go ahead tinker around with that play around and i'd love to see what you can make applying these techniques to your own animations if you'd like to learn animation and motion design techniques i've got a playlist of some of the best tutorials on this channel for you to take a look at i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 81,223

Keywords: motion design tutorial, after effects explosion, 2d explosion tutorial, ben marriott, motion graphics, 2d smoke tutorial, smoke explosion animation, cartoon explosions after effects, explosions after effects, 2D Cartoon Explosions, cartoon blast after effects, cartoon blast effect, animated explosion after effects, 2d explosion animation, How to make 2d explosion in after effect, smoke tutorial after effects, animated smoke

Id: w8mHmW6GgHM

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/notmyfirstrodeo2]

Damn i needed this tutorial few months ago. Anyway saved this post.

[u/AutisticKid2001]

Wow surprised to see you here Ben

Been hyping for your online course for a few days now

[u/[deleted]]

I love you Ben Marriott!

[u/KodakGold800]

Thanks, very helpful!