Advanced Electric FX Tutorial! 100% After Effects!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for videocopilot net and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to take a look at creating some advanced electricity effects inside of After Effects this one's going to be a lot of fun so let's go and take a look at what we're going to be creating [Music] [Music] [Music] I you you alright so there's a lot of cool things we're going to be exploring and a lot of different techniques that we're going to be combining together so lets going to take a look at a few of the different setups so here I have an example where the Lightning is reflecting off of the surface and each time it touches the ground it's creating sort of an interactive contact point so we're going to take a look at setting up the look of the Lightning and we're also going to be taking a look at tips to make the Lightning look more organic and integrated and create a really nice soft glow and the cool thing about this is that it's dynamic so we don't have to custom draw any of the reflections and as you can see in this example same kind of thing but what I can do is I can open up the comp with my lightning and just to show you really quickly I can go to one of the Lightning effects change the color and it will update in the final comp and you can actually play it back in the color of the reflection changes so it's very dynamic and works really well alright going to close that another quick tip we're going to look at is using the source material to influence the reflection so you can see in this example we're actually using some of the texture from the original plate to influence the reflections intensity so I'll show you some cool tips for controlling that so here you can kind of see how it's interacting with the background I think electricity effects are really cool you seem in a lot of great movies you know see that scene in Back to the Future [Music] electricians traveling down the line and you know killed that kid is one of Steven Spielberg's best movies they like that money now another really cool example is creating this subsurface scattering effect for the clouds and this is a really fun and really powerful technique so definitely pay attention to this one and then we're also going to take a look at adding some electrical effects to a text or to a logo and you can see that it interacts with the contours in a really nice realistic way so take a look at that and then finally we're going to take a look at this technique where we can actually control the direction of the lightning in this case we're kind of have like a reverse gravity effect so it's a really cool technique for giving your lightning a direction all right so we've got a lot of fun stuff to do and of course I'll try to keep my electrical puns to a minimum now I will admit I went on Google and I did a search for electrical puns and I got to say there was a shocking number of results all right let's go ahead and get started now first thing that we want to do is set the project file to 32 bits per channel so if you hold down alt you can cycle through 8 16 and 32 bits this will just give us more color information when working with bright glowing type of effects all right so let's take our Street sidewalk footage drop it into a new comp and let's create a new solid we'll call this lightning hit okay and then we're going to add the advanced lightning effect so we could come over here to the effects and presets we can type in lightning scroll down to advanced lighting and drop that on here now quick sidenote Video Copilot we've developed a free tool called effects console that allows you to apply effects to layers a little bit quicker so I'm going to delete this and using the effects console that you can download for free link in the description I'm going to hit control space and we're going to type in lightning and then I can hit enter and works just like that so you can use the effects preset windowsill but throughout the tutorial I'll probably be using effects console now first thing I'm going to do is go to the glow settings and turn the opacity down to zero I'm not a big fan of the glow and we're going to be creating our own glow a little bit later so let's focus on the core now let's turn the core radius up to maybe three make it a little bit thicker now remember we want the lightning to hit on the ground so what I can do is take the rectangle mask tool and just draw a shape around the bottom so if I turn this off you can actually see that I've isolated this bottom part and the cool thing is that the Lightning effect can actually interact with it so what we can do is go to the alpha obstacle and just turn this up a bit and now you can see that it's sort of touching the surface so we could bring this down here now I can hit control shift H and that will hide the controller's or the masks I can also just turn off the masks right here and I can move this round but if I move it too far one way it actually stretches off the layer so what I can do is go down to the expert settings and we have a setting called termination threshold so if we turn that down to about 5% and we can see that it actually cuts off those extra points and this way we have a perfect contact of our lightning now there's a few other cool settings here things like decay we can turn on decay main core and this is a cool setting for varying the thickness a bit we can also play around with the forking I like to play with the turbulence and turn it down a bit it becomes more straight and you turn it up it gets really complex so about right there maybe turn up a little bit of branching now another cool thing I like to do is add some animation to the core radius so we could keyframe it or we could add a quick expression so I'm just going to add a wiggle expression so I'll alt click on the stopwatch next to the core radius and we can come down here and we can type in and expression well do wiggle seven comma maybe three and what this says is that seven times a second we want to randomly change the value by a factor of three so this will just give the core if we look closely here just a little bit of variation now there's another setting here called the conductivity so as I move this sort of undulates the electrical current now what we can do is alt click on that stopwatch and add another expression so this time we'll use the time expression so time star four times and maybe two and this will just multiply time times two and slowly change it as it goes now there's a lot of detail here maybe I'll turn the forking down just a little bit maybe turn the decay down like I like for them to touch down on the ground so that looks nice now the other thing we could do is actually animate the direction now I should quickly point out if you play around with the types you can actually create some slightly different looks breaking kind of creates some interesting sort of patterns and there's some other interesting ones so play around with that we'll probably just stick to direction for now all right so this is looking pretty good maybe we could just add a little bit of movement to the direction set a keyframe and just move it a little bit and of course you can play around with the different settings as well the core drain will create some interesting variation and the fork variation as well so a lot of cool settings here that don't usually get explored enough all right so we've got this maybe we'll turn up the core radius just a bit all right so this is a great start now we can actually try to make it look good so what we can do is precompose the Lightning layer so choose layer pre-compose move all attributes we will call this lightening comp and hit OK now one thing we should probably do is if we double click on it we can open it up and let's set the core color to maybe a blue setting and we can hit tab and use the left arrow to go back or just go back to the calm alright so now let's go ahead and create that nice reflection now if we look back at the original example you can see that the reflection contacts and there's nice specular highlights and it's all procedural so it moves as the lightening moves all right so let's start by creating a specular reflection so what I'll do is I'll duplicate the layer control V or edit duplicate and then I'm going to solo that layer and then we're going to add the linear wipe effect now I can search for it or I can just type it in linear wipe and what this effect does is essentially just it's like a transition effect so let's just set this to 180 and what I want to do and if I hold down control as I move it will move slower is I want to just isolate the very bottom of this effect just like that and that way I've created a highlight of exactly where the lightning contacts the ground and now I'm going to add a blur so we're going to add a box blur which is the latest and greatest in the current version of After Effects and it's called the fast box blur and I'm going to set the blur to horizontal and increase the blur radius and then I'm going to add another fast box blur and by the way you can right click add to favorites and that way it shows up at the top and this time I'm going to do a vertical blur so we'll turn that up now here's the thing about a blur if I blur it too much it fades out entirely so what I want to do is add a solid composite right now the background is transparent so I'm going to add a solid composite so it's called solid composite add that set it to black and you can faintly see our glow or our blur right now but on top of that I'm going to add an exposure effect so type exposure hit enter and now with the exposure effect I can turn this up really bright and this is the nice thing about working in 32 bits per channel is that you have more flexibility and color accuracy so now if I turn up this vertical blur I can create a nice streak now if you use a solid composite you no longer have an alpha Channel so let's set this to additive and then turn on our lightening layer so now we can actually see what they look like together but what I want to do is cut off the top part of this blur and I can do that by adding another linear wipe so we could type in linear wipe set this to 180 again and bring the completion down and then turn up the feather just a little bit this way we give it a little bit of dimension we can check this out now and we've got something going on alright so this is a really good start now I want to start introducing a nice texture into this effect as well so if we go to the project I've got this grunge texture here and we could drop this into our scene maybe right on top of the lightening maybe we'll hit return and we'll call this spec now if we turn on our background plate or just unsolo all the layers things are looking pretty good but the only problem with this is that it looks too smooth so we want to add a little bit of texture so that's what this texture is for so if we turn this on maybe what we'll do is make it a 3d layer and we'll rotate it and just try to align it to the surface a bit we could hit s and scale it up now I could probably do a 3d camera track on the background but let's focus on the lightening stuff and let's just go time and freeze-frame and we'll just work off a still frame for now so I'll turn the texture on and I'm going to pre compose this I'm going to choose layer pre compose move all the attributes so we're just going to call this ground texture and hit OK now I'm going to toggle the switches and we're going to take this lightening specular layer and set this to luma matte now if you look closely the texture is now affecting that specular highlight all right so we've got the first one done now what we could do is maybe we'll color coat this so we'll just change this to red and the texture to green and that will be a little easier to see so what I'm going to do is select these two and choose edit duplicate and now I'll take this bottom copy and I want to blur it out even more so I'm going to go to the fast box blur the horizontal I'm going to increase that and I'm going to turn out the exposure and I'm going to increase the vertical as well so what we're doing is creating more of a diffused reflection area and the whole trick to this is really trying to recreate what happens in reality where you have a really bright spot with the specular highlights and then you have a more diffused softer area around it okay so we'll turn the background on so we can see this in context and this bottom one will call this diffuse and maybe turn it up a bit more and again we can soften the linear wipe at the end just to create a more three-dimensional look alright so this looks pretty good but we're also going to need a couple more we need a really hot spot for the contact so let's take the specular and texture and duplicate it ctrl D and we'll call this point and this is going to be just a little bit of a soft point around the contact so what we'll do is let's see we'll turn the vertical one down and turn the side one up a bit and then we can turn the exposure down this is sort of how we control it so very roughly we can see what's going on here and maybe turn the intensity down a bit and we can add a little bit of vertical but that looks nice and maybe even take the specular you can turn the opacity down on them now and that's a easy way to mix it in in addition to using the exposure effects so that's pretty good maybe we'll want to have like a little bit of a contact point so we could do even one more copy ctrl D and this time we'll keep the blur really really small then we can you know disable the background we can see this is a little bit better here and it may seem like a lot of work just for this little reflection but it really makes a big difference in the realism if you can actually have interaction now if you want to see more shiny could lower the horizontal blur and they'll kind of make it look a little shinier and even turn these two down so just sort of a matter of playing with the look and of course looking at real reference but obviously that looks really nice and here's the cool thing is if I lock this window open up the lightning any one of the lightning columns slide it over to the side here closing is I could go and I can change the color so we could change this to gold and everything will update come back over here close that alright so we'll turn our background back on you know we can even just grab just the Lightning comps now and that's why I like to use the color because you can right click on the color and choose select label color and it will just select all of those and I could even just move some of these things up so I could grab the lightening move this up even scale it down if I want to but I'm not bringing the texture I'm leaving the texture where it is so that it stays locked to the ground so that's pretty good all right so I think that looks pretty good for our reflection and as you saw earlier we can play around and tweak it in a little bit but now let's take a look at adding the glow to our lightning so let's take our lightning bring it up to the top here and let's set it to additive all right so now let's go ahead and start working on the glow effect for our lightning all right so here's how I like to work with my illuminated effects so what I'm going to do is add a solid composite effect and set this to black now it's additive so it shouldn't make a difference and now we're going to add a glow effect and what I'm going to do is turn the threshold down to zero and the intensity down extremely low and the radius to about 25 or 30 we want to be really really really low and then we're going to duplicate the glow and we'll increase the radius because we want to really have a nice soft glow so increase the radius about 100 or so and then one more time we'll hit control D and duplicate so now we've got three glow effects stacked on can increase that a bit now it's not making that big of a difference so what I'm going to do is add an exposure effect now and now I can increase the exposure effect and this will create a nicer result so even though it's a little bit slower to have so many stacked effects you can actually get a much softer looking glow now the other thing I could do is add a hue and saturation effect so we'll type in hue and saturation add that and before the exposure I could just turn the saturation down just a touch and of course I could probably just do this on the actual lightening effect as well so I could perhaps go inside of the lightening and maybe change the color to something else like maybe blue go back alright so this is a really great start to creating some nice lightening now I've also included this hotspot element that you can bring in and set this to additive and this is just kind of fun for creating source we could just use a curves adjustment to just dim it down or even colorize it and just link it up we could link it up to the position but kind of get the idea just kind of cool to see it come from a source now here's a couple of other cool things so again now that you see the glow and you start to understand the intensity of this lightening effect you might think about playing around with your specular highlight effect a bit and it doesn't seem as crazy to have such a large area of light we just fuse that a bit you know here's one more cool trick again it's all about the combination of effects but as an effect called turbulent displace and if you switch this to horizontal displacement kind of creates this side-to-side movement well what you can do is turn the size down to zero I think it's two and then the complexity up to say two or three and if you increase the amount you see that it creates like just a little bit of displacement just like a little bit of an unevenness as if the surface were you know a little rocky maybe like three and then you can play around with the the blur effects so but you might think yourself too you know you don't have time to render a turbulent displacement effect and I understand that too now the cool thing about this is that it's all procedural and it's all being generated from the same lightening layer so again we can change the color of the lightening and the effects is going to update on the other side it's all about working smarter and more efficiently you know I can remember in high school my parents would ask me to do some yard work and what I would do is I would pay the neighbor kid to beat me up and then my parents would see my face and you know so I got out of it at least until the next day and then I'm out there sweeping the porch with like a black eye and a sprained shoulder so I bought some time is what I'm saying all right so we've got this lightening effect here I've changed the color to more of like a gold color and now I want to show you a couple of different ways to make it look more realistic so for example if we select the main lightening effect here's a couple of cool things you can add to it one is it turbulent displace so just like before we could turn the size really low and look at this it just kind of creates kind of a random noise and we could maybe put that before the glow effect and just turn it down really low just just make it look energetic and this just gives it more texture now on top of that there's a really cool effect called vector blur and I think you guys know this effect it's been overused once or twice by me I'll admit but if we can just tone it down a little bit we might be onto something now we can turn the amount up to about three or four and maybe the ridge up a bit so here let's see if we turn this up high okay and this can be really cool you can put it after some of the effects so this is what you don't want I think I think if you just kind of give it a little bit and so that way you still have some hard edges but there's also some soft edges and just play around with the order if we put this before the exposure effect it's going to change entirely the look of it but it's also kind of cool if it's before so you have a little bit more hot spots around the Lightning so just keep it subtle and even the displacement could be put to after and these two effects actually can kind of work together so one of them takes the detail away and the other sort of adds it back now another thing I like to do is add a little bit of randomness to the brightness and flicker it and so we could actually add a wiggle expression into the exposure and perhaps wiggle maybe like seven comma four so I don't mind if it gets really bright like that I just want to make sure it gets bright really fast so let's set this to like nine and three so that's pretty good now one last cool tip for creating a more interactive reflection is to use our source material in our ground texture so let's take our street footage layer and copy edit copy and then jump inside of the texture and what we can do is just paste it in here edit paste control V and let's set the transfer mode to soft light and that way it just interacts with it a little bit and maybe we'll get rid of this and let's add an exposure effect and what we want to do is just softly introduce some of the brightness from this texture I'm kind of looking at the street crosswalk here and that's pretty good let's go back here and so now it actually changes it just a little bit so if we turn off the background you can actually see the way that it's interacting and what we might do is lock that open up the texture slide it over and just you know just play around with if we could add a little more contrast to it and this kind of makes sense because in some cases the white paint might be a little bit smoother than the ground and so you just create a little bit more variation which just helps make it look more realistic so small thing but anytime you can introduce your source material into the simulated effects it's going to look that much better now if you remember the effect from earlier where it looks almost like the lightening is moving in a direction sort of a reverse gravity effect here so there's actually a really interesting and simple way to do this so if we just go back to our example we created let's open up the Lightning comp now in order to get this to work what I'm going to do is hit ctrl R and bring down a guide and this will tell us where the cutoff point is for our reflection all right so to create this directional traveling Lightning effect what we're going to do is create a new solid and we're going to make it higher than the normal size so we're going to make it say 2048 and that's because we want it to move vertically so I'm going to add more to the height but if I wanted to move side-to-side I can make the width higher so hit OK ideal layer and we're going to add the Lightning effect turn the glow settings down to zero and I'm going to move the position of the layer so I'll hit P set a keyframe for the position I'm also going to set a keyframe for the origin and the direction and the idea here is I'll move this up and then I'll take these two points will move this one here and I'll move this point just somewhere where we can track so maybe about right there in between these two points now because we want this to interact with an alpha Channel I'm also going to create a mask so we'll create a mask right at the same point as our other one and we'll go to the alpha obstacle crank that up that looks good and I'm also going to hit M for the mask path and set a keyframe okay so now if I select the layer hit you I should have four keyframes so I have the path for the mask the origin and direction and the position of the layer so what I'm going to do is first let's set the mask down to none just so we can see the size of the layer otherwise it hides that so if we just turn it off we could see it will move forward and I'm going to move the layer down and what we need to do is offset these values back up so let's move this back up to where it was this up move the mask back up to our cutoff point about there and then we'll turn the mask back on so now if we look at this we've created a traveling Lightning effect now it might be a little hard to see so I'll just extend the length of the comp and then just shift these keyframes over and let's take a look so you can actually see it's moving down now I should probably lock that position right there so let's so the cool thing is that there is a little bit of movement but just not too much you get a feel for the direction of the lightning now we could change the type some of these other ones like strike are a little bit more stable in the way that they move we could turn the turbulence down all the same settings will work and create some different interesting results we can still play around with the direction as well so we could have it sort of shifting from side to side but the start point is still going to stay the same now if you wanted to create this coming out of somebody's hand you could create a horizontal layer and pretty much do the same thing so check this out we'll set the size up to like 4 turn the that's good and then also the color to like I don't know blue and then let's take a look so maybe we just darkened down the color of it now we don't have to change all of our look settings all right so now let's take a look at what looks like animating into the ground so pretty cool we can select the keyframes and then go up the animation keyframe assistant reverse keyframes and now it will play the other direction so sort of sucking out of the ground execute ah does you know yeah so now at this point and again it's nice because all of these parameters are can be controlled now through just opacity so you can tweak the look to kind of go with the color that you've chosen and alright so there you have it directional lightning alright so for this next section we're going to take a look at creating the subsurface cloud effect using a lot of really cool tricks so the idea is that there's a light source that exists behind the clouds and it's creating this sort of illuminance effect so what we're going to do is take this plane smoke footage drop it into a new comp and this is just very plain footage just to give it a little bit of a texture let's first create our light source so we'll create a new solid and we'll call this light it okay and we're going to add the lightening effect one more time at least one more time and we'll set the opacity of the glow down to zero now for this one I'm going to try the Omni lightening and this just kind of creates a more sort of sporadic moving lightening so I think that's kind of cool let's animate the conductivity state and just move it around so I just set a keyframe hit you we can see those two keyframes so just kind of give a little movement I'm also going to go to the core settings and add a wiggle expression to the core radius so wiggle I don't know like eight and six and so what that's going to do is kind of have it blink on and off right turn the turbulence down so we decay and yeah that's that's what we're trying to do we just want to have it kind of flickering and flashing a bit might even turn the core radius down and that way it'll turn off more often cool so let's set the core color to say a gold color and let's add a solid composite so solid composite set that to black all right so that's working pretty well now I want to go ahead and pre compose this effect so I'll choose layer pre compose just call this light comp and hit OK now we're going to add a few effects on top of this so we're going to add a fast box blur now this is kind of the reverse of what we just did so actually want to start out with a really wide blur now it fades out so again we'll boost that within exposure effect okay now I want to back in some of the detail right so what I'll do is maybe lower this down nice soft glow is I'll do a CC composite on top of this right so effect Channel CC composite set this to additive right so we're sort of putting it back on top and then I'm going to add another box blur this one also pretty soft like you see we're sort of doing an inverse and I'm also going to take I'll just add these I'll do another exposure effect and then I'm going to do another CC composite so do channel composite will set this to add and we'll add one more box blur there we go so the idea is to kind of create a very diffused looking light source unlike the previous sort of scenario so I'm just playing around with the exposure effects so something like that okay all right so this is our lighting effect that we're going to see deep within the clouds so what I'll do is come over here to the project and I want to create a mask for the clouds so what we have is this smoke sprite so bring this out and what I can do is duplicate it set it to lighten and I can move it off and so it kind of blends with it it doesn't make it brighter and it doesn't make it darker just sort of blends with it nicely and I can rotate this hit the W key rotate it scale it up or down and duplicate it again and so we're just going to sort of try to move these pieces around randomly until we fill the entire screen now one thing to note is I want to try to keep some pockets of a dark area and that way there's bits of sort of occlusion for the light so let's just distribute this around a bit and so we do want little areas of dark pockets right okay so now we're going to take all of these smoke elements hold down shift will select them all and we'll pre-compose these now I'm going to go inside here and I'm going to create an adjustment layer and here we'll add a curves adjustment try that okay so we'll go back now we've got this texture we should probably name this let's name this a smoke mask so what we want to do is we want to occlude parts of the light with this texture so we'll take this light comp and we'll use the set mat effect and this allows us to select a texture in this case the smoke texture and we're going to change the mat and we'll change the mat from alpha to luminance so now it looks something like that let's click invert and now let's set this layer to additive so now if we look at this we're starting to get a feel for that sort of inverted look now let's play with the Alpha channel a bit more let's add a curves adjustment switch over to the alpha Channel and maybe we'll add a solid composite on top of this channel solid composite we'll make it black and now we can color correct it with a curves adjustment so that just makes it a little easier to color correct it or maybe instead of curves we just do an exposure effect sometimes it's easier to work with exposure when you're dealing with light so that's pretty nice I can see a little bit too crisp of an edge and I might soften that just a bit but I like the sort of randomness of it and now we could do a curves adjustment on top of everything and just give it a little bit of gamma just a little bit more contrast of course we could add a glow effect on top of this and that will create an even more sort of light scattering type of effect so pretty cool type of effect and you know we have another tutorial for doing like subsurface skin uses some of the same principles but this idea of visualizing the negative space really helps to sell the depth of a shot and of course we can now go into the source material for this and potentially you know make some changes to this maybe fill in some of the gaps and things like that so it feels a little bit more flush together the other thing is if you change the opacity you could create a few different depths so a lower opacity will just create less pockets and then another interesting thing that we could do is we could take all the layers here go to the beginning hit our set a keyframe for the rotation go to the end and just add a little bit of rotation then and now if we watch this the clouds will almost look like they have a little bit of movement to them and we could of course add other things like turbulent displacement but I think we've used that enough today yeah not too bad see all that crazy glow exposure adjustment doesn't seem so crazy now all right and again in the light comp I could duplicate this and I could offset the conductivity so it's random set it to add this is a mini tutorial so sorry for the sidetrack but I could set this to blue and then if I go back you've got the next hot template file available now for 1995 I'm just kidding all right so there's obviously way too much information in this one tutorial so let's go ahead and add a little bit more we're going to create a new solid and we're going to call this e 3d so we're going to open up element and this is a third-party plugin but what I want to show you is how you can use lightning to interact with it so whether you have a logo or something like that this is going to be a really cool technique for getting that interactive lightning so let's create some text you think I'd have like a preset ready but here we are alright I'm going to create a text layer will go to turn that off on the element 3d layer will load up a custom text element of the Video Copilot and then we'll launch the scene setup alright so we're going to create some quick 3d text going to click the extrude button and that's going to load the custom path that we just selected of the logo and we'll jump over here to the pro shaders metal and let's just throw one out here and sometimes people ask like what is element 3d for and well it's for stuff like this like creating really cool fast text so let's just click on the material and we can play with the extrusion settings here and one thing I like to do is double up the extrusion and then click on the second one expand the edges increase the extrusion and then use like like a darker metal color on it like that now I could go see alright that's pretty good another thing you could do is select a model go to the UV settings and you can increase the repeat so if you do like two by two it just will increase the detail now this top one I think that's a little bit too reflective I'll just do something a little bit more diffuse and you can also select the materials and edit them so I can make it more diffused by scrolling down turning the glossiness down it looks pretty good now I'm going to load up a different environment map maybe just like an outside looking one that looks pretty good so back to this material let's turn the reflectivity down a bit to and I'll just kind of make it a bit darker so there we go classic metal text logo hit okay there it is clean up some of the edges a bit by turning on the enhanced multi sampling and let's create a camera so to layer new camera look at thirty five-millimeter and then we'll switch to the camera and move forward now another thing I'm going to do is turn on the ambient occlusion so I'll table that switch it to raytrace and that looks pretty nice now to give it kind of a flashy look I'm going to create a couple of lights maybe point lights and we'll do like oldest dude some orangish color lines and we'll stick them over here so half rez that's pretty good and we want these to sort of be flashing kind of on and off so we could go to the intensity alt click on the stopwatch and we'll add an expression wiggle if you like six and like four hundred like a lot and then we just duplicate it a few times I mean not too many times but but anyway you get the idea you're basically just trying to create a little bit of interactive lighting with the scene I like to play around with the environment this is like a big thing for element is just being able to shift the reflection to sort of match what you're working on it kind of what you're going for so and you can also like animate it so like slowly animate the reflection something like that alright so now here's a really important sort of workflow tip when you're working with rendered layers and that's essentially to select the things that make up that element title and pre-compose them and that way After Effects will manage the rendering of it more and once it's rendered you won't have to keep re rendering it and particularly for effects like lightning or I'm going to get rid of some of this blue I have to it's too blue so now if I want to add some interactive lightening what I can do now is create a new solid call this lightening and we'll add the advanced lightening effect so I think I've shown you good ways to create the glow and stuff so let's talk about how to get it to interact so what you want to do is we want to set the channel for the Alpha from this title so what we can do is choose set matte and we can select the 3d title and what that does is takes the Alpha Channel from the title and replaces it in the solid and then of course the advanced lightening effect will interact with the Alpha Channel so we could turn the Alpha obstacle up and now you're getting a nice little bit of movement now the other interesting thing is that this effect also will calculate if the Alpha Channel is blurred so check this out if we add a channel blur put that above the lightening and just add a little bit of blurriness you see how the lightening sort of diffuses in a very cool way so let's say we set the lightning from directional to a two-way strike and that way we have two points to control maybe we set this to a gold color just imagine the beautiful glow that we've created previously but now we have a great thing where we can animate this across the logo and we have controls over sort of the softness of it and and now it's going to animate no matter what so here's another kind of example like let's say we want to animate the characters and do something fun with it we could go to the multi object right so for every group there's a multi object setting and what this does is sort of breaks every piece down to an individual piece so we can rotate the Y so a lot of settings but once you kind of get the hang of it you could just do like a cool slick keyframe that brings the characters kind of into place or even like that just place I see like a wot X displays nice okay let me go back and because it's the Alpha Channel it's going to stay up to date so all we have to do is animate the origin in the direction in an interesting way which is not always obvious but there's a lot of fun to be had with this I think this is something that I haven't even really explored enough but whether it's the Alpha obstacle but then playing around with the you know the type of forking and stuff there's just there's a lot of really cool capabilities with this plugin so I know this doesn't look amazing but you kind of get the idea of just essentially having it feel like it interacts and that just adds so much now in this case I just put a copy behind the logo just to give it a little bit more depth and feel like it's interacting in the same theme so sometimes that's a cool trick if you want something to feel like it's wrapped around it have stuff that renders behind it as well alright so obviously there's a lot of different things that we can do in different directions that we can take it and that is where I will leave it for you guys to take some of these different ideas and see what you come up with I'd love to see some of the different stuff if you guys want to send it to me tweet it to me I always love to see what people are doing with some of these techniques and as always combine them with other tutorials with other ideas with your own ideas and let's keep this thing going let's not break the circuit alright everyone thanks so much for watching hopefully learn some cool techniques and as always be sure to check us out on Video Copilot dotnet and Instagram Twitter all that great stuff hi I'm Andrew Kramer and we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 1,446,625

Rating: 4.9745584 out of 5

Keywords: Lightning, After Effects Tutorials, No Plug-ins, Electro

Id: yxncS9gVDYI

Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017