After Effects 3D Camera Tracker Car Explosion Tutorial | ActionVFX

hey guys and welcome to an action-packed Destruction tutorial using Adobe After Effects so last week we were out lovely sunny day just cruising along when suddenly this oh no we weren't the ones in the car yeah I don't know any good in this tutorial I want to show you how to trade a large scale rocket or meteor impact explosion effect and blow up a car in the process now this tutorial is absolutely sponsored by action via X I actually reached out to the team to ask if they would let me use some of the epic action stock footage for this tutorial and they kindly said yes and allowed me to give away some smaller free versions of these epic assets for you guys to follow along with the tutorial and just to keep I really enjoy using this stuff extra the effects in my opinion offer some of the highest quality action stock footage that you can find on the market anything from explosions to burning debris ground cracks smoke fog water splashes blood and go and so much more they also have a bunch of free stuff on their website that is absolutely worth grabbing so go and check them out of action VFX comm and if you do decide to make a purchase in the end you can also use my custom coupon code surfaced studio in one word - not 10% off that final price now this is going to be an intermediate level tutorial and that will assume that you are quite comfortable using Adobe After Effects and that you know how to use this 3d camera tracker and work in 3d if he new to all of that if you haven't done that before go and check out some of the links I'm going to drop it down in the video description to something you know - Charles to check out first and then come back here but now before this gets all stale and boring let's jump right into the tutorial welcome to the exciting world of Adobe After Effects before we dive into the actual tutorial let's quickly talk about the effect that we will be creating it's this effect right here of a car driving along the route then a rocket comes shooting out from the bottom hits the car and it goes up in a massive amount of smoke fire and debris now for this tutorial we will not be creating a full-blown we the fluid smoke fire physics simulation which you could be doing in Houdini or blender if you know what you're doing it would most likely look better than what we've created here but also this would not be a tutorial this would be a full-blown course and this is going to be a long one to begin with so instead we are actually going to composite a whole bunch of different stock footage elements together to create this effect and track them into the 3d space of this scene now these smoke elements here at the bottom as well as this really cool-looking gas fire explosion where the car blows up into this fireball are provided by action VFX and they've allowed me to provide some smaller version files for you guys to download and follow along the debris over on the right hand side that you can see flying away here I've created in blender and I've just used some basic physics to create some destruction elements that are being flung over to the right-hand side again links to some relevant to Charles are down in the video description then I've also created this rocket trail here using trapcode particular which is a particle plugin for Doby after-effects again I'm not going to go into too much depth instead of pre-rendered this out so we're just going to composite that in and finally I've also provided a layer here for this flare that I've created using optical flares from Video Copilot again I've pre rendered this out so we don't have to take too much into that in this video we're really just going to focus on the compositing of how to put all of these elements together everything that you need to follow along will be available for you to download from our website so simply go to surfaced studio com4 slash downloads and you will be able to grab all of these files to download and follow along but now I really feel like I talked for long enough let's actually get started so to get started let's drag this car remove dot mp4 and to drag this clip onto a new composition icon to start a new composition now this clip is our base footage which is the car driving along the road and then it just vanishes now there's no explosion there's no rocket and nothing composited in yet and I've actually painted this car out using the silhouette paint plugin from Boris effects so I come to us remove this object from the rest of the shot because otherwise you would see the car driving down this road and that worked really well I'm a big fan of silhouette paint I've started tracing some tutorials for that again links to that in the video description but so if essentially just made advantage at the point where I want that explosion to start but before we can add an into the scene we need to track the movement off the camera and for that let's apply the 3d camera tracker to our card remove clip' in the effect settings I'm also going to expand the Advanced tab and enable detailed analysis and let's let this run through cool and that's done by the way if you wonder what that little pop-up was that I used to select this 3d camera tracking effect this is FX console from Video Copilot a free plugin for Doby after effects it just makes it easy to find your effects you can also just go into your effects and presets panel but I just like using FX console again - toril - that down in the video description so let's go to the 3d camera tracker our average error is point three one pixels which is actually pretty good so let's come forward and let's say we wanted to play something on the ground right here so let's just click and drag around a couple of points just over where I'd want that smoke for the explosion to sit and hmm it looks a cage but it kind of looks distorted and the reason for that is that for some reason a 3d camera tracker isn't great at figuring out of the field of view or the focal length of that camera I've used a medic pro to shoot this clip so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to come to the 3d camera tracker and the shot type I'm going to change this from fixed angle of view which makes the 3d camera track I try to figure this out automatically or to change that to specify angle of view and you can see that After Effects actually did used a horizontal angle of view of 115 point one two six eight but I actually know that the Maverick Pro has a horizontal angle of view of seventy eight point eight so let's punch this number in After Effects is going to resolve the camera and now let's do the same thing that select like a couple of points just over the flat surface off of the road and that actually looks a whole lot better like that target seems to sit on the ground a whole lot better so let's right-click create a solid and a camera I'm just gonna rename this tracking solid to ground plane and also going to lower the opacity to maybe around eighty or so percent and let's rewind to check out just make sure that this tracking is solid and that seems to sit in the shot really nicely yep I'd say that is a pretty good ground plane tracked into the shot and now we can start actually adding all of these stock footage elements to create the actual car explosion effect now you may have noticed that when I drag this car remove mp4 into my composition it already has a marker here which is the exact spot at which that car vanishes if this marker wasn't there so if I delete this mark and you don't have this marker you can just select the clip and press star on your keyboard to place that marker there just so that you know exactly where all of these stock footage elements need to be placed and let's start adding that explosion element let's come back to the project and the file we're going to be using comes from action VFX it's called gas explosion to underscore zero nine eight five now this is a 720p version you can get up to 4k super high resolution versions from their website so go and check them out if you like to now I can't just drag it in actually to make sure that I'm creating a 3d plane that sits in the 3d space on the road exactly where the skies so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select the ground plane and duplicate it press R and then I'm going to bump the X rotation up to exactly 90 so that I know that this plane is exactly perpendicular to the ground plane then with the ground plane to select it hold down alt or option on your keyboard and drag that gas explosion to element directly on it to replace the contents of this layer so that's now a gas explosion and if i zoom in you can actually see the intersection of this layer with the ground plane and this is why I like to have this ground plane there maybe let's make this a little bit more transparent but you can see exactly where that intersection line is and this gives you a good indicator for how to place your stock for this element in the 3d space let's actually rename this layer to explosion and let's move it forward and you can see it actually starts way below the ground summits you're going to drag it up in 3d space and again you can see exactly where it's coming out on that 3d plane let's actually go frame back to see where that car is so that's where the car so I'm actually going to move it forward a little bit cuz I actually kind of want the explosion to happen right where that guy is so that's kind of where I want the explosion to start but obviously I only want the explosion to start when the car vanishes and I might actually start it maybe there let's trim it him so right there maybe I'll move it over to the left just a little bit more and down so that's exactly where I want that Lauzon to kind of hit let's zoom out for one just a little bit and play this back yeah cool that's looking good and you can see that that explosion is now properly tracked into the 3d space of our scene now let's add some of those dust elements I'm going to select my explosion layer because it's already well positioned in the 3d space ctrl T to duplicate that and now I'm going to hold down alt or option and grab the dust wave one front layer and drag that onto my explosion to later to replace it against it's way too high so again I'm going to just drag it down and again I'm just going to watch for where it starts intersecting with that ground plane right there now I don't want this it exactly where the explosion sits so I'm going to pull it forward just a little bit and then again move it up so kind of sits on top of the ground but just in front of that explosion maybe just a little bit more I'm good to pump up the opacity on my ground again just a little bit just second see that intersection exactly where it happens so let's place the smoke right there and again let's just adjust the time so that this smoke starts exactly in the right spot at the right time so then let's trim that in so that's where I'm going to have my smoke come out maybe I'll move it forward just a tad yep that's looking pretty cool and again let's lower the opacity on the floor a little bit and I like to play with this a little bit just to make it easy to composite these things in so I think that looks pretty cool now one of the cool things with a lot of the stock footage elements from extra VFX is that they come with many different variants so right now we've composited in this dust way for front part but there's actually a better limit as well so the front kind of looks like this but there's a separate back element which is just the backside of that explosion as well as the shadow itself so this is just a shadow of the explosion so you can composite things in between these elements so let's come back to our composition and I'm going to actually rename this explosion to you to dust wave front let's duplicate it let's rename this one to dust wave back and with that select that alt or option held down let's grab the dust wave one back element and place that right there to replace it and this layer now I'm going to push this back in 3d space because I actually want this to sit so this is where the explosion sits I actually want the second dust five elements to sit behind the explosion so right there no matter if you bring the front in just a little bit more just so they're a bit closer towards where that explosion element happens but then the explosion sits between the two dust waves yeah I think that looks pretty good what am I do I might actually bring the explosion up a little bit because I'm finding that it's showing beneath this smoke elements so maybe there yep that looks pretty cool now the other thing is well actually I'm just noticing on the explosion layer that's Presti too real the opacity because we duplicated the ground plane it's a bit transparent so let's pump that back up to a hundred same with the front dust wave and same with it back and dust wave so the only thing that semi-transparent is the ground and everything looks a whole lot more intense let's rewind so you back out a little bit and let's play this back and that looks pretty cool next let's add a bit of a shadow underneath this dust wave and for that I'm going to duplicate this dust wave front layer let's call this dust wave shadow I'm going to place it underneath the front though that doesn't really matter because I'm positioning these layers in 3d space with that layer selected hold down alt or option and let's grab this dust wave one shadow file and replace that content with it you can see that just edit this shadow underneath it I'm just going to place it underneath and so over a little bit to the left hand side because if you look at where the shadow falls so if I hide the ground actually let me make the layer window a little bit bigger you can see that the sun's over to the right hand side so most all the shadow falls towards the bottom left I want to do the same with the shadow for the dust wave just a little bit towards the bottom left here let's zoom out let's rewind and play this back cool that's giving us a pretty nice base now there's still a lot to do in terms of color correction blending it all together I'm going to get back to that in a little bit our first one add all of the layers that I wanted then I'm going to start blending them together so the next thing well if a rocket hits this car there probably is a little bit of debris flying away for that I've created two layers one called debris beauty me zoom out and I created this in blender using some car parts that have placed here and then I added some physics to throw these pieces over to the right-hand side so this is essentially just bits and pieces of car flying over to the right-hand side there's also a bit of a shadow that gets created on the ground so if we get a bit of that shadowing happening as if the Sun was over on the right-hand side here and shining down so that that composites into our shot a little bit I made sure that that kind of matches the scene I wanted to composite this into you then the other thing I have as well I have this debris underscore mist pass which is this grayscale image where the further away elements are from the camera the brighter they are so things close to the camera are darker and bright is further away this layer used as a track mat actually allows us to control which pieces are in front of other layers and which pieces are further away in this z-depth compositing as it's caught because it's the depth from the distance of the camera in that defines the color actually allows you to very easily composite 3d elements 3d rendered pieces with 2d footage which is what we are going to do but if that didn't quite make sense just hang on for a second so let's come back to our composition let's come back to where the explosion happens I want to go to do is I'm going to duplicate this explosion layer and let's rename this one to car debris back so that's going to be all the debris pieces that are coming from behind this explosion let's grab the debris beauty pass and in alt/option health let's replace this car debris back layer and yeah that is totally misaligned let me rename the ground plane just I can see where I'm placing this I'm actually also going to scale this down a fair bit this is way too big and now it might be sometimes difficult to figure out well where does this layer now exactly intersect with the ground plane for that one thing I like to do with this layer selected let's apply an effect called solid composite onto it that is going to add a solid composited color and you can now see exactly where that's intersecting it's just making it easy to place this layer exactly where it should be let's just move it over to the right-hand side a little bit again let's come to the point where it should actually appear this is the car at this point I want that layer to appear I am just going to kind of time it up and move it up a little bit I'm able to make it a bit smaller and again this is all about matching this up with what you want that scene to look like and again I'm just making sure that you know it sits right on the ground which is the middle of the road here let's disable the solid composite again let's zoom back out in just a little bit and let's play this back cool it's actually looking pretty good now I might actually make it just a little bit bigger again reenable this solid composite because we are pushing below the ground and move it over just a little bit more cool and that is actually looking pretty good now you may notice there's actually two small pieces flying off to the side there's one here over on the left-hand side this little piece here that's kind of just vanishing because it hits the side off the layer and I don't want it to disappear just suddenly so what I'm going to do is actually going to grab a mask with that car debris back layer selected just draw one around that particular corner set the blend mode to subtract and let's just give the mask a little bit of feathering so what's going to happen is now this P is still going to vanish but it's just kind of fade out a little bit more gently it just won't be quite as noticeable and I've noticed the same over here on the right hand side with this big piece so if I follow the movement of that piece right here is just vanish this because that's where that layer ends so again we're going to draw a mask on that side of the layer set that to subtract and give that a fair bit of feathering so that this P is kind of it kind of does vanish it still but you can see it's kind of fading out a little bit and because most of the focus off the audience will most likely be this big explosion in the middle of the shot it shouldn't be too noticeable but I just wanted to fix those two things up now we call this car debris back right now it is in front of the explosion so let's grab this layer and let's actually move it back so it's just behind the explosion so you'll have all of the pieces coming out behind that explosion so right there but if I disable the dust elements you can see it's actually still casting a shadow it's still casting this shadow here on the front and I actually want don't work these elements on the front I just want the ones in the back and for that we're going to be using the mist path so let's return to the project I'm actually going to temporarily also disable the explosion itself now let's duplicate this card back laya let's call this one Qadri back Matt and I'm actually going to parent it to this car debris back layer just so that if I move one the other one will move as well and this car did bury back layer selected alt and option and it's replaces with this debris missed layer which is this grayscale image that we're going to be using as a track mat to hide certain parts of this layer with this car debris back layer selected let's apply an extract effect and now because this missed layer or this depth layer represents the depth of the elements from the camera if I wanna start trimming in from the dark areas it's going to start trimming in from what's closest to the camera so I can actually now start trimming out elements that are close to the camera now this might not seem like much but if you selected the car debris back layer which sits underneath the back mat set the track map from num to alpha mat and now reselect the car debris back mat and now let's adjust this extract effect and you can see that you can actually reveal or hide pieces out of this layer based on how far they are away from the camera now you get a bit of a rim because the layer isn't perfectly clean but what I want to do someone trim it in just so that some of these shadows here at the bottom are vanished we're going to place another layer in front of that anyway I'm going to also make this just a little bit softer but essentially what I'm doing is I'm actually just kind of hiding soft that shadow because I just want these back elements that then let's rename the explosion as well as the dust wave elements that really just sits behind those elements so now it kind of looks like it's really just coming from the back and that shadow no longer falls down on the bottom here so that's the first part now let's let cat debris back and category back Matt ctrl or command + D to duplicate them I'm going to rename these funds to car degree front and car debris front Matt let's just make sure that on the card your brief front mat that is actually parented to the car debris front and off the back depending on which version of artifacts you have some of them are smarter than others so let's select car debris front let's pull this forward a little bit so I'm actually going to pull this in front of the explosion but behind this dust wave element and on this car debris front mat I should adjust this extract effect because I actually do want that shadow because I do still want the shadow to fall now it's not yet falling on the dust wave and we're going to fix that up in just a little bit as well now if you move the Caddy blue front layer forward more you do get those shadows on the smoke as well which we're going to add as well because it doesn't quite look realistic if you have those pieces over there smoke I want that to be a bit softer so we're going to fix that in a little bit make sure that front layer kind of sits in front of the explosion just a little bit but behind this smoke and you can see the shadow down there let's rewind again let's check this out now that is pretty cool but the front looks a bit busy so now on this front mat what I can do is I can actually use this extract effect to start cutting in from the back so I'm going to kind of hide some of these elements that are further away from the camera and if i zoom in a little bit more and again remember this front Matt is this Mizpah here so we're going to kind of trim in from the back and with that layer to select it and use this a track Matt you can kind of you know like hide the back elements that should kind of be sitting in the flames still so I'm going to kind of cut that in a little bit and again softened that out a little bit so it kind of makes it look more like these elements of the car actually kind of coming out of the flames so it's not just you know sitting right on top and again this is kind of how you composite 3d with 2d with these depth passes so now ya see that looks much more like those car pieces are actually in the fire they're kind of just coming out of that which looks much more realistic let's remind to play this back yeah cool I think this looks a whole lot better next I do still want some shadow on this smokey because these copies is flying in the air would cast a bit of a shadow on this dust wave and for that I'm going to just select the car debris front layer duplicate that I'm not going to duplicate the matte let's call this car debris dust shadow let's clear the track matte on that and let's pull this forward because this shadow now I actually want on this dust wave but I want to confine the shadow to only the dust wave itself for that quite easily let's duplicate the dust wave front element and pull that on top of the car debris dust shadow and I'm going to call that car debris dust shadow mat and out on the car debris dust shadow I can set this to alpha Matt and now the shadow here this shadow element is actually just a shadow just where it overlaps with a smoke cloud now it looks way too sharp and crisp so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to apply a fast box blur effect to this dust shadow and bring this up just a little bit to maybe two so that you're getting these soft shadows essentially it looks like they're stuffed pieces of car shadows coming out of that dust cloud and it just adds that detail into that explosion let's zoom out a little bit again rewind and play this back cool that looks pretty good now I might make them a little bit softer maybe I'll give it a 5 4 let's check this out yeah I think it's just enough to give that feeling of their shadows over that smoke as well and everything is a bit better integrated yep I think that's coming along pretty well now talking about shadows because the Sun is actually pretty harsh you can see some harsh shadows here for the sign and this power pole and the smoke cloud would have a pretty harsh shadow down here so with that explosion actually in this smokey you would expect a big smoke shadow right here and we're going to get to that in just a moment but first what I want to do is I actually want to color correct these things and composite them so that we can then easily add things on top of them so let's start with this dust wave here it's a bit too contrasty it's a bit too sharp it's a bit too too dark as well so let's select the dust wave front layer let's apply a curves effect to it let me just zoom in a little bit and I'm going to bring up at the bottom of this curve the black point let's push that up a little bit just kind of soften the darks a little bit because it shouldn't be quite so dark it looks a little bit better let's come into the red Channel I'm going to push in just a little bit of red just a little bit of green I'm just thinking of you know if you had the Sun reflecting of all these fields in the Sun is a bit on the warm side so you know I just want a little bit of warmth in that color the set fixed and a little bit nicer the other thing as well it's actually pretty detailed it's pretty sharp and some of the footage looks a little blurry and grainy so let's apply a fast box blur effect onto that as well and I don't even want the blurriness to be one even one is already too much so you may have to try maybe point one still a little bit 0.05 just a little bit and it just blends it just a little bit better into this shot next let's apply a noise effect and again with anything where you're compositing in the stock footage or 3d into real footage you want to add a bit of noise because there's you lose a bit of grain and noise in the actual footage again you don't want to go totally overboard it should be fairly subtle so maybe four maybe five percent of noise just it looks a little bit more matchy with the rest of that stock footage so those are three effects curves fast box blur and noise will select all of these copy them copy them to the back element as well it fits in so much better already I'm going to do the same thing with the explosion and maybe I'll just copy these three onto the explosion as well just to get us started but I'm finding that it's that's a bit too wide so I'm going to bring the curves effect back in a little bit so I just want a little bit of that it yeah it's it instantly if I turn these three effects off it looks pretty harsh and out of place the moment I turn these three on now maybe again just a little bit too bright Suns gonna bring it down just a little bit but that looks a whole lot better already now the debris still stands out like a sore thumb so let's select the car debris front first because that's the main pieces that we see for that let's apply a curves effect and I'm just going to brighten this up like quite a lot like I actually want this to be almost lit I'm also going to give it a little bit of red and a little bit of green and the other thing as well if you look at the car the cars kind of bluish right so maybe what I'll do is with this front piece here I'm actually going to add a fair bit of blue as well as it's still kind of got a bit of that blue tint maybe I'll bring the red down after all just it's a bit more bluish and again make it a little bit brighter just it feels more spools actually that car like that specific car that we ended up blowing up and again it's a little bit too sharp so again let's get our fast box blur one is already too much so maybe point one again just that little bit and again because this is actually a 3d rendered element now there is a bit of noise in it already but again let's just add a little bit of noise to that and again let's not overdo it may be just four should do let's zoom out that looks good let's grab the curves fast box blur and a noise effect that we've applied to our car debris front copy and paste them onto the car debris back elements now we don't really need to copy them onto our car debris dust shadow because that is really just this blurred out shadow element over the smoke lot but if we now rewind it zoom out a little bit and let's play this back cool that looks so much better than before just by doing a little bit of color correction and kind of merging all of that together now I actually want to pre compose most of my explosion stuff but I do want to make sure that it stays in the 3d space in newer versions of Adobe After Effects you have this collapse transformations switch but I don't actually want to do that actually on a composite things on top of this explosion and make sure that they're not interacting with in the 3d space so instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate the 3d camera tracker let's bring that up above the ground plane select everything except the ground plane the 3d camera tracker and the car remove at the bottom ctrl shift or command shift and C to pre compose that let's call this one explosion comp move all attributes into the new composition hit OK and assuming that you included a copy of the 3d camera that should still look exactly the way it used to and now let's deal with the most obvious issues the big shadow missing for this large dust wave as well as for the explosion itself for that I'm going to reselect the ground plane let's be in a belittling 8 it let's call this one explosion shadow let's come back into our project file and again with that layer selected hold on alt option grab the gas explosion to clip and let's drag that on there to replace it if you rotate this foot so that's the actual explosion and now make your toes rotate it into place and where I think that shadow should sit let's just go forward a little bit because I think it's only ods mainly when this dust cloud here this big black smoke sits again I'm going to slide this on the ground kind of in position or where I think that smoke should sit again this doesn't need to be perfectly correct let's just come back a little bit let's just position that explosion kind of right there I'm also actually going to make it just a little bit bigger because again if the Sun was shining down there the shadow would probably be a little bit bigger than the element itself so that looks alright let's apply a hue and saturation effect to this layer I'm going to bring down the master saturation to nothing and then the blend mode of this layer I'm going to change from normal over to multiply it's hard to grout playing for just a second so that's kind of our shadow right there it's a little bit too crisp a little bit to shouts again fast box blur is our friend let's bring up the blur radius to maybe yeah maybe around 10 or so maybe a little bit less actually I don't want them to be just a little bit defined so maybe I'll go with 4t really the opacity and let's bring the opacity down to maybe around 45 actually what I might do is while this is really bright this is actually not too bad so then you can see the shadow wafting off to the left side right there and actually think that works pretty well let's repeat the process for that dust cloud so again we're going to hide the explosion shadow review my ground plane duplicate that let's rename this one to dust wave shadow come into our project let's go to select the dust wave one front element and again just replace that layer let's move to layer forward again let's come to the place where the explosion starts and just make sure that the dust wave layers are kind of lined up the way they should be so timing wise that actually looks alright now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to flip this 180 degrees over I'm going to make it just a little bit bigger I could drag it into position let's assume in a little bit see if that's it's alright maybe over to the left just a little bit more because again I want the shadow to fall towards the left side I think that's not looking too bad maybe over just a little bit more with the last letter let's change the blend mode over to multiply hide the ground plane so that's kind of going to be our base shadow all that smoke cloud right there you'll move it or to the right hand side just a little bit and again just a little bit too sharp so let's apply the fast box blur effect to that and bring that up to maybe around 2 or so because I want to keep that actually pretty sharp because the dust wave is pretty close to the ground so the shadow wouldn't be all that blurred out let's just lower the opacity on that again to maybe around 50 ish is actually alright let's grab the explosion shadow and the dust wave shadow and drag that on top of the explosion comp so that's going to composite on top and that's going to give a bit of a dark shadow down here which you know it's actually not a bad idea because you're getting that light falling onto the dust wave I just don't like that it's a bit of a straight edge line so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to add just a little bit of a mask to this top end is that the storm on that straight line there let's expand the mask properties set that to subtract and let's just feather that out a little bit it just looks a little bit nicer let's expand that mask a little bit just so that you don't get that harsh edge right there so let's remind let's rename the explosion shadow as well let's play this back cool and I think that actually looks pretty good now I don't like that there's a bit of a bright spot here so I might move this shadow in a little bit more just so that that closes up you don't get that gap over on the right hand side here let's check that out yeah see that's much nicer that's actually pretty cool you can even see that explosion she had all kind of falling over that dust cloud because we have composited all of those layers together into this explosion Kong and we're not using collapse transformations if you had collapse transformations on them these layers depending on their position in 3d space with interact with everything in here but I want those shadows to sit on top which is why I've precomposed all of my explosion elements together first the next thing I want to do is I want to add some glow to this explosion itself now Adobe After Effects has an effect called glow which you will find under stylize glow the problem is it glows everything on the layer including shadows and it just doesn't look terribly nice so we're going to work around that a little bit there are other effects that you used something like s glow from bars effects and a whole bunch of other plugins that I do actually like over this but because I want to go with built-in effects so you can all follow along let's use this one we just need to do a bit of trickery what we're going to do is we actually going to select this explosion comp ctrl or command D to duplicate it and that's called is one exploding below let's solo this layer and let's apply an extract effect to it let's zoom in here and in the extract effect I'm going to change my channel from luminance over to red because I want to extract based on the red Channel when it just keeps some of that bright yellow and red color to create the glow I'm going to bring up the black point now I'll just drag this in you can see it starts eating away everything and I want to keep eating it away until there's just red and yellow left so there's no gray that we could make glow so maybe right about there that actually looks pretty good so that's the only pieces of this layer that we're going to have glow and I think that actually looks pretty good now let's make this a little bit softer so it doesn't look too harsh again I'm getting a little bit of that cloud there so it's dragged in just a little bit more so this is going to be the fiery elements of our explosion let's change this layer from normal over to screen blend mode and let's unsolo it as well so kind of gone to composite this glow into that explosion now it's a little bit too intense right now again you could soften out that black point or you know trim this in a little bit more if you wanted to be a bit softer on what you get into glows that kind of looks pretty cool actually next let's apply a hue and saturation effect and bring down the saturation it's just just a little bit too yellow for my liking but again it's totally up to you if you want some comic II super colorful stylized explosion that looks pretty cool too I prefer it being a little bit more toned down so maybe it like that and now he's solo this layer because we only have this yellow you can use stylize glow and supply that to this layer that actually looks pretty good already it's unsolo that but it's just it's it's a little bit too soft but let's just rewind this and holy cow that looks pretty intense for an explosion so let me bring up the glow threshold just a little bit to maybe around 70 percent or so but let's bring up the radius I want a bigger glow just around this whole explosion so let's push this up to maybe even 350 or so and let's start playing with the intensity it's much too long so let's just pump this up to maybe close to 20 or so I want a pretty intense glow happening right there so that she looks pretty good but it's a bit red so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to grab this hue and saturation effect and place this after the glow just so that the hue and saturation effects the glow as well and just overall makes it a bit less saturated and I'm also going to place this glow at the very top I want this on top of the shadows just because well it's bright light it will probably kill some of the shadows while it's going on so if you're finding this too intense numb I almost yeah that's maybe just a little bit too intense maybe I'll bring the intensity down to around about 15 or so I want a pretty solid impact but nothing too crazy so that looks pretty good let's rewind and play this back yep that looks pretty satisfying now one issue we're having if you come in a little bit there's this power pole right here and the smoke is going right over it which is not really what we want we want the smoke to be behind this pillar so we need to create a check mat and then kind of hide this explosion comp behind that pillar fortunately that is pretty easy to do I'm going to re-enable the visibility on my ground plane let's duplicate that one let's call this power pole mat and now I actually want to stand this absolutes in the same plane as this power pole let me just quickly hide this explosion comp now make sure you want to change the color of this power pole matte from purple to maybe green this that's nice and visible and that's rotated by 90 degrees again holding down shift and you can see where this plane sits on the ground and let's bring this forward because I actually want to make sure that this layer sits on the ground exactly where this power pole is because otherwise it's going to shift in perspective and then not stick exactly where it should so that stays on the same location on the ground where that powerful is me just come towards a little bit more towards the end just because the camera zooms in on that power pole a bit was a bit easier to mask out that way that looks good with the power pole selected let's grab the pen tool let's just draw a mask around this powerful right here so that's not our trap mat and if you come back you should see that that kind of sticks to where that power pole is let's drag it above the explosion comp and on the explosion comp let's reenable the visibility and set the track matte to alpha inverted let's hide the ground so now that power pole should always stay visible in front of that smoke cloud so that looks pretty good I'm also going to make sure that the opacity of this layer because was a copy of the ground plane is a hundred percent so that cuts out pretty nicely in front of that smoke right there and you know just so it fits in with the rest of the Dajjal I'm just going to change the color back to the ground just because let's just zoom back out and let's play this back cool that is looking pretty good now I can see the smoke here at the top is getting cut off just a little bit so let me quickly jump into the explosion comm and yeah I can see it right there on the explosion layer let's just add a little bit of a mask here just over the top of that layer just so we can kind of avoid that harsh edge expand the properties let's set that to subtract this is feather it out a fair bit just so we don't get that harsh edge off the smoke right there let's return to our main comp and yep there you go it looks a whole lot nicer and the finish line is almost inside the last thing we're missing is that rocket coming in as well as the lens flare for that bit of color correction and maybe you can understand why I didn't want to go into detail on how created all of those individual layers because again it would take forever in this tutorial and be a whole course let's come back to the project now I've rendered those elements out already into a layer called rocket flare and rocket trail let's grab the rocket trailer place that at the top of our composition and that's essentially the rocket coming in now on time this app so that the impact that hits exactly where that cars so let's go to the point where we want that car to be it which is right about there and again this is time wise line that up and as I said I created this element using trapcode particular and if you want another to trial for that again just leaving some comments down below I can certainly make that happen now I want to add a little bit of glow to this rocket trail right here but I don't affect the whole smoke and again we've talked about the limitations of the glow effect already so we're going to do the exact same thing we did for the explosion globe let's duplicate this rocket trail and rename it to rockets trail glow let me solo the layer and let's apply an extract effect to it let's just come back a little bit and I don't need to do much here just bring up the black want to trim out some of that black and dark parts that we don't want to glow again I'm going to adjust the softness a little bit so it's not so harsh so maybe that looks pretty good now we can apply a glow effect to that let's just jack up the radius I'll give us a fairly big glow and again intensity we can probably pump up a fair bit again I'm finding this a little bit too saturated so I'm going to apply a hue and saturation effect to that let's bring down the saturation just a little bit so that looks a little bit nicer that's unsolo this layer so we can't just add it a little bit of that that intensity that glow for the rocket right on top now I might actually change the blend mode from normal over to additive on that and just ask even more intensity maybe I'll just bring up the radius a little bit more so it's just a little bit more of a wider glow so yep I think that looks all right so that'll then hit our car and blow it up next let's add a flare element to it and again I've pre rendered this called rocket flares lets us drag this layer into our composition and again you may just have to line it up so that time wise it works exactly where it needs to be placed again just an element from videocopilot optical flares let's just change the blend mode over to scream and again this time it's exactly where that rocket should be so now it can rocket comes in zooms in and hits our car hopefully right at the correct time let's collapse all of our layers and hmm well everything looks quite nice except I think the rocket trail is way too dark like it just stands out like a sore thumb to me so let's select the rocket trail and again let's just apply a curves effect to that bring up the black point or the lower base of that just kind of push it up so it's a bit more it's a bit brighter maybe just a little bit more brightness and again I'm going to add a little bit of red into that and a little bit of green just to kind of warm it up a little bit again I'll just you know like it just it just fits so much better so this is the before and this is the after it just fits the rest of the shot a lot better the other thing I'm not saying as well is that this explosion glow now sits underneath these trails let's grab this and move this on top of the rocket trail glow compress it underneath the flare but just you know it just looks like the explosions actually have right there and that glow is overtaking everything else finally the last thing I want to do is add some color correction and color grading to this entire shot and again it's kind of like putting your sandwich through the toaster it just helps bind all of these elements together just a little bit nicer so for that let's create a new adjustment layer I'm going to call this color grading drag it to the very top and let's just apply a simple curves effect to that you can use tons of different plug-ins for this stuff now the first thing I'm going to do is go to add a little bit of contrast just so it looks a little bit more punchy then I'm going to come into the blue channel pin that down in the middle and bring up the bottom just to add a bit of blue into the darks that already looks a little nicer that's coming to the green pin that in the middle and this time go to bring some greens into the highlights I want to go totally overboard maybe I'll lower that blue just a little bit more just a little bit it just adds a bit of style to this look so this is the before and this is the after it just adds a bit more intensity bit more atmosphere to it let's collapse that and finally we can also apply a vignette effect and it creates a solid layer and master out to create that vignette but there's also a CC vignette effect ever since it'll be After Effects CC so we may as well just apply that on top so that's without the vignette that's with the vignette you can adjust the amount the intensity but I think this actually looks quite good it just again helps focus the viewer on what's happening in the center of the screen now this only took forever and that's actually still more that we could tweak for the final effect and if you do follow along with this tutorial share your final effect share me what you create I'm really keen to see what you guys come up with but now let's rewind our composition and play back our final rocker vs. car explosion effect [Music] and that's all there is to it if you enjoyed this to Trump tease hit that like button if you knew you hit that subscribe button and if you want to watch mothers click these links over on the right hand side if you want to support me what are doing this channel be sure to check out all of the links down in the video description and as always thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music]

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 36,932

Rating: 4.9392185 out of 5

Keywords: Explosion, 3D Camera Tracker, Adobe After Effects, Tutorial, VFX, Visual Effects, Special Effects, Car Explosion, Free Stock Footage, Action Stock Footage, Explosion Video, Bomb, Rocket, Meteor Impact, Free Explosion, Free Smoke, Surfaced Studio, ActionVFX, Blender, Lens Flare, Smoke Trail, Debris, Compositing, Video Editing, Film Making

Id: bByhtSPvK_k

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020