After Effects Video Tutorial: Creating Realistic Snow

hello this is kevin gator with another tutorial for premium beat.com in this tutorial i'm going to take a look at a snow particle system technique I developed for this recent film champion by Mons Burtis and Daniel Berman it's a Swedish western set at winter time but unfortunately it didn't always snow on cue so my job was to add snow to key scenes where it could be snowing to add more drama and to introduce this main character so my work has really cut out for me look for two reasons first off it was shot in 5k resolution on a red camera the other problem is Swedish people are probably the most critical people I know when it comes to spotting fake snow in movies so I also have to develop not only an effective workflow but a particle system that would fall a keen Swedish eye so I'm going to share with you the techniques I developed for this film using red giants particular and After Effects let's jump in and see how it's done okay so here we are inside of After Effects and let's take a quick look at what we're going to try to create so a quick preview and this is the scene from the beginning of the film and it's this particle system that we're going to explore how to develop for ourselves so if we take a quick look around we'll see there's three different layers so it's a pretty straightforward scene and I have a low res proxy version of the original 5k footage so this is dramatically reduced to more of a 720 letterbox to make it more easy for us to use and less processor intensive I've also got here a black solid that contains my particle effect layer and a free D camera for rearranging and moving my particles around to composite a little more nicely so let's just jump in and try to replicate the effect from this so I'm going to begin by dragging my movie clip to the new comp area and there it is now sometimes when you get this type of work the footage will come with a frame at the beginning of the video and at the end of the video just so they can mark in on the Edit where this occurs so I'm just going to trim those off if I hold down the control key and the arrow key and go forwards once I can see where the frame begins I'm just going to pull the work area over one I'm just going to go to the end and I'm going to hold down the control key again it's command if you're on the Mac and just going to hit the arrow key back one and I'm just going to pull that over to reach where the playhead is and I'm just going to right click and choose trim comp to work area so now when I go back to the beginning we don't see this frame from the other scene we just see the clip in its entirety so let's have a little play through and take a look at what we have so it's just a guy walking towards us in the snow and now it's an interesting shot but it will be greatly improved by a snowstorm so what I need to do first is add a layer and new and solid I'm going to make sure that it's the comp size and I'm going to name it snow and click on OK next up I need to find particular and this is a third-party plugin so if you don't already have it installed you can head over to the red giant website and download a trial version of the plug-in for yourselves otherwise you'll be able to just type in here particulate and it should appear somewhere near the bottom trapcode particular and just double click that now straight out of the box it doesn't really look too sexy so we'll just see what it's doing right now and it's just a mitting from the center and this is the default setup so we need to go into the settings and we need to start arranging the configuration for our emitter ok I'm going to put it around about the halfway mark so we can see the changes as we make them most of the work is going to begin right here underneath the tab that says emitter so if we look at the settings for that we can begin by increasing the number of particles so I'm going to crank that up to around about 300 just so we've got a little bit more happening on the screen we're going to keep coming back and changing this value as time goes on it's always a good idea to start with a lower value when you begin and then just crank it up before you render out your footage the emitter type currently is selected to point so it's all emitting from one point on the screen and instead of that we want to choose box so what a box would do is have different settings for the x y&z and what I want to do is affect the width so I'm going to stretch out the X until it fills the screen and then I'm going to increase the Z so it spreads backwards and forwards what we want to have our sand particles that fall past the camera as well as some that appear to be coming from way back in our scene I'm just going to zero out the Y position because we are want it to be coming from the top and we're not really wanting it to emit randomly within the height we just want it to be spread over the X and z axis and if we preview it now you'll notice that the particles are emitting from the center of the screen so the next thing we want to do is affect the XY position so if I click on that I can just mark above screen there and now the particles are going to be emitting from the top so it's all fair and well we're starting to get somewhere but it's nothing like snow at the moment there's a few other settings for us to change before we go too far one of which is here we need to change from linear to smooth and we'll also change the direction from uniform to bi-directional and it's preview again see what's happened so now they're kind of gathering and populating in a similar area we can ignore the direction spread but we need to move down to where it says velocity if we crank that right up they're going to go flying like crazy all over the place but the default velocity is pretty okay for our needs but we do want to disable the random and also the distribution but we can keep the velocity from motion at 20 let's take another look at what we have so far so no big differences just yet but we're starting to get somewhere let's move on to the actual particles themselves so if I reveal this area here and the first thing we want to consider is the life that they are onscreen for you'll notice that they kind of appear and then after a few seconds they start vanishing and disappearing and we want to make sure that they live a little bit longer long enough for our scene to play out so I'm just going to go in here and change the life setting to something like 100 and we might need to adjust that later and at least now they should stay on the screen for the same length as the footage so if we watch these particles here they should stay on the screen and not just disappear at random the next thing we need to do is change from sphere let's just bring them down so we can see them here we want to change from sphere to something a little less it looks like just a ton of fuzzy balls and choose instead cloudlets so this is going to have a more snowflake II kind of look it doesn't look like it at the moment but with a few other settings changed it will start to feel a little bit more like a snowflake so I'm going to change the scale from five to something like free should be enough and also the opacity I'm going to knock that right down to about 15 now it's starting to look a little bit more believable let's just preview that it's okay starting to look a little bit more like snowflakes the color though is pure white so if we click on the eye drop tool and look for some snow reference in the image we can just I drop pretty much anywhere where it's light and it's going to give it the same color value as the snow that's already in the scene so that's an added bonus if we preview now see it's starting to look a little bit more like snow but we need to mess around with the physics settings before it really starts to take hold while I am still in this neighborhood we should probably fix the emission extras because what we see is on the first frame the snow is not there and it would already be snowing when the scene has started so we can go in here and change the pre run to something like 10 and that's going to start the emitter before the scene has begun so that gives us this instead so it's already begun snowing but they're kind of floating aimlessly and they don't really look so believable it's really starting to take shape so let's just hide the particle settings for the moment and let's wander on down to physics so under physics we have a couple of different models the first is air and the other is bounce and we want to keep it on air because we don't want the particles to really interact with the the ground we don't need to worry too much about that but we do want to start playing with gravity and the settings for the air so let's take a look at those and it's really going to be a couple of things that make everything happen here and that's going to be the air resistance the spin amplitude and down here in the turbulence field as well as the the wind and by mixing these it's going to really sell this effects of we play with the wind resistance and go extreme it's basically going to create an anti-gravity and if I play through now the particle is just kind of going to gather and stay in place but what I want to do is have a relatively low value and something like the 0.2 should be sufficient so it's going to have a little bit of resistance and with we go in and start playing with the gravity we can start to really get the snow look I'm going to set the gravity to around about 50 and that's already taken care of most of the problems now we've got something that looks a little more like snowfall we need to fix the emitter because we can see at the back there where the where the snow is populating so I'm going to go back to this setting here and I'm just going to make sure that that's outside of the frame we come back to the beginning and check it now that's looking pretty okay what you will notice though it's a little more dense in the background area here and it's not so dense in the side so we can fix that by stretching the emitter over we can also modify the z space a bit more as well so we have a bit more depth so we have more particles nearer to the camera and that's getting there but to really fine-tune and adjust it it's best to go into the layer new and choose camera and if you don't know what the camera was used or what what lens they used on the set you should probably have a chat with the DP or the director of photography and figure out what that was or as I took an estimated guests as this is a wide-angle shot I assumed roundabout 24 millimeters should be reasonable enough and what that's going to do I'm just going to my mouse is that the battery's running out what that's going to do is enable us to move around the particles as if they were in 3d space if I hit C on the keyboard a couple of times I'll see this icon where I'm able to zoom just through the particles and readjust them if I go back way too far we're going to reveal the sides but if we get them round about there we're going to have a reasonable spread so let's take a look now so now we're getting there we're almost done what we want to do though is try to work with the other settings for the emitter to give it a bit of dynamic by messing with the wind and spin frequency when you analyze snowflakes you'll notice they don't just fall down by themselves some kind of fall and they lift and float back up again and I found by playing with the spin amplitude I can get most of the effect I'm looking for so I'm going to just crank that right up if we go nuts they'll just like fly around like bees and that's not so useful but found round about 200 gave me a relatively good kind of snow look so it's a little more chaotic a little more organic but what we also want to do is affect the wind and turbulence for the wind I want to leave the X alone not only want to focus on the Y and the Z so if we pull add the Y value don't let's try there if I pull the wire it's going to act more like gravity and it's going to blow those particles down much faster but what I want to do is juggle the Y value and the Z value I wanted it to look like they're blowing towards him it's always best if you go somewhere in the middle and I want those particles to kind of blow back out so as if he's walking into the storm if we preview a few through now you'll see they're blown down and they're blown towards him but we need to compensate by moving our camera back in a little bit because when we use the the wind it's going to blow those particles away and we need to make sure they're still on screen so somewhere around about there should be pretty okay maybe out a little bit more and we can always go back up and compensate with our x value and okay let's have a look now and that's that's looking pretty okay the other thing I would focus on other than the wind is the turbulence field in particular we would take the effect position just crank that up a little bit that's just going to add a little bit more dynamics you see some kind of fall down and float back up again and if we go really crazy with that you'll see it looks a little more wild a little more like a snowstorm but again just a lower value should be sufficient enough to give it a moderate amount of chaos without completely ruining the shot and probably about 50 should be sufficient for this and there we have it we're almost there so I'm going to increase the number of particles from 300 to maybe out 500 or maybe about 400 and we can also see here in the info panel the number of particles that are on screen at any one time so if this number starts to get really crazy you might find that when you go to export it it might just freeze and it won't be able to render due to the amount of information so the way to handle that is to come back to the particles and just lower that value there and you should be good okay the last thing really to focus on now that we've got our settings figured out here is motion blur so when they move through the scene we want them to not look so sharp on every frame and actually look like there's a little bit of motion blur so we can do that in a couple of different ways so first we can enable motion blur for the timeline so if I click here now it's switched on but we also need to tell it on a specifical layer to enable the motion blur as well what we should see if i zoom in we go to full 100 and let's put it to full resolution when I enable this setting you should see that if you keep your eye on this one here it's very sharp at the moment and when I click on motion blur you can see it move and if we do a quick round preview will see that the closer they are to the camera the more blurred they become and the ones further away look a little bit sharper and for many of you this might be just fine but I didn't think that this gave me the desired look I was going for so instead I choose to use an effect inside of here called force motion blur with this is a plugin that comes with after a fair so numb is pretty intensive but it can get you out of a tight spot when you think that the native motion blur isn't really doing what you want it to so for this my settings were 20 and I think something like 200 maybe it was more maybe 300 okay and hopefully you noticed now there's a lot more motion streaks so this I thought added a great level of drama and it felt like the snow was blowing a bit harder the problem is it is quite a heavy plugin so it's going to take much longer to render so I'm just going to do a quick round preview and I'll jump back once the round preview is done to show you the result so the RAM preview is completed let's take a look at the final effect with the CC force motion blur added so let's have a look so hopefully you'll notice that the particles that are moving faster have an increased amount of motion blur versus those in the background that look a bit sharper and I think this is a little better than the native motion blur where you can't really configure the settings for them so I've been Kevin Gator for premium beat com if you want to see the full breakdown you can head over to my Vimeo page I'd like to thank mons Burtis and daniel Berman for allowing me to use the footage from the film to show you this effect so thank you for watching and see you next time

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 174,568

Keywords: Kevin Gater, Snow, Trapcode, After Effects, Tutorial, Video Tutorial

Id: qp-6JWreknc

Length: 20min 8sec (1208 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 27 2015