Cheap Tricks | AQUAMAN Underwater Effects: Part 1 (VFX Tutorial)

hmm activating optos ghost it's heading straight for us sound the octo alert [Music] hey everyone hoshi here and welcome to cheap Trick's where we teach you how to recreate effects from big Hollywood movies I recently saw the trailer for Aquaman where it looks like we'll get to spend a good amount of time under the waves now something incredible happened right as this tutorial was coming together red giant announced the release of a new amazing feature for trapcode particular and form called fluid dynamics it's so cool that I'm actually splitting this tutorial into two part one is about the dry for wet approach making your dry shots looked like they were filmed underwater and part two explores trap codes new fluid dynamics and creating fun cinematic scenes like these from scratch splash these tutorials together and you've got a course in creating some amazing material right at home proving that you can do anything you set your mouse to let's fire up the octopod and pay our fishy friends visit on today's episode [Music] for over a hundred years film makers have used different tricks to create the illusion of being underwater it's a real pain to film underwater and sometimes it just isn't practical to film practically like when you want an indoor space to look like it's submerged where you've got an expensive model you don't want to get wet on this episode of cheap tricks we'll be talking about some techniques to turn this into this we're giving away this underwater look template to jumpstart your process as well as some elements that you can layer into your shot nicely to create some pretty cool looks we're also going to talk about using particular to add bubbles and dynamic swarms of fish to your comp now to keep everything straight let's divide the underwater look into two broad categories the look and the elements in terms of look underwater footage tends to be bluish have volumetric light both from on-screen sources and from above frame the camera is often handheld or floaty and the motion of objects is slow the footage is also generally murky things fall off the farther they are away from camera and lastly sometimes the image can appear wavy or distorted now how about the elements that tell you we're underwater first we've got our floating bits just a bunch of little particles swirling around we see caustics or light ripples that dance along various surfaces perhaps fish or other animals may swim by underwater foliage is usually sprinkled around and grows around stuff moving objects create bubbles that either enhance their motion or float to the surface and to create your underwater look you can use some or all of the things on these lists it depends on the shot and your art direction now let's dive in you're gonna want the right type of footage pools of light and a dark foggy environment work best the brighter your footage is the more challenging it may become daylight exteriors are a no-go if you're using stock footage like this awesome material provided by pond5 you're gonna want something like this something dilapidated might lend itself to looking like the elements of taking their toll if you're shooting your own material here are several suggestions use a darker sparsely lit area especially with top-down lighting fog machines work wonders they can create a soupy feel and add volume to all of your lighting plus they're pretty affordable heck go buy one the week after Halloween when they're on clearance kick it on and then waft that fog around so it's more uniform now all your light sources will have cool volumetric light coming off of them just like in water if you want to get fancy you could even get a projector and project caustic patterns onto everything for some practical effects lighting this would work the best from the top down if you can manage that in your space I'm using my garage for this demo and so I'm lighting it from the side but at the very least your kids I'll get a big kick out of this film a higher frame rate to take advantage of slow motion it's harder to move quickly underwater and if you have an actor involved frankly it becomes a lot less believable if they can move around too easily and those are the basics for getting some good material to start with now let's dive into After Effects and get our feet wet I'm going to convert these three clips into some fun underwater scenes and after that I'll show you the template I cooked up for you guys based on what I learn along the way the beginning of this tutorial will show you how I honed the underwater look step by step I'll get detailed and I'll also provide some useful After Effects tips along the way but if you want to skip ahead to my summary of the downloadable template you can always use the table of contents in the description below let's start with clip number one I got this staircase footage from pond5.com it's a simple like dirty environment staircase the caked up dirt along the side of the stairs will really help sell that underwater nests I'm going to use that list we made earlier as a rough guide for what changes I should make to this footage my first step is almost always to motion track the footage once I get a good result I set the ground plane and origin I create a solid and camera here too I continue to use the plane creation tool to put stand-in planes on all of the key surfaces then I'll label these two these locators will be really helpful once I start placing extra elements within this environment and with that it's time for pro tip number one of this episode normalizing your 3d world you never know what the scale of your 3d tracked world will be sometimes it's reasonable and sometimes it's astronomical so I like to use this little trick once I'm sure I have created all the planes and locators that I need from the camera tracker I normalize the whole 3d world and it's actually very simple step one use the widgets to align your ground plane visually with the footage the greenwhy widget should be pointing into the distance and the red X widget should be pointed screen right step two parent all of the 3d objects including the camera to your ground plane step 3 open up the position of your ground plane and set it to 960 by 540 by 0 step 4 set the orientation to 2 7000 for a standard HD comp this means that your ground plane is centered and properly oriented so up is up down is down and left and right or square to the world space of after-effects and then for step 5 we need to adjust the scale of the 3d world I do this by creating a solid that's the size of the comp I make it 3d but leave it unparent head and scaled to a hundred percent you'll notice that it should appear right in the center of my ground plane now if I open up the scale of the ground plane I can adjust it up or down until that solid is about the same size as my frame just roughly once that's done I can unparent everything from the new ground plane now this 3d scene is what I call normalized that means when I import a new piece of footage or create a solid or text item they'll appear right in the center of this 3d world oriented properly and easily moved in x y and z space as defined by after-effects this will save me the time of repositioning and rescaling every piece of footage I bring in and it's also really helpful for any plugins that utilize the 3d space particle effects like particular and form will be really happy and 3d effects like video co-pilots element will have a great head start when you create and now on with the episode color correction is the next step on our journey as a starter I'm going to apply Magic Bullet Looks after shopping around I settled on the classic hot and cold look pretty neat next I'll add trapcode shine to create some volumetric light I'll slide it up in the effects stack and I'll also select the aqua light preset under colorize next I can tell shine to use a 3d light as its source point and then create a light called shine one by pushing this light back in 3d space I can create the illusion of the lights coming from some distant point behind this building and this is already looking great now the brightly lit trees outside this window are kind of bumming me out so I'm going to create a copy of my back wall solid rename it to window mat and then do some slight repositioning and draw mask shapes in these windows with a few simple key frames and a subtract mask to block them from when the staircase includes them I can switch this layer into an adjustment layer and through a fast blur and toner effect on them now these windows still function as a light source but it's less obvious that there's like trees and stuff out there now jumping back into shine I can utilize the fractal noise pattern to make these light rays look a little bit more organic I'll select the 3d light with parallax and use the cutout blending mode next I'm going to add CC vignette it'll just make the space feel a little bit more mysterious and dark toward the edges I'm also gonna dive back into looks and play with the s-curve module a little bit and there we are that about covers our full checklist for the look category and now it's time to add a few elements to help sell the idea we're underwater let's start with a floating debris trapcode form is just perfect for this I'll add a solid with form and then open the designer window to get a head start on the look let's select the cloud let particles and create a box grid adjusting the number of particles in the grid until we have a kind of uniform look I'll add some randomness to the size of these particles dial up the dispersed value and the fractal field influence and let's go with that for starters as you can see this box grid appears right in the middle of our ground plane which is great from there I can push and pull a position of the box and resize the whole shape to fill the space once it's the right size I can turn down the opacity of some of these particles so they look like just light debris I'll also play with the fractal field settings until I like the floating speed of these particles once I like all that I notice that there's this column right at the very beginning of the footage and it'd be nice if I could have it occlude these particles so I create a copy of the front column solid a skillet and mask it properly and then apply it as an inverted alpha matte there we are next on our list is caustics these are the patterns created by light passing through a water surface they're pretty simple to generate in after-effects just throw some fractal noise on a solid then alter option-click to add an expression to the evolution and put something like time times 250 so it keeps on changing over time and then add some vector blur to this and bam you're in business now the vector blur settings depend a bit on the scale of your noise pattern but you can always tweak both of these together until you get a result you like I'm gonna preemptively add a feathered mask around this whole thing so there are no harsh edges now I can take that caustic card and introduce it as a 3d element to my scene if I know I want to align it with one of the surfaces I have a stand-in for I could just duplicate that layer and then alt option drag the caustic card to replace it I change the blending mode to a door screen and double check that within the layer properties the layer doesn't accept lights and this is looking pretty great now water is dense so it can distort and diffract the image behind it I found that an instance of universe heat wave can be used to create this effect by adjusting the blur and heat size to match your comp scale and setting the flow speed a little bit lower you can create some really subtle distortions around the image that feel wet I really wanted to add some underwater plans to this thing and my solution at first was to create this bunch of seaweed using trapcode mirror putting it on a card and then kind of placing that around the scene it came up with a better solution for this later so I'm gonna kind of skip over it for now but speaking about adding life to this thing how about some fish I'd love to see some fish swim through here and I'd like them to be at least a little bit animated now you could download a picture of any fish you want and like puppet to it and after effects if you like but I'm gonna go a step further because I want to teach you to fish and I want to give you a fish too at the end of this all so I jump over to sketchfab where I found this great Creative Commons fish that was animated and uploaded by user-pc noodles I open it up in cinema 4d where I can copy and paste the star keyframes to the end and create a looping animation then I use Riptide Pro to export the animated sequence as OBJ's so I can use them in after-effects and render them with element 3d now this fish was a really nice shape and it was rigged which is swell but it's texture was really minimal and I don't want to stick you guys with this thing so I'm gonna hop into Photoshop and hack apart some fish skin onto this texture just pushing pulling cloning using the liquify window to mold these shapes and images to the original texture map I'm also using one of my favorite sheets which is the smudge tool is set to a hundred percent basically allowing you to stretch out pixels using brushstrokes so I can save this file and double check my work an element as I go and these eyes are a little hard to line up we've got kind of a situation going on there we go so now that we're all textured up I've got this animated 3d fish that works with element I'm going to give this away to you guys so you can play with it if you have element but I'm also going to render out a 500 by 500 sprite so you can use it the same way that I will in the rest of this episode using trapcode particular so let's jump back over to our staircase comp add a new solid and apply particular in the emitter settings I'll set the direction to directional then I'll set the Y rotation to about 90 degrees next I'll choose a box emitter and tweak the size a bit now I can move my emitter off-screen to the left here I'll set some keyframes on my particle count so there's some particles and then none again and it'll also increase the life of my particles so they last the whole time they're on screen so now is a good time to drag in that PNG sequence of the fish I rendered out earlier I can simply place it in the comp and then turn it off now in my particular solid under particle type I can select textured polygons and then for the texture I can select my fish side view I'll leave random loop as the time sampling mode which means that all of these fish will loop randomly from different parts of the animation now watch as I increase the particle size and hit play fish darts under the emitter settings I'll adjust the random velocity to spread out these fish more and then under particle rotation I'll select a very useful tool orient to motion which will keep these fish noses pointed in the right direction because these fish point in whatever direction they're moving I can get some really cool results if I scroll down to physics air and increase the spin amplitude now keep in mind that these are 2d sprites and there's a point at which they look wrong but even in a pretty high spin value since these fish are primarily moving laterally they really look like they're swimming for some better overall looks I can turn the motion blur on under the rendering settings and turn up the opacity boost a bit you can also go to shading and turn shadow let's from main on this kind of shading gives me some very quick depth to the group and breaks up the monotony a bit now turning back to my physics settings a quick reminder that spin affects the behavior of an individual particle but turbulence fields affect the whole group I'll tell my turbulence field to affect the position then it's important to experiment with a scale of the field the higher the value will give you a very bumpy result I prefer to turn the scale of my turbulence fields down to around 2 or 3 then depending on your effect position value the lower turbulence field scale values can result in some really nice wide swirls next I'll add some color correction to these particles just darkening them a bit and then using my good old friend CC light sweep to create an artificial rim when the fish are right in front of this middle lighted area in fact I'm actually able to link the origin of the light sweep to the light I created earlier for shine to do that I'm using a little expression called the two comp expression which gives you the 2d position of where a 3d object appears on screen these two match wits covers this technique really well and has behind the scenes from tank and really is an expression that no compression be without anyway color correct to your heart's content my friends but when you're ready to add some zing to these fish I humbly suggest going to your particular settings and enabling the aux system which emits particles from other particles if I select sphere as the type and scrub forward a bit you can see that spheres are now emitting from the position of these fish particles I'll create a curve for the size of her life so they kind of fade off over time even though real bubbles don't actually get smaller over life they can't and let just the Ox physics to give some negative gravity and turbulence so the bubbles kind of float up and away you know I'm feeling pretty good on this example so let's move on to clip number two also from pond5 this is a beautiful cruise ship interior I'll track the camera right out of the gate and do the same thing as before defining a handful of planes I can use to start understanding the space this particular camera saw only returned a tripod style result so I don't have the true parallax I'm supposed to have here but I can make this work I can take a big shortcut by hopping back over to my first shot and copying over the main adjustment layers and the shine light and then just pasting them in here this footage is much brighter and more saturated than the previous clip so the color correction isn't perfect right away but but you can see the beginning of how a template could allow you to have a lot of these first steps out of the way I'm gonna fast-forward through me upping the vignette amount and darkening the image adding a glow and finally throwing in universe heat wave on top of the adjustment layer next I'll repeat what I did before with form I'll add a solid at a forum the specifics really aren't important to follow along with here because they'll Larry by your comp size but the principle is this create a 3d grid of particles disperse those particles and then displace all of those using a flowing fractal field do I sound smart I'm trying so hard you guys alright let's turn on our shine layer again and get arts you with a shine locator right in the center of the chandelier I'll play with the shine settings until I get just the right amount of Rays coming out of the mid screen and get kind of a cool look going on here working underwater lights and everything and now I'm gonna do something really fishy by which I mean I'm going to create a dynamic swarm of fish that do something much more art directed say some visionary out there decides he wants a swarm of fish to come spiral around this chandelier in a pretty way well it turns out trapcode particular has an amazing tool to do just this I touched a little bit on this in episode 1 yeah no no no no this this episode 1 of cheap tricks in which we learned that particles can flow along the path of a designated light now I'm gonna do just that but with the added challenge of these particles needing to flow in front and behind the chandelier a step one is creating a 3d object that stands in for the chandelier I'll create a guide plane orient toward the camera and basically aligned with my chandelier I'll draw a mask around the solid center of this fixture and then I'll do what only an idiot would do which is draw really complex shape with lots of points on a single mask I'm actually not that worried about it in this case because the fidelity of this mask isn't super critical for this comp I'll set some key frames for the masks on a frame 1 and then jump to the end frame and slightly tweak everything and now when I scrub from the beginning to the end I have a pretty decent 3d stand-in card with a similar alpha step to is creating a point light called motion path 1 whenever you add a light obviously the layers react and it's no biggie selecting a layer and double tapping a will allow you to quickly turn except lights to off and you can do this for all the 3d layers at once if you want if it's bugging you anyway we're gonna keyframe this light to fly in from off screen and then swirl around the chandelier I'll start by sliding the light off screen setting a quick keyframe I can use f11 and f12 on my keyboard to pop between a custom 3d view and my comp camera or I can take this fun approach and switch to a top view and then enable two views horizontally so just like in a 3d program I can watch the framing and a reference view at the same time now this allows me to just keep inching forward and adding keyframes of this light swirling around the chandelier adjusting the tangents along the way and ultimately sculpting this fun shape it's actually really aesthetically pleasing I think and now time for another pro tip on making this 3d path for the light but I worked really haphazardly in terms of timing but After Effects has a great solve for this watch as I select all of the keyframes in the middle leaving the first and last then I can right click and say Rove across time which will then have AE spaced out these keyframes to respect the timing established by only those outer keyframes right now the spacing along the whole path will be consistent and you can see that as I alter these paths I'm really editing the shape only and the keyframes are automatically positioning themselves to keep a constant speed if you wanted to you could even turn the first or last keyframes into ease keyframes and shape their velocity and you'd be able to work with one simplified velocity curve even though there's many points along the way so let's put this cool path to work I'll import that PNG sequence of fish and I'll use it later as a sprite I'll need a solid with particular and then I'll just solo these layers so we can really focus on this effect once I've got particular in there for the emitter position I'm going to use this expression where I'm taking the position of the motion path one layer specifically at value time zero that means a particular will spew out particles from wherever I move this motion path to be at time zero the beginning of my curve now in my particular layer I can scroll down to the physics open up air and then I can select a motion path since I named my light motion path one I have the option to choose from 1 or 1 HQ which is a slightly higher quality now just to illustrate what we're working with here I'll set the particle velocity to 0 for a second and just hit play cool huh now I've got this editable motion path and the particles flowing along it the next thing I'm going to do is scroll down to particulars visibility settings I'm going to go to the ops curation layer and select my chandelier stand in I'll be sure to check effects and masks and then I can hide that layer and instantly I have particles that appear to be obscured by the chandelier just like with my other swarm of fish I'll keyframe the amount of particles to increase and then fall off then I'll change my emitter type to a sphere and fine-tune the size a bit and now I can preview this really cool swarm now I'm ready for my fish particles so let's go to particle type and select textured polygons and set the fish as the texture I'll dive down into the particle rotation and enable orient to motion and now I can see these sprites wrap around this path and all their glory now these truly are just 2d cards so there's a real strength in numbers aspect to this all with a large enough school of fish it's okay that some of them almost disappear on angle the swarm as a whole is more prominent than any one flatfish the particles per second really help shape the density of this swarm so I'll create a bit of a curve that's heavy at first and then tapers off this will become visible in the shape of the fish warm as it heads in now this clip isn't that long and so my original path actually demanded that the fish moved too fast this kind of speed might look great if these sprites were supposed to be birds or bats or something I mean remember you could do more than just fish with this kind of a thing but to correct the speed of these fish I ended up deleting a few revolutions of that path now that I've got these fish working I want to create some lighting effects I'll add a point light parent it to my chandelier and make sure it's nestled in the eye of this storm I go to the shading settings in particular and turn shading on and now the fish are dark in front of the chandelier and a bright behind it I can add an ambient light to fill in these guys in the front a bit and at first my ambient light doesn't appear to be doing much unless I crank it up like crazy which means I should probably go to the shading settings in particular and adjust the degree to which the ambient lights are affecting the particles here now I can adjust the lights until they're looking right to me now I've been doing this all with particular soloed so we could really see what's going on but watch now as I turn back those initial color Corrections and effects we'd added earlier it's so pretty right now just like with my other batch of fish I can go back and play with the spin settings in the turbulence field to give this path just a little bit more of an organic bend and twist I'll enable the ox particles again so there are some little bubbles that come off these fishies paths and now really in just a few minutes we've got this lovely fantastic scene worthy of the big screen I mean you know it'd be really cool if I got to use this particular set of skills on a few whimsical shops from a big Hollywood movie and then those few shots made it into the trailer so I could tell everyone about them early now that would be practically perfect in every way but anyway let's move on to clip three now I want to create a surreal underwater scene out of this last piece of footage but before I do the whole tinted blue treatment I want to show you a couple of tricks one is creating a reflective surface using trapcode mirror and two is using the motion of a piece of footage to generate particles so let's start with that trick using trapcode mirror now we've used mirror before but this time I'm going to show you how you can use it to create this cool watery surface like always I'll start with a solid I'll call it mirror and add the effect mirror under geometry I can adjust the height and width and then I can scroll down to this group called fractal and this fractal is bending in distorting the plane but if I dial it down to zero I'm basically generating a flat plane here now if I add a camera to the scene I can circle around and show you what I mean but now we're going to do something really cool down under material and lighting I'll change the color to black and then I'll scroll down to the image based lighting where I can assign a reflection environment map I'll select my dancer footage and watch now as I rotate around this plane it's like a perfect mirror surface now it's doing this by treating my piece of footage like a 360 spherical map but I want a little more control over what this is reflecting and to do this I'm gonna create a copy of my footage layer and I'll rename it dancer footage reflection and apply Cece Tyler now Tyler is an effect that allows you to repeat your image multiple time effectively scaling it down the reason this will be helpful to me is because now I can go to my mere lair and set it as the reflection map being sure to enable the effects and mask pulldown now given this cops eyes and the camera settings around 16 or 17 percent scale on my Tyler effect seems to be about the right zoom level to create the illusion that the plane in mirror is reflecting the image on screen now as I go for it I'll be bouncing back and forth between Mir and my Tyler effect because Tyler gives me the option to offset the center of the repeating footage basically a way to hack into what's reflecting in mirror for example right now my Mir plane is kind of down on the floor and I can offset the center of the reflected footage until it looks like the ballerina is being mirrored on the floor and now comes the really cool part I open up my mirror layer and if I go to the fractal settings and set the amplitude to a very low number like 1 or 2 there are now ripples on the ground properly reflecting what appears above them in the footage if I wanted to I can rotate and resize the plane to cover the desired ground and with the right alignment I get this incredibly satisfying plane of water and the really cool thing is this is a real 3d object that would react to the camera moving around all while reflecting your source footage but this is a tutorial about underwater stuff which means that right now we're on the wrong side of the water so I'm going to open up mirror and move this plane to the top of the screen addressing the size and angle a bit and anytime I want to see clearly what's reflecting in this plane I can turn the amplitude back to zero and I can see this more like a flat mirror switching to full resolution will also give me a higher-quality reflection there's a slight camera move in this and I didn't track the camera earlier so I'm gonna add a few keyframes to compensate for that very slight camera move and now I've got something really cool going on you may have noticed that if you've ever looked into a fish tank or watched underwater footage while you were filming parallel to the water surface the water actually acts like a mirror reflecting the fish and the tank or the undersea environment and that's really what I'm mimicking here you can use mirror to create reflective liquid surfaces and any kind of comp you like it's a super nifty tool so let's save this and move on to another trick now back to the original clip her motion is really beautiful and I think it could be really cool if we could enhance that motion with some particles or bubbles now underwater bubbles are kind of used with artistic license the real reason they're in most movies is because the actor just dope down into the tank and they've got a bunch of bubbles still clinging to their clothes and stuff but sometimes you just look cool when bubbles are flying off of you like a contrail or when you clash some underwater Triton's together you add some magic bubbles that appear and then you kind of wuss out and fade out their opacity the way bubbles cannot but I do like the look it feels right and ultimately you just want shots to feel right so here's my thought since this footage is relatively static and she's the main thing moving around and frame we can utilize a difference mat to create regions where she's moving the most I'll show you what I mean I'll create a comp called dancer motion detector for lack of a better name and in this comp I'll place two copies of the dancer footage one of them I can offset by one frame just like that and then hide it now I can apply difference mat to this visible layer and choose layer two as my difference layer as I adjust the settings a bit I can now reveal just the parts of the image that are notably different from the last frame now watch as I play through and you should get the idea since the background is only changing slightly but the dancer is moving more than that we mostly just see the edges of her up here I can augment this shape by adding a simple choker to eat away some of the straight pixels and then another simple choker with a negative value to bloat the remaining shapes I'll fill these with red just to make them more visible now if I place the dancer footage behind this as a guide layer it's really clear to see what's happening my last step for creating this motion driven layer is to create a garbage matte around the dancer so I'm just getting her changes and not for example the shadow over here on the wall now I'll reiterate that this is working because the camera is barely moving it would work great with a static camera but it really depends on your source footage now that this layer is ready I'll create a new cop called dancer with particles I'll place my dancer footage in here and also that dancer motion pre-comp this layer I'll turn into a 3d layer so particular can use it as a layer emitter then I'll create a solid with particular change the emitter type to layer and then down below the layer emitter settings I'll select my dancer motion detector and be sure to set the particle birth time as the layer sampling mode I'm also gonna select none' under the layer RGB usage I'll crank up the particle count until I can see some particles and turn the velocity of the emitter down to zero for now and quickly scrubbing through there aren't very many visible particles even with this pretty high particle count and that's because comparatively the Alpha of the dancers edges is a relatively small portion compared to this whole layer size so to combat this I'm going to jump back over to my motion detector pre-comp and duplicate my simple Joker effect a few times and just as an aside the simple Joker effect is one that can benefit from multiple instances of the effect rather than having higher values of one instance you'll actually get different results and sometimes it's worth playing around with this anyway when I chip back to my cop I'm seeing more particles now I'll adjust the size of the particles down to something that looks like a tiny bubble and then under physics I'll increase the spin amplitude and turn down the spin frequency I'll also tell a turbulence field to affect the position and turn the scale of the turbulence down and just like when I've used particular before I'm gonna dive into the designer duplicate this instance and create some larger puffier particles that are barely visible this will just add some volume and realism to my effect now let me preview just what's being generated by particular now it's a really cool shape and it's pretty much automated by that pre-comp with a difference Matt I mean imagine the things you could do if you wanted to use some of the other sprites and particle types included with particular you may never have to do a cop with an underwater ballerina but you might need to create a magic character who has a sparkly wake or add some life to some sports footage or who knows what I'm telling you guys the trap code suite will change your life now that we've created these bubbles and this reflective surface let's combine the two and in fact to save some time I'm gonna pre render it and if you skipped ahead to this point and are wondering why we have a bubbling ballerina reflecting in the ceiling I'm afraid you're gonna have to watch the whole episode next time skipper while working on this ballerina piece I've been holding off on the other kinds of water effects we've covered earlier and that's because while you weren't looking I created this underwater template on my other monitor with my right hand and a second mouse anyway I built this template for you guys it's called the aqua template and there's a lot of really cool stuff in here now remember that list of what makes a scene look underwater II this template really tries to cover all those bases up top we've got a pre comp where you can drop your footage and once you've done that you can open up comp to Aqua template RG and this comp is the red giant fueled super template it utilizes the trap code suite to help you customize your underwater look so up top we've got the underwater look controls it's linked via expressions to this locked adjustment layer below like before I used the pseudo a fairy to single custom control effect which allows you to alter the brightness and contrast color and tint distortion blur vignette and low the effect looks like this by default and then depending on your footage you can go through and dial any of these look controls up and down to suit your needs you can get some great top level effects just playing around with this remember it's basically controlling all the individual effects in this adjustment layer below if you want you can always unlock this layer and try messing around under the hood if you like next in our layer stack we've got our shine position it's a light that you can move around to any position that looks the best for your footage it's a 3d object so remember if you decide to motion track your footage you can place this in 3d space the actual shine effect along with its settings are on the adjustment layer below then just under that we have an instance of form creating some default floating particles now right now I'm rendering with GPU acceleration on if you have to use your CPU it'll be a little bit slower and you may want to just solo this first instance of form until its final render time last in this comp we've got a hidden instance of mirror enabling it will show you this plane that reflects your footage now it's based on the size and position of the si si Tyler effect in the hidden layer below called a reflection map right when you turn it on it's a little out of place just by itself but if you solo the footage in the mir layer you have a jumpstart on creating a water surface where there was none or to do what we did with our ballerina and create a reflective surface on the top of frame now the evolution speed is controlled by an expression and you're going to want to play with that number depending on the speed and scale of your footage now below this we've got a foot pre comp and a default camera as cameras mostly here from Mir as the focal length of the shot really affects what the reflection looks like now naturally if you can retract your footage you'll create your own camera and you can toss this one also locked and hidden at the very bottom is the vignette blur map and don't worry about it but also don't delete it and that covers it for the look part of this comp but now let me show you the elements pre-loaded in this comb they're all under the O 3 elements folder and there are lots of fun first we've got castex a nice big light ripple pattern that fades off at the edges then we've got a fish particle PMG sequence if you want to use it like in those other comps below that some light beams that you could layer into your comp if you want there are some wider ones and some tinier sharper ones these work to look like light coming down from a surface that you can't see below that we've got plants we have for looping PNG sequences of these underwater ish plants to speeds fast and slow now I rendered these sequences out of element 3d based on some plant models I had tinkered with and cinema 4d now these are really quick to use as cards but I'm also going to share my 3d files and element pre comps of these fish and these plants in case you want to actually use any of them with element 3d because of the needs of your shot so back to the template you'll notice this oh three aqua template AE which as you might have guessed is a 100% After Effects version of the underwater template it's the same adjustment layers and controls up top and then below that a poor-man's version of shine using a combination of effects primarily radial fast blur for the floaties I'm also using CC ball action now there's no reflective water surface option here but if you like Jacob Dalton has a fantastic tutorial called fill a room with water and that covers a great hundred percent AE method for creating a water surface if you need it now using this aqua template and all of its included elements I think you guys can crank out some really cool material let me show you an example remember that ballerina watch how quickly we can bring in her footage drop it into the pre comp adjust the position of the shine light tweak the color and vignette settings and then start dropping in some of our elements like caustics well remember to turn off the except shadows option and it's positioned a few of them around at the lighted areas after that we can have some fun mixing in some of these looping plant elements just kind of placing them around and offsetting the loop timing a bit I'm using the slow version since the footage is slo-mo and the animation on these ones is a little bit calmer with a little bit of brightness adjustment on these plants I can make them great foreground elements and a few minutes later we've got a really fun come and that's gonna be it for part 1 be sure to watch part 2 after this and learn about fluid dynamics and creating some really fun cinematic scenes on your home computer follow us on Twitter at red giant news or hit me up directly with your questions at action movie kid and I'll see you in part 2 [Music]

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 954,668

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, gaming, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, how to, diy, maker, iron man, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, vlogger, vlogging

Id: KfaGuHeYStA

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2019