Cheap Tricks | AQUAMAN Underwater Effects: Part 2 (VFX Tutorial)

[Music] welcome friends to part two of our cheap Trick's water spectacular we're exploring some different VFX techniques inspired by the Aquaman trailer and also by the many cool films that explore the deep blue sea today we'll discuss the latest and most absurdly mesmerizing feature of the trap code suite fluid dynamics we'll use it to create some cool splashes for this logo and spice up some CG shots created with element then we'll push even further into the realm of what's possible to create on your home computer with a few awesome cheats if you didn't catch part one it's available on this channel right now in this episode I'll sometimes use the Aqua template we talked about in detail in part one but other than that watch in whatever order you want not your mom trapcode Foreman particular are now equipped with fluid dynamics the ability to simulate the behavior of particles in water so let me give you the scoop once you have the newest version of particular you can throw it on a solid and then hop into the designer window you'll notice it all looks familiar but now there's this play indicator bar which will be helpful when you break out the newest feature now we only have time to dip our toes today but I'm gonna show you a few quick possibilities with fluid dynamics I basically just learned them watching the more in-depth tutorials right here on this channel so when we get started I suggest using an emitter with some depth and x y&z since you'll get a more robust liquid result so I'm gonna start with an obj emitter the smooth sphere then I'll increase the particle count and pop over to physics where I could always choose between air and bounce but now there's fluids the second I turn on this feature the particles suddenly act like bubbles in a water tank churning up to the top this box is a visualization of the influence the liquid force has all these particles all the particles in this space are surrendered to the settings you pick over here now watch if I drag the box over here or make it larger there are also settings like buoyancy determining if the particles float up like steam or bubbles or down like dry ice or sand falling into water now to make this prettier I can pop over to the color blocks and select the fire preset and behold the prettiness this gray block on the play bar shows that particular is caching the simulation so you get this great interactive loop to play back remember that particulars designer window has camera controls just like in the comp window and you can use C to cycle through the different camera controls and the speed is phenomenal and back over to the physics block I'll click on the visualizer relative density pulldown which allows you to really punch up the apparent depth of this liquid shape by affecting the brightness or opacity of the particles based on how densely they're placed so check out if the sphere were smaller and spewing more particles this is crazy and now that it's cached I can see it from all angles I'll hit undo a few times and then pop back to physics to show you that there are actually three fluid forces you can select from so far we've been looking at this buoyancy and swirl only but next up is the vortex ring ooh or check this one might be my favorite I imagine it like a donut that churns particles through it giving them kind of a spiral ring of momentum like a mushroom cloud or those cool fog cannon things and museums and you can tell the force to apply just at the start or continuously and you can move this force around and adjust the settings to get really cool effects next over here we've got the vortex tube which as you might guess as a tube force perhaps best described like this [Music] very popular indeed and as if this wasn't all enough just like particular allows you to have multiple instances of particular in the same space you can add multiple fluid dynamic systems to the same space now so you can do stuff like this [Music] now you've got an idea of what these systems do let's do a quick overview of how they work in form I'll apply form to a solid and then click on the designer window let's choose another obj emitter this time the car then I'll switch to phases and turn down this density a bit maybe around 30% now as you know the main difference between form and particular is that forms particles are kind of a permanent array but we can still affect them with a cool force as we just learned about click on fluid and check fluid motion here's with some buoyancy here's the vortex ring and here's a vortex tube you can get really cool results when you play with the size and position of the fluid force and just think of the unique like alien disintegrations you could create with this or explosions or I mean like I could honestly watch this for the next half hour kidding mostly all of these controls can be adjusted and keyframed outside of the designer window I in the traditional workspace and real talk I used to work exclusively with these traditional dials I really didn't like the designer window but the last few builds of particular inform have been so helpful at previewing multiple particle systems and especially these fluid forces that they've really won me over all right so that's the quickest overview I can muster and now let's make some stuff I'm gonna use video co-pilots element 3d for pretty much all of my examples from here out if you're following along it's probably best if you have some knowledge of it now the aquaman trailer does this cool splashy reveal some rotating 3d letters with the aquaman shield on the background let's see how quickly we can do something pretty visually similar start with a new HD comp I'll create a B G grad that's kind of blue gray white toward the center it'll add some text and just adjust the character spacing a bit next I'll add a solid and apply element where I'll scroll down to custom layers and set my text as custom layer one then I can simply head to the scenes setup click on the extrude button and I've got some 3d text next I'll click on my environment button which will add a reflection map that'll give my letters a little bit more reflective detail once they're animated now these letters all need to rotate individually on axis as they come in so if I click over here to switch to mesh view I can assign channel one in the auxilary animation for each of these letters so I can keyframe them outside I'm just using one channel since all these letters rotate at the same time anyway I accept my changes and jump back outside where I can add a group null it's an easy way to handle the position of this text block now if I twirl down to the ox channels I can find the Y rotation and add some keyframes negative 90 to start the letters on edge and then 0 to finish flat now that I see this two closer mimic that trailer logo I'll make these letters a little bit less thick inside element and I'll also add a few different colored bevels to my text now you can do this until you're blue in the face I won't bore you with the details next I'll add two lights and after effects in a simple camera drift out the other 3d component of the original logo is Aquaman's shield now he could waste a bunch of time in a 3d program proving you don't even know how to make the most basic of 3d shapes or you could see if maybe the internet could help you with that it looks like a Google search takes me to a yogi search result that leads me to a Thingiverse model made by spider piggy requiring a simple Creative Commons license attribution I'll gratefully download this STL model and convert it to an obj in blender which is free you could also use mesh convert comm or green token bottom line there's lots of free stuff on the internet everyone go grab it please browse responsibly back in after-effects let's click our way back into element and add a new group folder and designate it number two and then we'll import our shield awesome its little craggy since the model was intended for 3d printing but I'll combat that in the surface options by enabling Auto normals I'll jump back into After Effects and create a null for group 2 and then size and position this shield behind the letters it's a little flat looking so I'm gonna go back into element and make the texture a little bit more Cromie and maybe finding a more exciting reflection map they don't mess with lighting some more until I like how everything looks as a final touch just like in the trailer I'll add a black solid with no light factory on it I'll set the transfer mode to add and then a few keyframes later I've got the basics for my logo and honestly it's something like this is fine for like a boring 3d text and a trailer kind of thing but we're gonna spice it up with some dynamic splashes of water my plan is to create a bunch of unique splash shapes and then composite them into this final comp so I'm going to create a new composition to do some testing with fluid dynamics now as we just learned form can use an obj as its initial shape and then we can play with some fluid dynamics I'll jump into the obj selector and then add new object I'll grab that Aquaman shield we just downloaded and then switch the particle source to its volume now I'll click on the fluid dynamics block and turn fluids on immediately I get what I was hoping for particles in the shape of that shield flowing away like water now switching to the vortex ring will give me some better control of the direction of this destruction as I rotate the vortex ring around I get some really cool patterns and results if I turn the buoyancy down to zero it gives me that nice suspended water feeling and with some fine-tuning of the random swirl and the swirl scale I can get this great organic shape a nice amount of curl I can also adjust something called the fluid time factor it's a way to speed up the whole simulation so everything is moving at the rate that I'm looking for I'll accept these changes and then move out into After Effects well add some keyframes to the particle size to simulate the particles fading out now I could have used particular and an obj emitter to do something really similar but I really like the crisp starting point I get with form now as I play through you can see that these particles kind of fade out after they make that cool swirl under shading I'll also enable the shadowless and dial them up a bit so there's a little bit more depth variety here now this motion is perfect for what I'm imagining but I need a more liquid look so I'm going to use an old technique that I've used in the past to turn particles more liquidy I'll create a new solid and apply CC plastic then I'll select the form layer as the bump map I'll make sure effects and masks is enabled and then I'll select the Alpha as the property to look at if I cut the minimum results I'll get this nice blobby shape thing and then play with the lighting settings and softness until I have the right amount of blob enos that's want then to add some depth of these splashes I'll create a duplicate of this plastic layer move it down to the bottom of the stack wreck and dial the settings until I get this kind of softer shape they don't darken it so it feels a little bit deeper and once that's looking good I'll add an adjustment layer to the top and use the CC light effect to add a side highlight and a bit of shading across the whole shape and then another adjustment layer with pixel motion blur mod you know what I'm actually gonna go to my foreground plastic layer and then add a bit of a drop shadow to enhance this depth even more and now playing back I've got this cool splash now I'm gonna want multiple splashes just like this starting with the Aquaman shield shape and then splashing off to like one side or the other so my solution is to duplicate this comp a few times and then simply dive into forms designer window and aim that vortex ring in a different direction this whirl of particles will get turned into a similar bumpy lumpy splash within its own comp and I repeat the process a few more times and now I've got four unique splashes to start comping with I'll pre render all of these as PNG sequences with an alpha Channel just to save myself some time but they really only take a few minutes to render and now I can place these sequences all into my title comp as 3d layers I'll tap a twice and then go to accept lights and switch it to off for all of these then I'll place this one behind my element layer and leave the other three in front so something like this now these look a little more like splashes of Elmer's glue or something but I'm not done yet so let's focus on this bottom splash layer I'm gonna add a matte Joker to reduce that drop shadow fringe I admit I should have just fixed it earlier but where's gonna leave it but then I'll add CC glass I'll adjust the softness and height and displacement and till I get this kind of crisp clear water looking effect next I'll copy these effects to the other splash layers the one warning if you copy an instance of CC glass it keeps whatever layer you had selected for the bump map which means I'll just quickly pop into each of these and switch them back to look at their own lair and then check this out I'll do a little bit more color correction than some different layering of these pre-rendered splashes but my end result is very satisfying let's push a little further into this realm by creating our own scene with an animated submarine model there are many great places to find 3d resources for your film there's a range of marketplaces and free resources and a simple web search will usually direct you to many of them today I'm spotlighting a sketchfab as a fun resource it's community of artists and hobbyists to put together models and photo scans many of which they're willing to share for CC attribution it's really easy to preview the 3d models on this site and as you can see they have tons of models that would student underwater theme to find a submarine I simply type in submarine and then check downloadable I've got lots of choices but I'm gonna pick this kind of whimsical sub made by JJ art Jezza art thank you I load this model in the cinema 4d where I can break off the tail and create a simple little loop spin element can import animated c4d files which is great if you wanted to do this in blender for free you could also do that either as an animated obj sequence or as two props that you can animate internally in element but you've got options back in After Effects I'm going to add the element to a solid and then import my animated sub now this sub came with all the textures but I've got to do a bit of real inking until I was looking like it self again once that's all there a little cheat to preview your animation is you can click here and grab the start frame and kind of drag it back and forth and you can make sure the animations load it in properly everything's looking good so I'll say okay now in my effect controls I can create a group null for the sub it's feeling a little small so I'm actually gonna hop back into element until it to be bigger and I'll also line it up so the null will be located in a good center spot excellent I add a camera and then two simple keyframes on my submarines no you can see that it's just a straight linear path I want this to be one of those shots where the submarine is kind of driving toward the camera and then whips past it so I'll go a little bit wider add some keyframes for my camera some of the first some at the end I'll turn those into ease keyframes by hitting f9 and then adjusting the speed curve so I get the camera to whip right as the sub passes now obviously we're missing a background and it just so happens that I have a couple of 360 panorama x' to share with you guys I'll load this deeper sea looking one now if this were just a standard multi-plane comp you could maybe throw this texture on a 3d card and push it back so it reacts a little bit to the camera but when I do this with a camera move this big I run into a problem I can't make it big enough to span this camera pan that's where a great little plugin called trap code horizon comes in handy I'll create a solid called horizon and apply the effect horizon creates a 360 degree map that reacts to the camera by default it comes in with this gradient of multiple colors that are fixed to this imaginary 3d backplate but the really fun thing it can do is wrap 360 panorama around the camera all you have to do is select the layer you want to use as the background here and now watch as I orbit the camera around you couldn't really see it's wrapped in every direction now one of the Handy options in case you don't have a proper 360 wrap is that you can adjust the amount of coverage you want your image to have instead of a full 360 degree horizontal coverage I'm gonna squeeze my image a little bit tighter so it fits the whole camera move but ultimately squeezes in a little bit more background detail you can even rotate the map here until it's working nicely with your camera move and now we've got a background and a hero prop but frankly it's really poorly integrated at this point so let's remedy this right now the element layer doesn't have any lights to make the render more realistic so I'll start with a parallel light which I'll manually adjust to be coming from directly overhead now that's a little bit better next I'll add an ambient light that's actually a little bit darker blue just to give us a bit of tinting in the shadowed areas in fact I might pick a more bluish color for this top-down light too now the render settings an element can really punch up your result and we'll explore them more in a moment right now let's just add some ambient occlusion think of ambient occlusion as the soft self shadowing an object has by itself it kind of looks like this or this in our case we'll turn it on crank it up and then tint it a bit blue like the water the next thing I notice is that there's this reflective part of the sub which doesn't really look like it's reflecting the environment so I'm gonna go back into element click on the environment button and load in that underwater panorama you see element uses this thing they call physical lighting simulation where the environment not only reflects if a surface is reflective but the materials are also influenced by that same environment map giving them a more realistic look now also under the render settings you can open up the properties of that physical environment and adjust the gamma tint or even dial up and down the influence it has on the existing lighting let's do a few more things under render settings to make this all look better let's go to shadows and enable shadows I'll select ray-traced because I've been obsessed with ray-traced thing since I was like 14 and you can see how nice that is as I turn it on and off down the list this way we've also got fog and enabling fog is a great way to create atmospheric depth whether it's fog clouds or in this case water I'm gonna sample the color of this darker water over here and then play with the distance and opacity settings until I kind of get the effect of this emerging from murky waters passing and then disappearing back into them and now we've got a pretty formidable scene going here where there once was nothing so let's turn it up with some trap code I'm adding a null and I'm gonna parent it to the submarines no next I'll turn it 3d now doing it in this order gives me a parent didn't know that's got the same orientation as its parent and if I zero out the position I get a null that I can easily move using just the gizmos to place exactly where my propeller is located now watch if I were to rotate this thing around you can see that that null is married in proper 3d space now the point of this null is to help me create a location for the emitter of a particular layer that's attached to it so let's do it solid particular you know the drill I'll add an expression to the position of the submitter by alt or option clicking on it then I'll use the pick whipped to select the tail null just a layer name and then I'll add this dot to world zero zero zero enclosed in these brackets and then parentheses so you should know this expression well if you caught our inner benefit says laser beam tutorial for also if you've just been around the a Eve lock a few times this tells particular to emit particles from wherever the tail null is located within the whole 3d world basically ignoring that its local position is fixed since it's the child of the submarine though and a simple preview will show you exactly what I'm talking about there we go now let's have some fun click on the designer window next let's have the particle shrink over time I'll add a bit of opacity randomness too then let's change the emitter to an obj I want it to be one that has a little bit of height and width disparity like this capsule now I'll jump into the physics block where I can select fluids and I just love watching these the particles in that influence box swirl and twist up like bubbles let's see what it looks like in the cop alright so you can see I've got particles coming off the back of the sub for sure I'll crank up my particle count and adjust the emitter size a bit it's a little boring at first so let's add an expression to the X rotation of the emitter I'll start with time x negative 400 since the propellers spinning counterclockwise little faster than ones per second so let's see what that does nice right now there's not a lot of liquid movement yet a lot of that has to do with the fact that my liquid force region is traveling along with the emitter along this line it's not really sticking around to influence the particles that are remaining it's only about 500 pixels wide by default and this sub right now is at least a thousand pixels long in relative terms so let's increase the force region size to around 2500 now more particles are being affected by the region but it's too slow almost imperceptible so let's scroll down to the global fluid controls and increase the fluid time factor to 3 and now we're getting somewhere I'll turn on visualize relative density because it just looks cool they don't add some keyframes to my particle amount at the beginning because there's this little pop that happens right when you enable liquid forces and I think of it as the spoon that starts your particles churning then goes away now I'm kind of curious to see what happens if you play with the velocity from motion slider in the emitter settings basically this simulates momentum and if I increase the value the particles look a little more like they're being dragged along behind the sub which is actually kind of cool but if I dial this number into negative values I get a different effect looking like the particles are actually shooting backwards as if pushed away from the sub and I actually kind of liked it better I'll up the buoyancy also so the bubbles are inclined to rise after they appear now this is looking pretty good let's add some puffy particles that'll give this trail a little bit more volume and depth I'll go into the designer window click here and select duplicate system now I want fewer particles for this instance I'll pause the player and just focus on what one still-frame looks like I'll choose cloudlet particles that are large and barely opaque and I'll draw a little custom kerb on their opacity over life now when we pop back out these smoky particles should give the illusion of kind of like a microscopic bubble mist I'll add some keyframes to that to at the beginning and now we've got a great little bubble trail I want to make sure all the systems are selected and then go down to the bottom and enable my motion blur at about a ninety degree shutter angle now let's fix up these bubbles that are in front of the submarine at the beginning now one simple way to do this would be to duplicate the element layer place a copy in front of the particles and then key its opacity down as there's that hand over where the bubbles start to be in front but it's always good to be mindful of when you start doubling up on effects that could become heavy so here's a cheat I like to use sometimes instead of a duplicate of the whole element layer create a solid and apply the set mat effect then point it to the element layer checked effects and masks and now you've got a simple mat layer that's copying the Alpha Channel from the other existing layer I can apply this as an inverted alpha mat and key out the opacity right when the handover happens a few last touches I'll add an instance of trapcode form to create some atmospheric floaties and that should be pretty quick I'll throw in a solid with form alter the particles an x y&z grow them to fill the whole screen I'll use cloudlet particles and then disperse and displace them and I'll set the evolution speed to a little bit lower and now you've got some great additional underwater detail that helps the space feel a little bit more deeper than 3d now with all shots that are entirely CG I like to apply an adjustment layer with an instance of Magic Bullet renoise err to add a bit of subtle texture to the image the cool thing about this plug-in is that it's not a simple texture overlay renoise ER is actually scattering the native color and light values to simulate real photographic grain I'll also throw in an instance of CC vignette - now it's banding a little bit and that's because I'm in 8-bit for this project if I go to the project window an alt option click over here I can switch to 16-bit which totally clears that up now we'll send it out to render where it ultimately takes about six minutes for this six second shot which is not bad for a full CG environment with about eighty thousand visible particles by the end of it you guys are doing great now let's take on a similar challenge but this time with little extra life I'm gonna pick up speed here a little bit but it's really important to me that you see that I'm using all of the same techniques we've discussed across this series let's start by searching sketchfab for an animated and downloadable model simply using the keyword see right away I find digital live 3ds model 46 of a sea turtle this turtle even survived a shark bite so a little After Effects won't faze him the animated file is native to the free software blender it's beautifully animated in here so just like in our Black Panther episode I'm gonna export an obj sequence by clicking export obj and then checking the animation box here a few minutes later I've got a perfect sequence then I'll hop into After Effects to set up my scene I'll load in one of those underwater panoramas and apply it to a solid with horizon next I'll add a camera layer then I'll add another solid with element I'll jump into the scene setup and I'll click on import 3d sequence and check it out he even loaded with his textures now for the environment map I'll select that same panorama as before and then I'll scale and align the turtle group to the center right here I'll click OK then I'll create a null controller for my turtle and create a practically identical swim past the camera with pan thing and this animated obj sequence is already doing a lot and if I go down a quick checklist of things like ambient occlusion fog adding lights and enabling shadows I start to get some really great results it's really worth playing with the sampling that element can do in various properties generally the higher the value the more fidelity your render has now with some diffuse shadows this top lighting I've got going looks pretty plausible but it's missing something just as we discussed in part one things that are underwater often have caustic patterns on them and this is especially true of anything like sea turtles that are just under the surface of water now as some of you may have seen on my Twitter feed I've been doing some experimenting with how to pull this off an element so I took a cue from theatrical productions where they often use a gobo like this one the cast lights like this on stage I made my own set of 3d modeled gobos so I could attach them to a set of lights add an expression to make them rotate and then place them in a similar scene giving me this result now because I need a rigid geometry to make these holes these light patterns are static which is kind of a bummer but I've tried casting shadows from an animated layer before and it just didn't work unless I just missed something maybe there's a hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for video hey Hoshi what's up man oh that's actually you hey what are you working on I was trying this like animated shadows thing with these virtual gobos to make kind of a caustic pattern thing this looks awesome yeah it's none of my business but another cool thing you could try is a shadow map with the alpha cut off on the shader and you know use like a fractal noise or something's but this is this is pretty awesome gotcha so shadow mapping makes this work not raytrace thanks man yeah of course no problem by the way I really love your work I love all the action movie dad stuff it's all thanks I was actually doing a video with my kids for like the ground was on fire you know the running and screaming was really nice did he use like particles are some of your stock footage for the fire no it's not with the fix oh that's uh irresponsible but uh thanks for the pointers Andrew no problem Hoshi we'll see you next time well that was really weird but now we know that we can cast shadows of a video layer so let's create a new square 2k comp and we'll create a caustic pattern in here I'll create this one using a cell pattern with some vector blur adding a time expression to my self patterns evolution gives me some great uniform but still organic looking caustics now if I add an extract effect to all this I can basically key out the brightest areas and when I enable the transparency you can see that now we have the makings of an animated gobo basically imagine if this opaque pattern were printed on glass and you shined a light through it now that enters confirmed this will work we can create a shadow caster that uses this animated texture let's crack open element and add a group to in this group I'll add a plane scale it up a bit now if I hit OK this plane is being rendered into the scene casting the shadow let me create a null for group too so I can manipulate it and now you can see how interactively you can play with shadows now this needs to be just above him like a water surface and bigger now I'll import my caustic texture and move it down to the bottom of the layer stack I'll go back to my effect controls for element and then down under custom texture Maps I can assign this layer I'll jump into the scene setup window where I can modify my planes texture by selecting the custom layer I just assigned now if I scroll down to the material properties I can find the Alpha threshold and dial this up and now my new layer has caustic shaped holes look at that now the first time I tried testing this I was using Ray traced shadows which don't detect the layers transparency but now we know that we should use shadow maps and we're on our way I'll do a little repositioning of this gobo and I'll actually parent its null to the main spotlight that way if I decide to move this light around it'll stay nice and aligned with it they have to combat some of the choppiness in the shadow I'll play with the map size over here and the diffusion settings in my light I'm also gonna add a bit of an under light almost like there was some light from an aquarium display or bounce off the bottom of a pool or something I don't know it just looks cool now play this through and it's awesome I like this turtle now let's add a solid with form I'll create a wide and tall sheet of particles not too deep this time and then I'll push the whole shape back I'll disperse these particles make them cloudlets really dial up the displacement from the fractal field and turn the flow down to about 10 now check this out I'm gonna place this instance of form down below my turtle now I'll duplicate it and place another copy above now on this foreground instance a form I'll pull its position to be up closer to the camera and now when I preview we've got a turtle sailing through water but you know what's missing the water water surface and I'll be darned if we haven't talked about how trapcode Muir is awesome at creating watery surfaces so I'll just create a new solid add mirror I'll rotate it flat and stretch out the shape once it's this big it's worth cranking up the number of vertices and x and y and then I'll adjust the fractal shape amplitude and frequency looking pretty good let's scroll down to visibility where I can add a black fog and adjust it to span almost the whole depth of the shape now when I convert this layers blending mode to screen the fog works like a nice soft fall-off and now I can use the far slider in the visibility settings to trim off those distant spikes I'll switch the material color to something watery too this will kind of soften the look of these to control the motion of this water I'm going to go to my fractal settings and add a time expression to the evolution and the X scroll speed now between futzing with the number of vertices and X&Y and a little bit of playing with the complexity of the fractal field I could land on something that looks really wonderful and watery and then watch this now I think this looks pretty great on its own if I wanted to add a little bit more spice to this I could import a copy of that aqua template we discussed in part 1 then I can drag this sea turtle animation into my oh one footage comp from here and then switch over to the aqua template I can disable my form layer since I'm already doing that in the other comp now if I hop up into the underwater controls I can play with the tinting a little bit how much it's blurred on the edges and also I can grab my shine light and drag it up here so it can look like it's casting a few little rays from top of screen just subtly now let's play through this thing now I hope you guys can see that with the right tools you can easily hop around and grab a few elements and throw together this whole scene in just a few minutes and it really makes me wonder what else we could accomplish in such a short amount of time I mean it seems like a shot like this would be impossible to create so quickly I mean who would take on that mission we would so let's dive in by searching for divers on sketchfab well download this animated one I'm gonna load this into cinema 4d and discard the existing keyframes but since this figure is already rigged it means that I can pose her into a nice diving shape and you could do this in blender too then an After Effects I'll jump into element again and create this full turbine set out of components from motion design to I mean you can do a lot with these if you want to spend the time I'll create a group too and add that posed diver then I can add a camera so I can navigate this weird set and find my framing just like in all the other examples I'll use a group null to add position and keyframes to the diver who all have thread this needle and once I like this and I know I'm not gonna change the camera again I pre-rendered layer and an alpha of my diver soloed now I really like a lot of the handy things that come with that aqua template we've been using so I'll import that at this point I'll move my assets into the template itself giving me those color controls some edge blur and vignette a little bit of ripple it also has this default form array of particles which actually works pretty well with my comms camera even just for the default settings now that I've got these fundamentals the particles are what's going to really make it sing I'm going to use particular and plan on using a combination of fluid dynamics and classic air dynamics I'll start with a classic set or no fluids I'll use an expression to link the emitters position to where my divers null is and you can see where I'm going with this already now instead of the point emitter I'm going to import my diver obj into particular and now if I turn down the emitter velocity you can kind of see what I'm getting well jump back out to the AE window where I can see that this emitter is too big by default so I'll scale it down until it's about the same size as my diver and a close look at my first few frames I can see that the emitters backwards compared to how element brought it in so I'll go into the handy obj emitter settings and check invert Z and now we're on our way I'll make my particle smaller and then scroll down to the air dynamics where I can dial up the turbulence field and add some air resistance once I get the amount of turbulence I want I can fine-tune the particles to fade out over time the way real bubbles cannot and then do our famous add a bunch of bigger less opaque particles in a duplicate system to give us this result now right at the end here these particles aren't supposed to exist past this ring so I'm going to use particular obscuration layer settings for that I'll create a 3d solid call it ground I'll lay it flat and because the entrance to this tunnel is basically right at the center of our 3d world already if I draw a mask here and scrub through it's perfectly positioned I'll change that mask to a subtract and then a hop back into my particular layer I'll make sure the master system is selected and then scroll down to visibility at the bottom and add the ground with its masks as an obscure ation layer marvelous now to preserve some of that work I'll actually duplicate my particular layer and place the second copy behind the divers alpha Channel I'll use that layer as an inverted alpha mat making it so the diver is now sandwiched between these two streams of particular now if I alter the settings a bit between the two of them I give this nice look of a portion of the bubbles being obscured by the diver and a few of them being in front on my front particular layer I'll enable the motion blur at a ninety degree shutter angle and then I can move on to our pretty layer our fluid dynamics layer we'll add a solid with particular and then just like in our intro I'll create a sphere of particles that fade out over time then I'll enable fluid dynamics a vortex ring to be precise I'll flip the ring to be pointed down and change the buoyancy to negative I'll play with the settings a bit until I like what I see and now that I have this generally looking like some plunging bubbles I'll step back into AE here I can adjust the emitter position to align way up here with a divers entrance now I know she's generally headed straight down so this angle should work just about perfectly adjusting the fluid time factor ends up being a really useful tool for tai this fluid sim to work with the rendered layer as I had just a time factor I'll also play with things like the random swirl in the swirl scale and just like with any simulation you basically just preview it a bunch of times until you really start to like how it looks when I turn on all my other layers I've got a very fun scene again in a very short amount of time to give you the real-world figures I spent about thirty minutes on downloading this figure and getting it set up in this scene and animated it took about five minutes to import that underwater template and do the color correction I spent about thirty minutes adding my particular layers to get it to this point and then after that I fussed around with the settings for another thirty minutes or so just to get it as pretty as possible so two hours ish for some really delightful stuff alright so I really can't help myself so we're gonna do just one more that uses all of our skills combined I really like this shot in the Aquaman trailer it's just kind of fun kind of Pacific Rim ish and I think that we could do something just like it if we wanted to I'll start to sketchfab for the word creature and down here a little bit I find this delightful creature named forg made by Sagan I like him because he's got a human morpha type which is going to be important in a second I can download and then unzip these files it's a Coolatta file so I'll open it in blender and then export an obj of it I'm doing that so I can load it up on mix omocha you may remember this from our Black Panther episode here I can upload a character by importing that obj model and then because he's got a human-like form mix ammo can auto rig him just by me placing a few guide markers for his chin wrists elbows and knees once it thinks for a second it's got an auto rigged up now I can search for motions that I like and apply them right in this preview window I like this one labeled Aurore which still gives me a few customizable sliders up here where I can fine-tune the animation a bit I want this thing to look like he's a hundred feet tall so I'll turn the overdrive to a lower value to simulate scale once I'm ready I press download and then get a nice animated FBX I can open that FBX in blender and he's there he's really small but when I press play I can see that he's got his motion intact I'm not gonna worry about his scale right now I'm just gonna jump right to exporting an obj sequence by selecting obj and then I'll put him in this folder I'll make a new and I don't know how to make a new folder okay and I'm sorry guys truth be told I'm really not very good with blender I literally just learned how to orbit the camera while making this tutorial but it's free and that's pretty cool and you know if you wanted advice from the world's greatest blender err I suppose you could always google it and and it turns out that that's a popular filmmaker and debunker of internet hoaxes Captain disillusion oh man that guy's really blowing up right now anyway now that I have my folder I check the animation box over here and I start exporting my sequence but there's about two hundred and fifty frames so I'm just gonna let that bake in the background while I get started in After Effects I'll start with a new HD comp and then I'll create a couple solids one called horizon and one for my element layer next I'll import this sky panorama that I clone stamp together and I'll create a pre comp from it once I brought the pre comp in here I'll tell horizon to look at this as the texture and I'll hide my element layer there we go and next I'll add a new 35 millimeter camera so I can look around it's like that let's see how our obj exports going we've got a little more time so let's hop into our sky pre-comp to transform this static image into some more animated looking stormy skies I'll start by creating a new black solid and adding a fractal noise effect to it I'll adjust the brightness and contrast of this until I get just a few little spots all over the place and I'll disable the uniform scaling and make them kind of wider than they are tall so they look a little bit cloud shaped I'll alt option click on the evolution to add this expression time times 200 and as I play through it just makes it so the noise patterns changing through time if I make this additive I can quickly preview what it looks like compared to the scale of the clouds under it and I'm liking this so I'm gonna go ahead and pre compose this layer moving all of its attributes into a new composition now all of these white patterns and some of these dark shadows are going to turn into lightening patterns that appear in the clouds but what I need for that is a way to somehow spotlight just little isolated bits of these white patterns so I'm actually kind of use the effect spotlight which I have basically never used for something like this but I think it's gonna work I'm gonna use an expression to link the from and the two coordinates so basically I just get a nice little feathered spot and then on the position of the from I'm gonna do something kind of fun we'll add an expression that begins with this poster eyes time and right here I can type a certain number of frames per second we'll try eight and then I'll put a semicolon and I'll add a standard wiggle expression we'll have it wiggle frequently by about 2000 pixels and now when I play this back what you're seeing is that wiggle expression happening but it's time is posterized - just eight frames a second that makes it a little bit more staccato kind of like lightning and in fact if I were to duplicate this effect and play it together now I could have two little highlighted spots kind of bouncing around and this is actually really cool already I can tell that there's a weird error with the expression I think because I duplicated the effect so let me go peek down here and yes it copied the expression so all I've got to do to edit that is add a little - to my CC spotlight I'm gonna change the properties of the second spotlight making it a little bit wider and a little bit softer playing these two at the same time you get a nice effect of some bright highlights popping up and some kind of wider or softer ones this posterized time addition to any expression is really really nice because it can give you these cool herky-jerky kind of random but not smooth random motion to things if you like I'll play with the settings just a little bit more and we'll pop back into the sky comp and here I'll change the mode of that pre-comp to multiply which basically darkens the whole sky and allows a few bright spots to appear where that fractal noise is then if I add a duplicate a copy and offset its timing and change it to an additive mode you'll see that the two combined in this way where you're getting these bright highlights from the Lightning in some spots and everything else is a little bit darken together I'm gonna try adding a bit of glow to my additive layer just to see something like this and now this is looking pretty cool already technically this whole sky map is supposed to be the sky and then the sky is reflection below so do that I'm actually gonna squeeze down these two layers and then make a duplicate that is that you know the opposite and drag it down here you won't really see this in the comp but just so I know it's there this will look a little bit more convincing down at the horizon line I'll play with their opacity a little bit more until I get kind of a good combination of the fractal noise and the photographed layer and I'm liking it so let's hop back into our comp and see what that looks like wrapped around really pretty cool looks enough like a stormy sky to me and it's gonna be the background to a whole lot of other stuff going on so I want this to be just passable enough I don't want to dwell too long by now that obj sequence is done exporting and I'm ready to hop into my element layer add the element effect and then go up to file import sequence I'll select those OBJ's and bring them on in I will relink this model to all the textures that it came with which can take just a second but it's great that this model included them all now I'll pop into my scene and add a group no for the monster I'll scale him way up because I want him to be pretty big compared to my camera and then I'll start previewing through this motion it's pretty fantastic and I'm gonna set a few camera keyframes just to follow his roar around a little bit and then I'm going to use kind of a spindle technique where I'll create a no that's 3d technically right in the center of this monster somewhere I'll attach my camera to it and then add a couple of keyframes on the Y rotation so it kind of gives you that Michael Bay low angle spinning around this object and you can still keyframe your camera and all of the camera movements separately next it's time to start lighting this monster I'm gonna add a dark blue ambient light just to feel like the sea and the sky or something or filling in the shadows just a teeny bit really low then I'll add a spotlight and turn it into kind of an under lighting whenever something is lit from below it makes it feel like it's really tall and that light sources are generally below it so that's kind of fun and right now the monsters got a really flat finish but I'm gonna place him in a rainstorm so that's not gonna do for very long so let's hop into element and play with his textures a bit and increase the reflectivity all the way up to a hundred make sure that this character is all the way glassy and then I'll dial down the way his glossiness and reflectivity textures are affecting that amount so he's actually pretty glossy all over now he's looking great I'll hit okay and then back outside he looks like a nice wet monster and it's a little bit too uniform so I'll hop back in real quick and dial up the normal bump influence so it's a little bit more stippled now when I play through and get a preview of this monster I think he's looking pretty badass next I'm gonna add the Lightning light now this should be a really bright light that for the most part flickers on and off creating little rim lights all around this monster I'm gonna do something kind of interesting with this light I'm gonna parent it to a null that I make 3d and place right in the middle of the shark since this light is way kind of in the background you'll see that as I rotate that null the light is still always pointed right at the shark giving me a nice rim light or something like that I'm going to orient this null so this light is kind of right back here behind the head of the creature just pointing straight at us and from there I'm going to add some expressions for it to rotate left and right and up and down and I'm going to use that posterized time effect that we were using earlier and I honestly don't know if it's poster eyes or posture I think I've always said posterized but I'm gonna add an expression that basically says that at a rate of 8 frames per second I want this property to wiggle in about 90 degrees of freedom and on the Y rotation I want it to rotate sometimes a little bit more than 180 sometimes I want it to come around the front a bit so I'll add this number to 44 now and now when I play back you get this amazing strobe effect of this lightening pattern jumping around it's actually a little bit too much in the front for my liking so I'm gonna try to dial down these values a little bit until I end up with a nice amount of wiggle on them that I really like now to work in concert with this light moving around randomly I'm also going to add a wiggle expression to the intensity of the light so it won't always be super bright sometimes it'll be a little bit less and sometimes it'll flicker in between frames a bit and I love this this is look how scary and silly this is now I'm in love with the way this monster is looking so I'm gonna pre-baked him I'm gonna render out a PNG sequence of the beauty pass the moths are looking like this and then also I'm gonna make a duplicate of my element layer and I'm going to come down to output and switch it to a z-depth output now you can see that as I adjust the z-depth start and the z-depth end actually even adding some keyframes in them to kind of sandwich this shark monster nicely I'll be able to use this pass to really help me composite things that are supposed to be kind of in-between in that body space like fog or rain or mist in any case let's render these both simultaneously they actually go really fast and once they're done I'll import them and replace their use in the comp now it's time for me to start focusing on my particular layers I'm going to add particular to a solid I'm gonna use a box emitter type and make it way wider and way deeper and then I'll dial up the number of particles like crazy I'm gonna make it be a directional spray pointing negative 90 degrees which actually means that I have the height and the depth reversed right now so I'll switch that back scrolling down to the bottom and enabling motion blur will make this start to look just like rain which is awesome under the air physics settings I'll also play with the wind so it's blowing the raindrops a little bit to the side and also add some turbulence to the position now the next thing I'm going to do that's gonna really add some complexity to this particular layer is go to the shading and switch it on now at first everything looks a little bit uniform but if I play with a nominal distance here I can get some different varieties of how much the light is affecting it how much fall-off in the light there is I'm also going to switch the shadow lets on which gives me a kind of rich look to all this and since I'm imagining that this is the layer that's pretty close to this monster I'm going to now use that depth map as an inverted luma matte meaning that the brightest parts of it will be erased so for example this brightest part of the arm will look like it's occluding pixels when it comes down at the beginning and this just helps the rain look a little bit more like it's blended half into his body a bit and now that this is all working I'll actually duplicate this instance a particular and drag it behind my monster and then I'll push its position way back in Z so I have a nice bunch of background rain going on - next I want to add some cool wisps of water that kind of looks like it's being blown off the surface and all this wind eNOS for that I'm going to use the new fluid dynamic settings in particular I'm going to create a separate comp so I can just focus on this I'll add a solid with particular and then hop into the designer window I'll create a sphere that emits a bunch of small particles and then I'll jump over to physics where I'll add a vortex ring I'll point this vortex ring to the side and then dial up its amount a lot I'll also play with a random swirl on the squirrel scale a bit once I like the shape of these swirls I'm going to duplicate my comp but add some of those bigger particles that are barely opaque just like in the previous examples ultimately my little swirl looks like this now I can pre render this really long comp now I made it extra long so once I've imported it back into after-effects I can take this layer and duplicate it about four times and then offset the timing a bit and so when these are all set to a screen transparency I get this nice blend of all of these systems of particles blowing across in this nice misty swirly pattern now if I place that on a 3d card and soullow it with my monster for right now you can see that I could create one big card that's behind the monster and one that's in front of him but utilizing that depth map that I rendered earlier as an inverted luma matte as I add some brightness and contrast keyframes to that Z depth map it can help me control how far in front or behind this mist seems I'm liking just about everything about this comp so I'm going to add some finishing touches to a top adjustment layer I'm going to apply Magic Bullet Looks and then see if I can find a setting that I really like I'll also add an instance of renoise er like we talked about I'll add some additional CC vignette and I'll also add universe spot blur I'm gonna use an ellipse that's about as big as the whole screen and then check invert allowing it to blur the pixels at the edges and lastly I'm going to add some chromatic aberration from universe now this effect a little goes a long way but I really do like the final result so I'm going to turn down a lot of the values of this and I'm also going to select the bokeh lens texture because I think it works really well for a wet scene and this was crazy let's let's check it out I think that was really fun guys to accomplish everything we did in the last hour relied on some incredible software on tools but I also really wanted to share a lot of the places and resources I turn to whenever I need help the point is you spend a lot of time behind a monitor but remember that that monitor is also a portal to a whole community of people who dedicate their time spreading and sharing their work and their knowledge so learn from them combine these skills with your own stories and inspiration to create something new and wonderful and totally original hey captain something about that Andrew Kramer cameo seemed awfully familiar derivative even I don't know mr. flair looked like your standard disembodied voice accompanied by a lens flare to me he probably just had audio to work with and was trying to keep it interesting audio cameos so lame indeed but now I'm afraid it's time for us to go a YouTube endscreen somewhere is attempting to get the viewers to click on more of their video there it is we're too late [Music] [Music]

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 191,135

Rating: 4.9591126 out of 5

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, action movie kid, aquaman, dc, fluids, water, underwater

Id: x4XjNWUXUd8

Length: 64min 50sec (3890 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019