CHEAP TRICKS | Bill and Ted 3 VFX-cellent tutorial

[Music] man i wish there an easier way to make this bill and ted tutorial hey what's up i'm you from a month in the future and i brought along the completed episode whoa i know right greetings my excellent friends future hoshi here and there's a new bill in 10 movie coming out in the future or the past depends when you watch this today i'm showing you how to make a customized phone booth in cinema 4d i did my best guess at modeling a version of this egg-shaped time pod featured in the trailer and we'll throw those into some scenes and also go worrying through the circuits of time i'll even show you how to create a trapcode particular vr environment to use as a reflection map it'll be most splendiferous you can download these models and a new and improved electrify template for free through the link below within this tutorial you can take control of time itself with the nifty youtube chapter demarcations or the table of contents below to navigate to any bit that you'd like a lot of folks directly and indirectly assisted me in putting together this tutorial and i'd love to give a personal major shout out to puget systems for sponsoring my new action movie dad workstation with an amd ryzen 9 and an nvidia rtx 2080 ti video card now it arrived right in the middle of me making my kraken tutorial and i found that i was able to run identical cinema 4d simulations and after effects element 3d renders markedly faster on the new system i've also been playing a lot with rotobrush 2 and content aware fill for video which both perform exceptionally on the new computer not to mention that my trapcode suite now runs optimally saving on computing and processing time really frees me up to be more creative and i'm all about saving time and speaking of saving time we need a 3d model to do these animations we'll start with a phone booth now for youngins a phone booth is a a metal box used to make telephone calls and also a staple for time travel plots you see what happens the slackers mcfly the bill and ted phone booth is pretty iconic but i don't have a super firm grip on what it looks like in detail so after looking up some reference images i settle on this model from sketch fab user rudd olenka as my base it's a creative commons model which i can remix and pass along to you my friends but first a few changes so i'll load it into cinema 4d where i'm going to transform it into a more faithful model before kicking it to you folks now disclaimer as i've said a lot on cheap tricks i'm just learning cinema 4d so the next two exercises may be comically simple and or misguided so if you're an expert chime in below so i can learn more i learn the best from doing and as time goes on i hope to get better and more confident of this program so i can teach you whatever i learn along the way all right consider yourselves disclaimed now this booth model came in blank so i got to start with some texture linking normally i'd use the asset manager to relink multiple textures but as sometimes happens these came in totally unlinked at least the materials were named properly so i'll get them restored and then save this booth as a cinema project once we're linked up i can see that it would be helpful to be able to preview this booth texture a little bit better so with my material selected i'll click on the viewport tab and change the texture preview size of booth to 8k and now it'll look a lot better while i'm working this texture's got a lot of fun flavor but i'm actually going to overhaul it and i might as well start by getting organized over here you can see everything's just a box so i'm gonna give them all distinct names to confuse myself less later then i'm going to do some super basic modification of this geometry i'll go into point mode and then switching views back and forth i'll grab and translate this relatively minimal model into the proper proportions for the bill and head booth it'll also need some simple red panels and some glass sections which are missing i just use simple planes and boxes for all this including the front door which i'll make up of two segments so i can animate it later next i jump in and do some photoshopping erasing the stickers and graffiti and then also pasting the simple phone sign to replace the branded logo i even decided to touch up the face plate of the phone to get a little bit more on theme it's pretty fun to research these kind of objects and the replica prop forum is a really great resource to go to if you're interested in a hero prop from your favorite film and if you're in love with it it's really likely that someone on there is too and in my case i looked a lot at jack dowd's phone booth conversion project as reference and i also used user egon spengler's reference of the payphone face itself why does that name sound so familiar it'll come to me for the umbrella antenna i was positive i'd just be able to find an umbrella model that had the same kind of structure but like 20 minutes later i realized that it was silly for me to not just be modeling this myself so i did i found a good shot of it from the new movie trailer and decided to go off of this one image alone to kind of build out my version now remember i'm basic so i started with a cylinder with a bunch of height segments so i could just grab the individual rings and then kind of mold them into the shape of this center rod then i used some cubes and arranged them like little spindles just kind of guessing and doing some super basic stretching out of some of their segments i also placed a small capsule right through here kind of as little bolt detail and then i drew the profile of a little wire using the pen tool and then added that and a tiny circle into a sweep object to generate this little wire i select and group these spindle objects together and then add them to a cloner object now instead of the default grid array i switch to radial and looky there there are eight spindles in the movie antenna i think so i'm gonna go with that number and then reposition my spindles until they look pretty faithful to me i'll copy that over to my booth project and just set it right on top you can actually see a really clear shot of the top of the booth in the trailer and luckily it's just super simple so i'll just plop the antenna right there and i love it all right last i'll move the anchor points and the hinges on these door pieces so i can make a super simple like two keyframe animation of the booth opening the cool part about these being rigid bodies animated in cinema is that the trapcode suite and element3d can utilize this kind of animation built right into the c4d file that it loads which will come in handy later and now our booths open for business now if you've seen the trailer you know that there's more than one way to travel through time i'm actually referring to the egg-shaped uh time pod that kristen shaw comes out of uh oh man it's gonna be fun she plays rufus daughter i bet she's got some really fun futuristic name i'm kelly so it looks like an egg kinda and kind of like a uh a diving bell or perhaps you know the the eva pod you know from that movie wally and i was considering modifying one of these models kind of into that desired shape but you know i guess if you're gonna make an omelette you've gotta make some eggs now since my modeling is kind of trash i'll just give you the basics i created a sphere with 36 divisions around it and then pressed c to make it editable then i started splitting off polygon selections into little panels i used the extrude tool to add some thickness to some of these sections kind of similar to how i did my ice in the kraken tutorial and the bool function subtracting one shape from another is one of the few things i know how to do so i boiled a cylinder right out of the middle here and then added this little tube and a disk as that little light on top and then we were getting close enough that i decided to add some taper objects and ultimately used two of them to sort of squash and stretch this egg into a pretty similar shape to the trailer i even kind of modeled the interior based on my best guess from what i can see it's kind of a c shaped bench and since i haven't learned how to use symmetry properly i'm doing my best to hand craft a shape and extrude it you know an easier way might have probably been to just create a text object and literally used a letter c oh well i recolor the interior to be kind of blue shrink a copy of these support struts into the pod and now we've got something that looks okay i pulled out a little notch between these front doors and also threw in this you know stretched guitar pick shaped window and you know now that i think about it the silhouette actually looks a lot like a like a spinning guitar pick anyway i used an extruded copy to cut out the windows and then also kept that little spline around so i could sweep a little window bevel like this one and uh i think we're in pretty good hey man it's future future you and uh i'm here to tell you that your pod models got a lot of issues what this this format is already confusing listen some of your normals are flipped and there's some bad geometry that will be most heinous when you try to import them what am i supposed to do i'm like in the middle of it don't worry i fixed them a little and they'll work for the rest of your tutorial i mean you're pretty good at after effects but you've got some uh you should uh continue to broaden just say it you're a beginner at c40 but that's okay because maxon has lots of resources for you on their channel covering a broad range of topics from beginner to advanced you know your feedback sounds a lot like a promo you're even using that red giant voice i don't know what you're talking about but i've got to get back to the future yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so we've got some models just saw the movie and it's actually not divots in the door they're like fridge handle kind of i was guessing from the teaser okay let's put him in a scene in after effects i'll camera track this little pan down scene i'll define my ground plane and then run the normalized track script the free script from workbench tv which allows you to normalize based on the floor or the wall now i know some of you requested that and what can i say joe 2020 i'll add a solid with element and then i'll do something that's become pretty standard for me inside element i'll create two group folders in group two i'll simply add a plane and turn it into a shadow catcher by clicking on its material swatch and scrolling down to advanced and checking matte shadow then back in group one i'll import the model that i'd like to place into my scene in this case it's the phone booth and as i import it i'll be sure that i check import animation and i've got a bit of texture material starting to do it's pretty standard to spend a little bit of time in the element window getting all of your materials into the best shape they can be uh whenever i have to deal with glass in element i reach for this preset called rough glass and then i edit it a bit now if you don't have this pro shaders pack you could really do it with just about any material you like but the important thing is that you go to the advanced properties of the material in your scene and then change the blend mode to add or screen and you can also turn down the force opacity slider to show you better what this is doing i will load in an environment and this one looks enough like it'll match our city footage and now as i rotate the model around you can sort of see that those glass panels are mostly visible via their reflection so good enough for me for now i'll click ok and then back in after effects i'll add a group null so i have a handle on this 3d booth and then i'll find a desired landing spot now remember how we made that door animate earlier here's how we utilize it in element under group 1 go to baked animation and change the playback speed to 0. now i can click the stopwatch on my frame offset putting it at zero and i know my animation is 50 frames so when the value is at zero the door should be closed and when the value is 50 the door should be open now because this isn't an object sequence it's a cinema 4d file the animation is actually being interpolated meaning i could stretch this animation out over a longer period of time and everything will still look smooth now i'm just realizing that this phone booth is huge and it should honestly probably be more a similar height to these doors of the building over here it's a less yeah it's less cool composition now but maybe we can cheat it later all right let's animate the booth in if my world is properly aligned i should be able to add a keyframe to this end position and then scroll here where the camera is tilted up and then just raise that sucker all the way up here now i'll play with the timing to get it to work with the tilt and i'll adjust the velocity curve so it's super fast and then slows down a little but the value is still up here because i want it to slam into the ground all right we'll continue to improve this booth once we know what the effects situation is i'm going to start by focusing on the antenna now i gave this a little bit of thought and then i decided that i would like to try a video game approach to bringing this antenna to life i'm going to create a series of cards with electricity on them that are kind of placed within this antenna geometry i'll show you what i mean i jumped back into cinema 4d and then created a plane with four width segments and just one height segment and now in polygon mode i can take each polygon and right click to split it into its own piece this trick is my shortcut to making it so one material is now being divided into four quarters across these now separate planes they share a texture but each section will look unique i align these planes with the antenna one plane per cross pair then i'll head back to after effects where i can update my model to make sure those cards are in there and then i'll create a new composition that's a little bit smaller and i'll import a side view of my antenna so i have a little guide now i'll add a black solid with the advanced lightning effect and then just go to town hand keying some brief but distinct patterns of electricity that are very customized to the shape of this antenna once i have this nice long piece of animation i can create a new comp sized that i can stack these four copies of the animation on top of each other now i'll offset each subsequent lightning card and then if i select these three offset copies i can duplicate them and slide them back so they loop into themselves the result is four offset looping bits of electricity animation which i can now bring into my phone booth composition in element i can set this lightning as a custom layer and then in the element interface i can find that material for these cards and i can set this custom layer as the diffuse and illumination channel to eliminate that last bit of the card showing i'll adjust the alpha threshold and then after a bit of fine tuning i get exactly the result i want a variety of distinct electric lines that interact nicely with the antenna now when setting something up like this the illumination color and the glow tint in element can help you dial in the look of something like electricity now earlier i call this the video game approach because it reminds me of those like pc games of the early aughts that would feature transparent textures for things like electricity or fire on little 2d cards but one of the nice cheats here is that element's glow feature adds a screen relative thickness to the glow even when the card itself is at a pretty dramatic angle this makes it less obvious that these are just 2d cards and let's take a look at this and it may have felt like a lot of work but for a detail like this antenna i really think it adds that extra oomph to be able to really see the little tendrils of electricity in front and through these metal spokes now playing with all this electricity is giving me flashbacks i seem to recall building a template that allowed people to add electricity to their footage it worked by having a precomp where your layer lived which fed directly into another comp where the electricity was sort of customizable to your piece of footage now i did a quick test early on to see if i could just throw this on my phone booth element and the result was very promising but it's a little bit clunky if you just want to add electricity to a layer that's already part of a comp you're working on so long story short i'm saving a version of this template where i've added some top level controls using the pseudo effects extension here's how it works just load in my template and then copy this solid over to whatever comp you're working in then place this layer above your keyed footage and then in choose layers set the source layer for that to be the red green blue and alpha then in the electrify controls you can control the amount the scale the flow speed and direction also the crackle speed independently you can also select the color of the electricity and there's a glow multiplier slider right here under advanced there are two sliders so you can adjust the macro turbulence size basically the overall tendril shape and the micro turbulence size which adjusts those smaller jaggedy things next under advanced is this 3d layer reference point now this is all a 2d cheated effect but i noticed that when the camera drifted or the object moved it was kind of weird that we were moving through the field of electricity rather than the field sticking to it but if i select the 3d null that is my phone booth position this reference point below has an embedded to comp expression that adds that amount of 2d offset to all of the fractal fields so now as the camera settles the electricity seems more married to the object also i can grab the object and slide it around and the electricity will look much more like it's clinging to the object anyway this top level electrify control all works because of this pile of native after effects filters below right now there are a whole lot of expressions going on underneath the hood and my calculations aren't perfect i just tested them on a few different scenarios here today and you're welcome to mess with any of those expressions or settings for these effects below i found different cases where it was really helpful to blur the footage more or less ahead of time and also you can decide whether or not you want this additive fractal noise which is there to kind of create something for the fine edges to grab onto in your otherwise smooth surfaces but totally up to your taste i mean honestly being able to add electricity to a layer feels like something we should just universally be able to do wait universe i work for an after effects plug-in company you know i need to make a phone call hello harry frank it's hoshi how'd you get this number this is my personal can we make a universe plug-in out of this thing i'm sending over please please please please please please yeah sure fine awesome you're the best uh yeah how's the how's the family they're asleep hoshi it's like 3 30 in the morning all was good catching up man right well no promises but we're gonna try to put that on the list for you guys hey harry frank does awesome work at red giant we like to call him the uh master of the universe uh i like the column i mean not to not do his i apply my new pseudo effect to this phone booth and adjust the settings and scale until i really like what's going on i also add some keyframes to the electricity amount slider so it fades out so this comp is looking a lot better already but it still needs a bunch of little effect details so i decide to do what all sensible people should do and check footage crate to see if they can speed up my workflow so i added the smoky landing effect which is probably intended for death eaters and also a few ground bursts of mist which are cleverly made as a front and back asset so you can envelop your object i may have not grabbed the right matching pair there but whatever i'll turn these into 3d cards and then time them to work with the booth landing just like that then i add a copy of null light factory for which i utilize a two comp expression so i can put the flare right on my phone booth locator next i utilize one of the best free plugins ever video copilot's sabre now if you're on vfx and for some absurd reason don't know about this it's basically the beam effect on steroids useful for lightsabers and all sorts of other things i browse through and then find one of the presets that looks like a good energy beam for this movie and then i create a 3d null that is up at that booth starting position and then use a pair of two comp expressions on my start and end for the beam so it'll automatically be rendered from this origin point down to the base of the phone booth without me having to keyframe anything and speaking of me not having to work any harder i'm also going to utilize more footage crate assets to amplify the electricity impact when the booth lands i mean why do something from scratch when someone's already done it better than you have the time to do right now on your comp i mean production crate's got a bunch of free stuff if you want to try them out but i highly recommend you add this tool to your arsenal and to make everything look a little better i use vfx super comp i pre-collapse any of these similar groups so i can use super comp's awesome presets and controls to do things like blur my background behind the smoke or electricity elements and spill light in and around the edges and kind of bleeding through some of the stuff to make it all more cohesive because it's so easy to do i threw in an instance of vfx reflection so i could have some of this electricity reflecting under the booth it seems like it would it's so bright also i really wasn't in love with the framing so i did end up letter boxing and kind of adjusting the footage as well as adding some top level magic bullet looks and renoiser just to get everything looking a little cooler awesome there's one down and i did really like the test that i was doing of my electrify effect so i decided to make this into a full-blown shot to simulate the telephoto look i actually imported the environment map that's reflecting in the booth and then used horizons image map to place it behind my 3d model i altered the glow and color settings of the electricity to enhance the look even more i added a few red spotlights that are attached to this kind of randomly spinning central null and also tweaked the electrify effects a bunch until i had something that looked pretty good here and then i decided i wanted some custom smoke falling off the top of the booth i'm in love with trapcode's fluid dynamics and i thought that this could be a perfect solution for this kind of look in cinema 4d i created a little custom emitter shape that's basically just the outline of a square i add trapcode particular to a solid and then in the designer window as the emitter type i'll select 3d model and i'll select that little square that i made so it'll emit particles in this nice square shape now on physics i'll switch the mode to fluid and add some negative buoyancy and now i've got the beginnings of the smoke system that i want back out into the after effects window i adjust the size and position of my emitter until it fits nicely on the rim of my phone booth and then i'll play with changing the particles to smokelet particles and in the liquid settings i'll enable visualize relative density and also play with the random swirl i can also enable shading for particular so those spinning red lights are actually doing some cool interacting now like always particle systems require lots of trial and error but eventually i get this nice shape and then i'll share a fun technique that i sometimes use these particles are still pretty loose but if i add a cc vector blur to this layer using direction center i can turn it up a little bit and kind of melt these separate particles into little streams i could even use a second instance and mess with the settings even a little more until i've turned a simple particle flow like this into this and then just like before i'll throw all of this into super comp to make the smoke even smokier the glow is even glowier throw some random particles in the foreground and we've got this looks pretty tiny why me to me all right and now for our next example i'm sorry i'll try to keep the egg puns to a minimum i mean they're too easy and they're no good if they're overdone villain ted's excellent adventure okay so in the trailer the time pod appears right in the middle of this bright neighborhood so i decided to just run outside and quickly film a little plate on my iphone i brought it back into after effects and camera tracked and normalized it along with a handful of guide planes now just like in the last comp i'll add a solid with element create a shadow catcher ground plane and import my time pod model i mess with the material of this white shell and try to set it up as slightly reflective with just a bit of smudginess so it still feels real but not you know too perfect all right next let's play with the eggs position not to be confused with exposition how could i not i can't i can't okay it's okay that looks fine now to make this pod look a little bit better i'd go to select an environment map to kind of reflect in it and then i realized that i could actually use the occipital 3d app to actually create this exact reflection map that should be occurring here so i ran back outside and used the app spinning in a gentle circle while trying to not look like a weirdo to my neighbors and then exported this nice flattened panoramic image and emailed it to myself so now honestly two minutes later i have a perfect reflection map that i can select as my environment and if i exit out for a second and then scroll down to environment here i can click on the show in background box and then use the custom environment rotation tools to rotate my environment to basically match my camera angle now for this to have been absolutely perfect i should have stood in the exact location of the final pod i was actually standing on the corner of the sidewalk because i like not getting hit by cars in this stop sign free neighborhood i enable ambient occlusion and also add a light source to try to match the shadow direction from the background and also add a little bit of ambient light uh all right obviously there are these you know rose bushes in the foreground here and it's possible that the ground shadow or some of these other effects will need to be behind these plants so to do this i'm simply going to add a color range effect to a duplicate of my footage and try keying out the asphalt and that works great the only problem is that it doesn't account for all this garbage up here but that's why i created this guide plane on the rose bushes now it doesn't need to be exact but if i kind of move and scale it over here i can use this 3d plane that's tracking roughly with these rose bushes as an alpha matte for that keyed copy of my footage i can even pre-comp these two together and collapse them and now look at that beautiful layer i'll leave it up here at the top of my comp now for the animation i study the trailer and it appears that the pod spins into existence and i think it even flattens down a little bit as you can sort of see through it and as it's settling it's clear that there's a bit of spiral distortion going on and luckily in element under particle look there is a deform twist control i enable the twist and i'm able to add a nice amount of spiraliness to the pod now i've often skipped over using elements motion blur in the past in favor of something like real smart motion blur but that was mostly because i was using 3d model sequences now elements motion blur settings are perfect for something like this that i'm animating within element especially because there's rotational blur i turn up the samples and the shutter angle to a higher degree than you can do in real life and then i key that down over time because i don't really need it once the rotation is over next up are those cool spiral particles a little bit like that star trek teleport effect and for these i'm utilizing trap code form as the base form i can select a 3d model and then choose my time pod c4d file this imports a copy of the model that form will now source for the placement of its particles so i match the position and the size of the existing pod and now i'm ready to start making this into an effect now i don't need nearly this many particles and down in 3d model settings i can adjust the density down to a very low number so i'm just getting a handful of speckled particles along the surface of this egg then i keyframed the y rotation too loosely matching my pods arrival in render settings i'll enable the motion blur and turn up the shutter angle and the levels of motion blur so the particles are forced into little radial streaks then to make them more visible i add a curves adjustment and crank up the alpha now it's obvious when i play this back that you can see the particles that are supposed to be behind the egg so i'm going to show you a trick that i like to use and i actually forgot to mention that i used on the smoke in the last shot whoops and that cheap trick is to go to the visibility find the far vanish and then add an expression to it under vector math i'll use a length expression that'll determine the number of pixels between the 3d camera's position and the pod position now all the particles behind the center point of this egg will disappear boom a lot of the impact of this pod arriving is highlighted by that bright blue lens flare and obviously i'm going to use no light factory create a 3d null to use as my light center by applying a 2 comp expression to the center of my lens flare and then i'll animate it flying into position at the beginning keyframe the brightness and size values we've been here before i'll add some optical glow to my spinning particles so they stand out a little bit more now and then also just like before i'm going to use saber to create my sky beam thing but in this case i'm going to cheat and just put it on a 3d card and center it around the egg and then keyframe the values a bit really widening out the top at the beginning to fake some interactive light on the ground similar to the trailer i create a square 3d solid apply some fractal noise some cc radial fast blur and then a small circle mask i can tone this light to be bluish and then place the 3d card flat on the ground right below the pod i'll use an expression to link the z rotation of this plane to the y rotation of the egg model which should give me some free animation some scale and opacity keyframes later and we've got this beautiful ground interaction and man it's already a lot like the trailer but just for fun i'm gonna bring in those smoke wisps from the phone booth shot and sandwich this egg with a very subtle amount of smoke and um there you have it you folks up for one more shot so the trailer features a few glimpses of the updated circuits of time they took the concept of those original circuits and gave them kind of a fight glove opening overhaul it's obviously a bunch of time conduits twisting around and there's a ton of time traveler traffic flowing back and forth there's sort of this bright horizon where all the conduits head toward technically it's very complex but i'm feeling sneaky and i bet we could cheat it in after effects you can cheat just about anything in after effects you can cheat many things in after effects but you cannot cheat me whoa okay death you're on if i can't fake this shot in after effects then you can have my cds all right let's move quickly we'll create a solid with trap code down then instead of a circle generator we'll choose line i can put the first point of that line right in the middle of screen and the second point far off in the distance then i can adjust the camera up to kind of watch it stretching off i'll add a few more sides and segments to this segment under repeat paths i can turn up the number of repetitions and increase the position randomness and now under fractal displacement i can turn up the amplitude and adjust the frequency until i get these noodles curling up a bit under segment i dial up the number of segments until they look a little bit smoother mess with the fractal settings a bunch until i really like the layout of these next i'll add a spotlight and push it far into the distance looking forward it's possible if i worked a bunch more and used a couple of different instances i could create a truly 3d network of dow conduits and then fly my camera through them but that level of crazy complexity sounds just a little silly for a few minutes of this tutorial so i have an idea that's so crazy it just might be passable once i have a bundle i like i'll add a top level adjustment layer and then use cc power pin to unstretch a selection of these ropes now if i bring that card into another composition with a camera i could probably lay those cards out in perspective to start to create that corridor shape obviously it's no longer truly 3d but i'm counting on this being background detail and not the main attraction so i can really quickly arrange these 3d cards into a shape that i like and i can even offset the timing so that each one feels pretty unique and in fact if i reduce the number of strings certain are leading off the edge like this my card should now represent a nicely self-contained bundle of circuits i place a 3d null far in the distance and then use it as a locator for a null lens flare and also as the center of a dark blue gradient ramp and all this begins to start simulating my background environment it's going to look bad for a while but it'll slowly get better over time and now it's time to use some optical illusions now in cinema 4d i make a long cylinder and then i add a formula displacement to it and also a twist displacement to it now if i can get the formula in the right place i can get it so the tip isn't moving at all and i could place my camera right next to this static part of the time circuit and since the oscillations are moving toward camera there's a bit of an illusion that you're traveling forward now if i bend the whole end of this system up so you can't see the end of it i think we're on to something at this rate the animation loops at about 60 frames so i'll use the file sequence exporter to export this cinema 4d sequence into element i'll also import our time pod as its own group and then i'll jump out and try positioning these two items now if i line up the camera and the tube to extend it to the distance and then curve up and off screen and place the time pod right here within this relatively static part of the tube my playback gives the illusion of the egg hurtling toward the distant tube this is assisted by the slight jitter that i've placed on the camera's x rotation i can turn my circuits environment into a pre-collapsed 3d object and then add just two keyframes one where it's farther away one where it's closer to camera this will add some slight perceived parallax in this world now something else that i know would really help us out is a dynamic reflection map if we could tell that the reflections were moving past this pod we could really perceive that it was moving forward through space static reflection maps meaning they were always a little bit cheated but in this case since we have this relatively round reflective object that's supposed to be moving through space i think we have no option then to create a true moving reflection map for it alright so in the last example we used this reflection map which is a kind of a 360 panorama more specifically i think it's called an equirectangular projection of a 360 map which is the kind that video copilots element uses but how do i make particular move through this weird space well i didn't know the answer like five minutes ago but i was able to go over to mike griggs youtube page and he had a great video called create a 360 environment in adobe after effects for vr now vr that's crazy that's something i've never really done before so let me show you what i learned from mike we go to composition but instead of new composition we go down here to vr and i'll say create a vr environment all right so i'm going to create a new vr master keep it kind of small because i don't really need a ton of detail uh 24 frames per second and also i'd like to have 3d camera control center my camera and i am using 3d plugins it's important to do all these since i'm using particular now i'll press create vr master and we've got a cute little comp here and in this comp i'll do what i know how to do which is create a new solid pump add particular and then i'll do let's say a box emitter that we push into the distance some something like that we'll make this directional uh turn down the spread a bit and rotate it around 180 degrees and turn up the velocity so we get air a standard you know star field screen saver thing going on this is a great way to get into how this works now before you proceed one thing you should double check is go to your file project settings and double check that you have gpu acceleration on here okay and now we can take this thing keep all these boxes checked and now say create vr from current composition or i'm going to select vr master here and say generate vr output and watch this that noise was actually me got this big comp now watch what happens when i start playing this it's marvelous we are flying into the interstellar black hole anyway this got me really excited i thought this was pretty awesome um now if i want i go back to my particular setting whenever i like and i can go to the particles and in this case i would like them to be kind of a variety of colors from a gradient i think that the time circuits basically feature kind of reddish things that are going into the past and bluish whatever they're doing something like that so they got multi-colored things moving like that through space now if i click over to my vr output it's still the old version i need to go to my vr master make sure that it's selected in my create vr environment pull down and say refresh the vr output once i refresh boom we've got our equirectangular projection of a 3d flying through trap code particular crazy right so this is basically what i did and then i took this comp and i slid it to be a layer in my time pod tube composition an element i can select the vr comp as a custom layer and then i can set it as the environment map just like in the trailer i'm kind of pushing the reflectivity and chrominess of the pod because i think it looks cool for this segment i'll enable the glow settings in element also and then here's my result so cool right vr particular environment map crazy now since i was having difficulty making the tube look right earlier i decided to make some duplicates of my element layer one will be the reflective transparent front face of the tube and the other will be the mostly opaque back side of it i can render just the inside of the tube by clicking on the model in element and checking invert normals and then i'll sandwich the pod in between now just for a little more visual clutch i mean artistic composition on my group in back i'll add a few other copies of this long circuit and then replicate some random copies until they inform the shot like this now just like with the far background i will need to move these ones forward to help preserve the illusion to add some energy to the pod itself i add some optical glow with the radiate dial turned all the way up to cast some light behind the pod almost like a re-entry kind of burn i'll also add a leading edge by using a drop shadow that's a bright yellowish color i'll add some expressions to the camera and also a few movement keyframes so it just feels like a chase camera even though as you'll recall the pod and the tube are really just static right within the shot i did a lot of vignetting and other color adjustments all along the way including some top level looks and renoiser and in the end we've got this nice cheated circuits of time animation [Music] boy that time we are always running out of it i ran out of it when i tried to figure out how to integrate these amazing motion capture files provided by dj forte dj was kind enough to film these most non-heinous miximo ready skeleton fbx files i wasn't able to integrate them into something i wanted to make today but they are yours for the taking along with the other templates i mentioned earlier so a big thanks to dj you should definitely follow him on instagram and check out all his awesome work there now as is tradition on cheap tricks it's time to end abruptly after rushing through the most complicated shot it must be very disappointing but you know what in any case now more than ever be excellent to each other and party onto ghostbusters egon spanglish a ghostbuster of course

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 31,471

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, bill and ted, bill and ted 3, bill and ted face the music, bill and ted excellent adventure, c4d, cinema 4d

Id: -T3iUS4auT4

Length: 47min 27sec (2847 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020