Cheap Tricks | It's Wrinklin' Time (VFX Tutorial)

[Music] hey everyone Hoshi here with red giant and welcome to the first ever episode of cheap Trick's reach month I'll be showing you how to create some of Hollywood's most amazing effects right at home ever since I was a kid I've loved seeing imaginations come to life through visual effects on the big screen when I went to see wrinkle in time I couldn't help but think about how many of the effects could be pulled off right at home using some of red Giants tools to test out some of these effects we decided to put together a little VFX trailer I knew I needed an awesome young actor to work with on this project and who better than someone who appears right in the opening scenes of a wrinkle in time hi my name is Lee Wilson and I play young Megan irika one time it was amazing because they were really nice to me and it felt like it was just one big family and it was just really cool but one thing I didn't get to do was all the visual effects I didn't personally get to test it but I would love to all right should we go do that today yeah all right let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I had a blast filming with lyric she's a real pro now I'm gonna take some time to break down some of these shots and show you exactly how to pull off these looks at home one of them is the environmental distortion you see happening to the ground plane and some of the other elements in the shot next we have that shimmery glass curtain effect hanging down from the sky literally representing the wrinkle in time that these characters could pass through in the movie lastly as you can see in the trailer the characters find themselves on some really wild alien environments I'm going to show you how you can manipulate some stock photos to end up with this really immersive environmental effect so let's go let me start with a simple overview of displacement using a text layer if I apply a displacement map to a text layer nothing exciting happens at first because it really wants the input of a displacement layer I'll create a few examples with some solids we'll add a checkerboard effect to one checking the add mode to preserve the Alpha Channel we'll also create a ramp on sample two we'll narrow that down a bit and lastly let's use one of our universe generators the fractal background this one is even animated by default I'll make these layers lightly visible so you can see what's happening back in my text layer I can now use these as displacement Maps I'll select the one I want I'll check effects and masks and also luminance in these two channels now watch you can see the white sections move the text information in one way and the black square is translated in the opposite direction leaving a stark line between the checker areas if I select the gradient ramp it gets so soft that the final effect looks like slanting the text the lighter the color the more it translates if I push these values or tinker with some of the Advanced Settings I can get some really crazy stylized effects or even title design ideas one important thing to note is that anything in the displacement map that is at 50% gray will not move at all that'll come in handy later watch as I apply this last animated layer as the displacement map and will you get the idea now for the trailer of a wrinkle in time the text crinkles a bit kind of this broken mirror effect for that I'll need a different type of displacement map I'll use a solid and generate a cell pattern effect I'll select the plates HQ mode crank up the scale and sharpness when I apply it as the displacement map you can see that kind of fractured look I was going for and if I want I can even animate the evolution of this effect to get some cool procedural results perhaps even throwing an expression time times 50 on the evolution to let this evolve on its own depending on the scale of the plates in this layer you can get some really crazy shattered looks but I'm gonna go back to the look from a trailer I'll throw in some color ramps and also a couple light swipes to add a little detail to this text then I'll throw in an instance of trapcode star glow which automatically generates little glowing highlights wherever the values of the highest I can dial down the threshold Hill I just get a few glints in the top corners and I've got a simple title that I can type anything into add the obligatory slow scale of keyframes but this is child's play what about that weird ground thing you mentioned well actually it works off of these same principles but in a whole new dimension yeah I'm talking about doing this with 3d layers so grab a piece of footage motion track it and create a ground plane now if I generate a map on this 3d layer and try to use it as a displacement map you'll see the effect doesn't work unfortunately the masks and effects pulldown doesn't do the trick either and neither does pre composing the 3d layer even with collapse transformations you'll need to copy the camera over to a pre comp to effectively have a duplicate 3d comp one for your footage and one for the displacement map so now After Effects is happy that it has one nice flat layer that it can apply as a displacement map matching all of the camera animation etc now if I had just the displacement map I actually get what I wanted the distortion appears locked to the ground playing with various bump maps will yield all sorts of interesting results you can hand animate layers or waves or ripples to move in any direction you want and the cool part is that to a certain extent they can really look like ripples in the ground if you push too far you might get some weird sharp distortions and if you push further you could get these kind of watery ripples now these weren't desirable for the effect that I was going for but they could be an interesting way to create a unique puddle or portal for each shot that featured this effect I had my motion tracked footage in one comp and then a duplicate comp with the same camera alongside it with a unique displacement pattern often it was just some fractal noise that I'd animated to flow in one direction in one case I even used a blurry radiowaves effect I needed to place the girl's legs in front of this distortion effect so in this comp I did that by creating a 3d plane that was approximately where she was standing since she was standing pretty still and the 3d plane was already set to track with the camera I only needed a few keyframes in these other shots I used the rotor brush and I actually got a pretty fast result I also planted a few clone stamp little patches on the ground plane underneath to effectively erase the character now these patches didn't need to be perfect just enough so I wouldn't get distorted edges of the character peeking out when I used my displacement map in this very first shot I also added a burst of dust using trapcode particular I placed a box emitter right on the ground that spit out some cloudlet particles with shadowless settings enabled I added a little wind so it kind of drift up and turn the opacity way down so it was pretty subtle now if you're new to particular I highly suggest checking out Harry Frank's in-depth series on this plugin and all its features right here on this channel so in summary playing around the displacement maps can give you some really cool effects without having to do a whole lot of work you could even use your displacement map to aid in the shading of something that you create I mean there are some really cool things you could do using this technique now let's move on to section two that glassy curtain effect it was actually really simple to create with trapcode mirror Mir is a very fast plugin for rendering these 3d sheets that react to the camera they can be affected by fractal noise and used for motion design there are lots of other things in this case I was going for the look of some theatrical curtains that would kind of wave in the breeze one side motion tracked my footage and created a camera I had an ear to a solid i justed its position made it taller and wider and then up the vertices to add some better resolution then I pulled in a comp that had a gradient ramp that was black on top and white at the bottom now this layer can remain hidden within the cop under the fractal settings in mirror I can select this as an amplitude layer and you can see that the map is working as a multiplier for that fractal distortion pattern the riffles become almost nothing at the top but the bottom is still nice and wrinkly by opening up the individual amplitude and frequency I can dial down the frequency of the Y Channel and end up with something that looks more like drape cloth you'll need to play with these settings as there are really infinite combinations and your eye is probably searching for one just like any good fractal based plug-in mirror has an evolution setting you can click and add keyframes to this or you can alt click and add an expression I'm gonna type in time times 50 which will cycle the evolution 50 degrees every second at first things are a little bit too fast and wrinkly so I slowed down the expression and also simplified the fractal now I'm really liking the motion of this thing in the shader setting I'll switch the blend mode to normal and the result is great it really quickly generated but beautiful curtain is little spectral highlights in all I'm just scratching the surface of what Muir can do I could apply a texture to this 3d sheet play with the lighting settings but right now I'm really just looking for this quick result and when you look at a transparent object there isn't a lot of apparent shading on it usually just those spectral highlights really come through one of the more visually informed of things about glass is its refractive properties meaning how it scatters or distorts the light passing through it now I could use a displacement map to simulate this but I've got something even prettier it's a universe plugin called prism displacement I'll apply that to an adjustment layer behind the original Mir layer select the mir layer as the displacement source and then tell the source to be the Alpha Channel pre multiplied with gray if I sell adjust the prism displacement effect for a second you can see that the default result is this really cool wobbly glass looking surface in fact there's a setting called glass refraction within the plugin the prismatic effect is that there's some built-in chromatic separation between the colors so up close there's this kind of rainbow effect visible in the highlights similar looking through a prism playing with these settings allows you to get the glass and refractive property you want in your comp turning the mirror layer back on we now get this delightful combination of a glass like distortion and some cool highlights in the shape information from the mere layer I added a note light factory on top of everything and attached it to a 3d know through a handy expression you can also tell Noll to track some 3d lights and get a similar result I just didn't happen to here has last little bit of detail on the curtains I added some trapcode star glow to add some golden sparkly highlights to everything kind of pretty right I only saw the film once but this is kind of what I remember the phenomenon looking like if I wanted I could totally nudge this into like an annihilation shimmer effect that someone's already totally done that moving on let's get out of here and into an establishing shot on an alien planet now here's the final shot and here's the source of protection obviously a lot has to happen to make this effect work but in our case we're just gonna send our girl to like another terrestrial planet with a totally agreeable atmosphere I was kind of wondered if there are planets in the Star Wars universe that have atmospheres that don't really work for humans I mean they barely needed like a little airline oxygen mask to survive a space slug on an asteroid but why was I talking about oh yeah rotoscoping characters it's always a pain in the butt but I knew I was gonna have to do this so I employed a special technique called planning yes I knew I wanted to turn this around quickly so planning was definitely important I knew that lyrics hair would be the hardest thing to roto so I made sure that it would end up in front of the sky in the plate that I shot she's also angled to have a lot of shadow on her back and her clothing color was something different enough from the mostly grass background behind her legs knowing roughly what she was going to be composited in front of was important too I wanted the alien background played to have similar lighting and also a similar horizon line so I wouldn't really have to worry as much about the edge art effects so how does it all come into play when you're staring down the barrel of a 230 frame roto job let's watch the clock starting at about 10 a.m. I garbage mounted out the top half of my actor and applied a primate keyer to the sky color by ten of four I can jump right into rotobrush country now I had lyric jump and land right at the head of this footage and I knew that this would be the most intense part requiring the most attention to detail now remember I'm only really focusing on the road Oh below the horizon line his first 50 frames took about 12 minutes but after that the remaining 180 breezed through mostly on autopilot and I was freezing my rotobrush about five minutes later I spent about 10 more minutes fussing with her hair when it's below the horizon line and blending my rotor brush bottom half with my keyed top half but for a full body ten-second shot in 30 minutes I call it a success I decided to preserve part of my ground plane like a little cliff she was standing on the ground in this field was relatively flat so by creating a copy of the 3d tract ground plane I could simply draw the shape I wanted and use it as an alpha mat for the original footage and now you can see it looks like a little pathway just floating I add some rough and edges to make things a little bit more organic to make it look like there was some depth to this I Photoshop a little generic cliff face texture I brought this into After Effects and turned it into a couple of different 3d cards now using that guide ground plane I could align these 3d layers and also do some custom masks just so these kind of simulated the sides of this little cliff face adding in one more copy here and roughly aligning it with the angle of this cliff and one more clever mask and I've got my shape switching between the custom camera and the scene camera gave me a really easy way to preview the 3d shape lastly I did a bit of color correction on the sides of these and the final result is pretty great next came the background the actual quote other planet well I didn't want to work too hard so I didn't after looking around on pond5 for an environment that kind of looked decent I found this one I downloaded a sample and placed it into my background to see if I liked it once I did I spent a cool 7 bucks on this version that was high enough resolution for my purposes and then threw it into Photoshop isolated the mountains with a quick select tool then applied the liquify effect the landscapes in wrinkle and time were weird but familiar and that's what I wanted to do here just distort everything until we got some pushed shapes that you wouldn't really see on earth but nothing looks too smeary next I move on to the sky where I used the content-aware fill tool and some clone stamping to create an all cloud layer I painted the layer the represent of the blue sky and then I keyed out the sky color from that cloud layer this way I can paste a generic planet right behind the clouds and voila instant interdimensional planet look and in case you're worried about it the other planet has really low gravity is tightly locked to this one so this planet is totally sustainable once I bring my layers into After Effects my animated the Photoshop comp by turning the cloud layer 3d and adding some subtle movement I used the location of the faraway nose from my 3d track to place the comp and then I used little trick to bend layers that is I adjusted the anchor point to about right here below the horizon duplicated layer and then rotated a bottom copy and stretched it forward this way there's a little bit of parallax that you get and it's not just one flat card i precomposed the foreground and background layer so i can easily work with them as two separate elements adding a little bit of light fog in between the two and some subtle light wrap on top next I shopped through Magic Bullet Looks where I could really quickly preview a bunch of cool different ways this planet could look I've also added what my good friend Eric calls a load-bearing lens flare because why not one very last-minute addition was these bubbly particles that float by to do this I added a light called motion path one now this wasn't so I could use it as an actual light it was so I could use it as a finally tunable particle path I animated the path to curve right past lyric and then on into the background I added a new solid with a particular effect and way down under the air settings I can select motion paths one this tells particular to let its generated particles flow along a specific path but one more thing I need to do is make sure that the emitter is lined with the first part of this motion path I could do that by kind of copying and pasting the values over from this motion path but I have a feeling I might be playing with these values so I'm going to link them with a really simple expression I'm gonna pick with the position of the particle generator to the location of the motion path light and then type dot value at time zero now as I move this path around the generator will always start at the first frame of the motion path particular comes with a bunch of really cool sprites shopping through them I chose this bubble one and then played with a few different settings and let these bubbles flow right along the motion path and often to the background and there you have it the final look of this interdimensional planet landscape full-body roto and full background replacement in a really slim timeline and that's really everything so to summarize we learned a little bit about displacement maps in the different ways you could use them to create different looks how you can use precomposed 3d displacement maps to move along with camera movements a really fast way to do a glass cloth simulation and finally an immersive environmental effect using as few resources as possible now copying or mimicking some of these Hollywood effects is a great way to sharpen your skills or learn some new techniques but the next step is to take some of those new techniques and skills and apply them to new effects that no one's ever seen before really make them your own now you don't need a big Hollywood budget to pull off some of these amazing visuals just a little bit of dedication a lot of time and a few cheap tricks thank you guys for joining us for this first episode of cheap tricks if you guys have any suggestions for VFX challenges you'd like to see us tackle please let us know below and we'll see you next time

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 366,562

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, wrinkle in time, action movie kid, daniel hashimoto, ava duvernay

Id: y3cR5s6BL5M

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018