Cheap Tricks | Pixar’s Onward Half Dad Effect tutorial

greetings friends tis I Hoshi your action-movie dad and today we're brewing up I I can't let me just show you what we're up to that's your magic staff [Music] [Music] today we're gonna create some dad legs from onward and at the moment I've only seen the trailer and obviously it's an animated film but this half dad really inspired me to try a live-action version of this effect of course I couldn't help myself and yes at the end of this video I'll also show you how to create an animated version of these legs as well now you may never need to create dad legs per se in your video but perhaps you need a headless horseman or a zombie with a hole maybe you've got some thing coming over for dinner I mean there's lots of reasons that visual effects are used to erase limbs in movies we're gonna stick with a family-friendly look of dads legs in onward and I'll walk you through three levels of difficulty you could approach this effect with this episode could be helpful for anyone using After Effects because today I'm going to talk about a lot of principles that could aid you in a lot of places including camera tracking some basic plate projection some masking tips and not to mention some particle and lens flare design at the end in your VFX journey you'll come across easy shots and hard ones and as a father I want to prepare you the best I can even though I don't know where your particular path is headed if you want to remove the top half of a character you're going to want a piece of footage of that character the easiest most straightforward way is to use a lockdown camera film your actor and roll some extra empty plate at the head or tail of your shot remember that the framing of your shot might be different if you are the only subject somavia shooting tips lock your exposure and focus if there are going to be visible character shadows on the scene it'll be some more work so if you're able to film somewhere where the shadows are pretty diffused you'll have an easier time I've decided to wear a green t-shirt for this test and I'm making sure to keep my arms awkwardly highs so they don't intrude on the waistline and that's my clip I'll bring this into After Effects and just for giggles I'll apply Prime at key or six I'll select this shirt color expand the selection a bit restore the foreground and you know what holy smokes like I'll be honest I didn't really think this was gonna work I filmed this in a bit compressed with bad lighting but once again Prime at his extremely flexible in these situations in later examples I didn't use a green shirt so y'all can see how I deal with that spoiler alert it's harder and now I'm gonna apply a matte choker matte choker is a really common plugin and I'll admit that for like ten years I just kind of fussed with stuff not really taking the time to appreciate what it could do obviously it chokes in your mat but in case you didn't know first you can determine the geometric softness which is basically how round you want your shape to tend toward you can set a choke amount and then you can determine how feathered or soft the effect applies down at the bottom is a number of iterations so you can have After Effects apply these transformations multiple times in case you really need to choke a mat next you also have a second set of choke controls this is perfect for a situation where you want to choke your mat in just a little bit to get rid of artifacts around the screen but then re-inflate that core mat consider key framing these values if you want to do something else magical like making something sink into the void or walking into walls mat chokers pretty solid alright back to the program so we've keyed out my shirt one next we'll need a background and since we've got a static shot going here I'm just gonna copy an instance of this footage and freeze a frame from the tail and normally I'd suggest a few seconds of plate so there's you know some proper video noise and stuff but I'm lazy and YouTube is compressing this anyway so we got a background now I look you know just like a dumb weatherman who wore green to a forecast hen really I want to look like this awesome weatherman who wore this costume on his forecast so we'll need to create some mats out of the bits of me that we don't want and leave the parts that we do since this is the layer that has the mat choker any feathered masks I apply will be affected so I'm actually going to pre comp this layer with its effects before I create any masks now we can create a mat that kind of goes like this you know it'll hover right above the waistline and maybe shoots out to either side a bit that way I can matte the shadows on the wall over here too I'll use the feather controls on the mask adding some feather points right here to keep the mat a little tighter next to the body and then immediately feather it out over here on the sides where the wall shadow is more visible since prymatt is doing the fine work right here at the waistline you probably just need a handful of keyframes for this mask to make the whole thing start to work and there we go not too shabby the next thing he needs is that glowing core and some light streaks and some particles floating within all that now obviously all these need to be married to these pants which likely means doing some manual tracking and the After Effects tracker could be helpful for this task but I'm moving around a lot so it would likely need a lot of hand-holding and even if it's really good for some pretty good stretches of the track whenever I turn my waist we have a problem and I need to manually make up for these drifts I remember how I mentioned I'm lazy like a minute ago in fact I'm so lazy that I would like to first see if I can create an elaborate but automated way to track this waistline so I don't have to do so much frame by frame tracking and there should really be a term for this kind of madness where you you know have to stew on a problem for a while mash a bunch of effects together to prove you have the Wits it takes let's see what ingredients I have already well I've got this keyed shirt and remarkably that may be all I need to stew mash my way to an easily track a waistline the seven of you who got that will would love it alright so watch carefully because this is its own form of magic I'll place my keyed footage in its own come then I'll duplicate that layer and set it as its own inverted alpha mat that should mean that practically all of it is matting itself out but if I offset the mat layer I can create this little belt sized patch because of this offset the belt will exist all the way through now I'll pre comp this thing and call it belt and I'll actually let me fill in this black and use a mat choker to sort of sand off those dangly pieces then I'll pre comp again duplicate my layer and the bottom copy I'll leave as is but on the top copy I will smear using a vertical fast blur this makes it hardly visible of course so then I'll add some curves effect and crank up the alpha curve so I get this nice smear if I apply a matte choker to this smear I can end up with a shape that's taller than the original belt but narrower by my choke amount you can see the two shapes overlaid here now watch if I subtract this shape from this one it leaves me with two little dots here and here I'll pre comp these together again like a madman and then with this layer that has these two dots I'll use a matte choker with all its nice geometric simplify errs to convert this into a nice little dot then I can duplicate that layer on the bottom instance I can use mat choker to bloat it out even more and fill it in white I'll throw in a little solid here for some nice color difference and here is our result and look at these abstract little googly eyes we've created I'll overlay the original footage as a reminder of what we've created here in fact you know why not quickly mask out these ones that are on my arms a couple quick key frames and check that out not bad at all I'll run the aftereffects tracker on this footage tracking the position scale and rotation I'll use this hip on screen right as 0.1 since it's the first to enter and the last to leave screen the trackers target null is what I'll call the waist no and then in the tracking settings I can say to track the RGB since we have some really clear distinct solid colors and then with only the slightest bit of help these guide points track through like a dream and this is why I love After Effects it's like an old workshop you know and you've got all these tools that your dad or whoever used to use but these simple tricks can make some really amazing things like like googly eye hips the latest latest fashion trend you know at honestly once I had these dots here I could have used any random combination to make all sorts of trackable locators now had I known that the green shirt would work so well and give me so much including this tracking Head Start I would have totally done it for my other examples but surprise this series is also an educational experience for me too anywho this bizarre process allowed me to end up with this null that spans the gap across my waist it scales and rotates appropriately through the comp and I can parent anything that I want to be part of this effect let's start with a solid that will stand in for that surface above my waist I'll scale and position it and then I think I'll apply a radial ramp that's white to blue you know it's kind of this ethereal thing I'm not sure if it's a surface or a slight hole into the pants but either way there's this interior glow of sorts and since this disc is parented to my waistline it's just a simple matter of scrolling through and adjusting the shape of my mat every so often to make sure that the edges line up and the perspective kind of matches I'll also enable the motion blur and then truly it only takes me a few moments to get myself to this result pretty great now we need a magic beam emanating from the top of him now how about a very simple approach let's make a little square pre-comp over here and add a nice blue solid then we'll draw out the shape of a little cone of light and then we'll add a little circle mask that we can set to intersect and then feather it out now by now everyone knows that you can use trapcode form to easily create a true 3d array of glowing particles that can dance and disburse for the fractal field it takes just seconds but maybe we can go native ayyy what do you say let's add a solid and apply some fractal noise we'll add an expression to change the evolution over time and then we'll add a mass to this small area in the middle now I can add CC ball action which we used all the way back in our black panther episode it's a quick and dirty way to create some dispersed small particles now by scattering these particles a bit and adding a time expression to the instability state look at that the fractal noise behind is determining some random brightness of these dispersed particles I can even duplicate this layer now and change the particle size and count a bit a CC ball action is nowhere near as capable as trapcode form but in the right instances a cheap trick is your best friend so let's see how it looks if we just place that and parent it right to the waste null with very little effort we get this great result now so I can imagine the full potential of these simple layers I'm going to gather them all and throw them into Supercop I've talked about super comp before but as a reminder it's part of red giants B effects suite and it's a compositing environment where all the layers are aware of each other for example I can add an optical glow to the disk and the glow from it will wrap in front of the pants layer even though it's composited behind and all these modes are really quick way to add a little bit of extra to your because my scene is relatively bright I'm gonna use a trick often necessary for a lasers or lightsabers when the scene is too bright you effectively need to darken the area around that bright laser or you know torso beam whatever you got I'll approximate this by creating a new dark blue solid which I can add a small circle feathered mask to I parent this to the waist null then I can add that layer right into my super comp stack and move it down below all of my other elements even though it's being composited in super comp I can still go right to the layer and adjust the mass points as I need now let's take a look at this now optically this makes no sense but this is magic we're talking about I like the color now I notice a few moments where the edges of my shirt were a little bit visible as artifacts and with pretty great ease I parented a solid to the hips and then drew a little mask shape to reduce the appearance of these little bits and once again since the solid is attached I only need a handful of keyframes to cover this relatively long shot all right so let's take a look at what we've made I've added a few little keyframes to fake some camera tilt and now we've got this goofy little scene of these legs bounding about and not bad that's the easy way to do this I started with a nice keyable shirt it was a lockdown camera nice and bright simple to work with well what if I wasn't wearing a keyable shirt what if I just you randomly asked my child to film me with my phone and then just walked around like a for a bit I mean the quality is lower but no there's a little bit of energy to this shot and some more challenges as we'll soon see now the steps are basically the same replace the top half with the empty version of this environment track the hips so you can add in a disc and beans but as you may have noticed this isn't the static background the cameras moving that means one of the first steps is using our good old friend the camera tracker now luckily this is a pretty simple track for her after effects pretty correctly assumes that this was a tripod like situation my kids holding the camera not really translating around now once we get a track we can create a plane and a camera maybe centered here over the fireplace then I'll add one over here to the side and one over here as well because of the tripod solve the planes I create will be arranged a little bit more like a psyche and these references will serve an important function in a moment now I'm sure you've been in a situation where you forgot to grab an empty plate for something and so you try to reconstruct the background from different frames we're gonna do something similar here where we go to export stills from across this clip with the goal being to make sure that all of the background is revealed at some point behind me walking around now there's a ton of motion blur so I'm scrubbing through looking for helpful frames that also have little to no blur if possible I'll export and re-import a bunch of those steel frames and now it's time to do some really rudimentary plane projection with these alright so I'll explain the process really clearly this first time I'm gonna repeat it a lot throughout but here are the basics I'm going to import a still piece of footage to the same frame that it came from in this case 14:26 now when I import the frame nothing should look different obviously it's the same frame it came from but what I am gonna do is I'm gonna go to this middle stand in solid press P shift R to reveal its position and rotation and copy those values I'll make that frame that I just brought in a 3d layer and then paste those values onto it as you can see from the side view here basically it's putting this still frame right where this other stand-in solid is now it's not very aligned or anything so I'm going to use the x and y gizmos to slide this card until it's sort of centered within frame now at this point you can see that if I scrub through my comp that layer is moving around as if it were filmed with the original camera now it's not mapped exactly correctly so I'm gonna go back to the original source frame which luckily in this case you can see right here in the layer name 14:26 I can make sure that matches in my timeline in fact if I wanted to I could press the star key right here so I have a nice little marker an indicator that this is where the frame came from now to align it I'm going to apply the effect CC power pin I really like the interface of CC power pin where I can just grab each corner and drag it to a line with the comp frame this creates a cool little illusion the actual layer is still at the proper orientation of the wall back there but it's being stretched out a little bit so that from the perspective of the camera it's exactly aligned with what we expected on frame 14:26 I'm gonna mask off the clean section of this layer that I want to be put in to my comp now because of the CC power pin any mask I draw is going to look a little bit weird because the mask is being applied before the CC power pin since these aren't very dramatic transformations it's not going to be too bad but as you can see I can hone in this nice little rectangle that shows the fireplace feather the edges a bit and then if I were to enable motion blur let me just play you through what this layer is doing now now our track was pretty good and the position of that card stays pretty consistent through the whole comp I always suggest going to the frame with your marker and adding a keyframe for the position then if you want you can go through your whole comp and find a frame maybe toward the end like this and double-checking the alignment I can zoom in here and see that it's drifted a teeny bit but I can just nudge that back into place so over the course of this timeline that'll automatically be correcting on top of these nudge kind of keyframes you may also want to add some curves or brightness and contrast to these as the exposure may shift depending on your shot and that is my favorite way to do an all in After Effects simple plate projection now I believe that I'm a II scripts there are some really cool tools for this but I'm not super familiar with any specific ones enough to teach you guys about them so what I am gonna do is repeat the same process over here over here and basically mask power pin and nudge a bunch of different sections of frames and so they're doing basically what this first one did my end result is this moving background that really approximates what the background looked like behind me nearly the whole time since all these layers are working together great I'm gonna pre-comp them together and call them background I'll also copy and paste a copy of the camera in there so I won't have to use a collapsed transformation always now remember before how I said it would have been really cool if I had worn a keyable shirt through all of this well obviously I didn't in this case I'll spare you the details but I did try roto brushing parts of the shirt and the hips and tried to recreate that magic of the last one but I really just proved to myself that the keed shirt was the real key to making that last one work also this was actually the first one that we shot and I didn't really know what I was doing I was trying to figure it out so what I'm saying kids is that mistakes are okay as long as you're willing to do the hard work it takes to repair them hard work for me in this case was manually tracking in a null to be my new waste null throughout the whole comp positioning scaling and rotating really only took about 20 minutes but a lot could happen in 20 minutes that could've been used for something else I'll wear a green shirt next time this time around the mask I used to erase my body also had to have a really faithful waistline much more than last time since I don't have the benefit of keying but it just meant a few more mask keyframes the next few steps are super familiar in fact I'm gonna copy over my layers from the last one my background blue darkening piece my beam and my hip disk I'll parent them all to the waste null and then go through just like before and do a few tweaks on the position scale rotation of them some masks on that hip disk and what I end up with is this nice handheld version of the legs walking around now one of the things I notice as I'm watching this is that the particles attached to me look a little bit weird as they translate left and right like that so one of the things I can do is go to my beam layer and increase the speed of these so they move around a little bit more and are less obvious when they track altogether as it grew the other thing I could do is I could add a solid add particular to it they'll parent a null to the middle of this waist and on the position of my particular emitter I'll use a two comp expression just to create a few particles that kind of drift up and away as these pants are walking around now particular is a 3d plugin and it's trying to react to this 3d scene camera I'm actually gonna turn off that scene camera since the background was the only thing that was previously using it and if you'll remember I had copied the camera into the background so I wouldn't have to deal with it again this is technically why I now have effectively a 2d set of particles but they at least trail a little bit behind the pants as they walk around maybe a nice touch at the very end I shop through some Magic Bullet Looks to try to see if I can improve the general look and feel of this shot I'm also noticing this annoying remote that I left on this couch and it's really drawing my attention it so I'm gonna go to my background layer and quickly bring out spot clone which is one of the easiest ways to remove annoyances from shots like this I can just set the position here the clone from section to a clean part of the couch and then run the tracker then I can go back to the middle run the tracker backwards and what's pretty cool about this tracker is that it did its best to follow the object all the way off the edge of screen I love tools that make simple work out of what could have been an annoying task to deal with instead 30 seconds and here is my final effort for this one I'm pretty cool it's a handheld shots got a little bit of life and this is totally a preference thing but I really love the look of handheld captured effects obviously and that My Children concludes our medium level difficulty shot now it's time people time for difficulty level 10 I'm performing with kids I'm having someone unfamiliar with the camera filming this and somehow the whole thing was shot a little out of focus and normally you'd reshoot but maybe you kicked your own daughter in the face on the very next take and had to call it a day she's okay by the way I'm so sorry sweetie in compositing terms we've got a lot of issues too I'm now wearing a green shirt I'm wearing this white one the camera is handheld and does more than just pan around it also follows us up into the living room and then up the stairs and I also had a very specific camera move in mind for the end where Sophia shrinks for it to work so I needed to take over the camera work for this last bit of the shot requiring a hidden cut also the kids fur layered right in front of me for large sections of this coming close to an even making contact with my torso that still needs to be erased and breaking my own rule I also run in front of James here for a split second what I'm saying is I got buckets full of things to solve and there's no easy way to say this I just had to roll up my sleeves and commit to finishing to deal with the out-of-focus issue I used Magic Bullet denoiser 3 what I love about denoiser is that it has a built-in sharpen filter which I can use but unlike a standard sharpen filter I'm also able to reduce the amount of noise and grain in the image so I can take this out of focus plate and move it to here using this effect the next step was trying to camera track this shot to make sure that I had proper locators for all of the background I would need to replace this proved to be a bigger challenge than I'd originally thought because of all the foreground characters running around the camera tracker had a lot of trouble with the sections where I run close to the camera so I followed my advice from the very first video I ever made for red-giant which is garbage matting out your characters before running the camera tracker eventually I was able to create a decent camera track and just like in the previous shot I created some stand-in solids all across the shot as locators for the plates I needed to reproduction to the scene to create these plates I used the same process as I did in last shot where I tried to export still frames from across the shot to make sure that I'd represented the entire background that I was about to pass in front of now it's really important in a shot like this where the camera is moving so much that the background you grab comes from frames pretty adjacent to the motion that's happening right then and because the characters were all over these frames a lot of the time that man jumping into Photoshop stitching together a few frames to create more clean background plates that I could reproject into the scene because of the shaky camera track a lot of these individual reference frames needed a lot more slight adjustments and key frames on them to make sure they stayed aligned enough with the original footage I'll take all of these 20 background layers and render out a piece of video called background patches my final result looked like this it's a very dynamic camera move but by stitching all these little bits and pieces together we've created an amazing dynamic plate before I jump right into masking I realized that a lot of the help in my other shots came from that tract waistline you're probably ahead of me on this one but in this shot I had to manually track the hips and their alignment throughout the shot there are some sections where I needed to guess where the hips were when I was behind the kids ultimately the tracking took me 35 minutes to do and all things considered for all the benefits I'm going to get from this tract no 35 minutes isn't too bad just like in some of the examples before I decided to use this hip know as a way to paste a solid onto myself and then draw masks from there the first mask I created was called waste this is the one that I made sure really conform to my belt line and I also included that top foot or so of my hips so when I place in my effect layers they can easily slide behind this piece the second mask I created was for the top half of my body I needed to make sure that I masked out my elbows as I moved them around and that's somewhere between this waist mask and the top mask I can extrapolate the shape of the background I need to fill in now that this solid is creating the mat shape it needs to I can apply it as an alpha mat to the original footage revealing my background patches of footage behind it once I could finally see this comp coming together there are definitely a few little things I needed to fix with the background but that's to be expected this section of the shot is 23 seconds long that's an absurdly long shot and if you're making a movie or short film it's really unlikely you'd ever have a 23 second shot in fact this whole little bit with the kids is meant to be a continuous 50 second shot where only the first 15 seconds don't have effects some of the next steps are again very familiar and once again really easy because of this tracked hip snow I added in my standard layers for the beam the backing blue color and that little hip disc which is really only visible for this small section of the shot right here next we have the issue of foreground objects starting right up here in the front the stick moves in front of me that's obviously an issue so I needed to mask that him immediately after the kids run out and are often obscuring my body now earlier in the shot if I'd been able to quickly strip into a green screen top half or something like that perhaps I would have had a little bit of help keying out my kids during these sections but for right now I've just got my own two hands and rotobrush to help me through this matting out the foreground objects in this shot took me an hour and a half so sure we got all the foreground characters taken care of wonderful however as I mentioned before I break one of the very few rules I had for myself during this shoot which is don't run in front of the kids because of the random and playful nature of the way we shoot I forgot about this completely and ran straight in front of James during this section that means one of the actors is becoming a section of background that needs to be replaced at least for a few frames it's a happy accident that I barely obscure him for very long and that my hips raise up high enough that they cover his face right in the middle here because what I was able to do is freeze-frame the last frame of James before he's obscured by me and the first frame when he emerges on the other side rotor brushed him out and then was able to place him back into the scene behind my legs for those few frames once he's tracked in and the shot is in motion you can barely tell now if you were online and happened to see this for the first time even if you have an eye for visual effects I would hope that a moment like this is at least a little impressive now the second half of this shot was a lot of fun to do but it's not really what I'm focused on today if you want to know the basics I needed to stitch together two shots this one with my friend filming me run up the stairs and this one with me filming Sofia drop her staff Sofia drops the staff before shrinking and so I used content-aware fill to delete her from this little section where she runs out of frame now I'm sure some of you are curious why this is the first time I've mentioned content-aware fill now in my testing I did attempt to use fill at a few stages of Matt replacement earlier I tried using reference frames and also a nicely tailored mask but it turns out since part of that mask was right at the waistline I didn't really get the results that I wanted I even tried seeing if a broader mask like this would give me a better result and while this result is impressive and it might have worked really well on a natural setting or something like that it didn't really work for the purposes here today but back on the shot with Sophia running out of frame it worked great I was able to 3d camera track me moving in and Matt in some footage a tight shot of Sophia from the top of the stairs but hopefully I was able to distract from a lot of the imperfections using some of the particle techniques we did in our frozen episode mix with some awesome assets from production great now speaking of magic there's also a magic moment earlier in this shot where the kids turned me from full Hashi into half Hoshi I opened up the trailer as some reference and looked at some of the moments where the wand is casting this conjuring spell now this will be happening to me but in Reverse currently there's just a moment where the top half of me pops away in the video so what I did to help sell this effect was take a still frame of the last moment before I'm obviously lifting up my shirt and adding some key frames to a linear wipe that makes me disappear from top to waste now we know when and about how fast I'm supposed to disappear when the wand and onward is doing its thing it's got this bright flare at the top of it and casts out these kind of blue tenderly particle magic things let's start by designing a flare that matches this from the movie it's really quite easy using no light factory I'm gonna bring my reference into this scene and create a new black solid then I'll add knoll light factory and jump into the designer window inside here I'm actually gonna start with my Captain Marvel eyes preset because it's kind of similar with a nice blue stripe in the middle there and then one by one I can hide or add different assets and recolor them until I get this star shape and that blue stripe in the middle that feel really similar to the ones from the movie one of the best parts about this is that once I'm done designing my flare I can save this preset so it can travel anywhere next up we've got that cool magical particle II thing that goes from the wand to the feet and shocker I'm gonna do this using trapcode particular I'm gonna create a new template that uses a lot of little pieces and skills we've gathered along the way on cheap Trick's and from Aaron Rabinowitz awesome laser rig tutorial that I'll rely on particulars awesome ability to turn lights into emitters now I've got my solid with particular now I'm going to add a light a spotlight it's pretty narrow called emitter as soon as I've done that I can go into particular and tell it to emit from the lights change the emitter size to zero and the direction to directional right away you see that now the light named emitter is shooting out the particles in whatever direction it's point of interest is facing they have some better control over where this magic is going to start I'm going to add a null called emitter position and then I'm gonna parent the emitter light to that I'll zero out the position so it's located right on this null object and then on the point of interest I'll zero out the X&Y and push it back in Z about 500 pixels or so so it's pointing forward away from the null like this now I'll add a 3d null called target I'll push this back in space here and then over on my null called emitter position I'll open up the orientation and I'm going to add this expression look at the position meaning of this layer to the target layers position compared to the world and then in the parentheses I'll put anchor point iron rabinowitz has a nearly identical set up in his laser gun rig but for this one-off effect I just wanted a really really simple rig as we learned on the sonic episode one of the great things about emitter lights is that you can quickly duplicate them and place them to different spots and now you have multiple emitters from the side view here you can see that these particles are flying right from these three lights right toward that null in the distance but I have a theory for how I want this effect to work down under physics under air spherical field you can add a spherical field this is basically a sphere that pushes out or sucks in particles around a certain area I'm going to add an expression to the spheres position and link it to the world position of my target null if the strength is positive it pushes particles away if the strength is negative it draws them in so if I make it a negative strength with a large radius with a nice feather on here I get this awesome little black hole that sucks in particles right at the location of this null that the lights are all aimed at look at this interesting shape we've got going here pretty cool right now just just for giggles let's add like a wiggle expression to this target and see what happens if it were moving around and look at that as the target moves around the beams are pointed at it and then gets sucked into the spherical field attached to that same null you know to make this path look even more dynamic and magical I'm gonna go to the turbulence field settings under air and I'm gonna play with the effect position amount I'm gonna turn the scale way down and kind of play with the settings until I just get some nice curves and we don't have the time today but this has so much potential to be like a proton pack stream or all these other sorts of things I'm really excited to play more with things like this so a standard way of working with a particular is usually working with these simple white particles until I get the motion right before I start putting in fancy glow particles and things like that but I think we're about at the point that we should switch these to some glow sphere particles tint them blue and then maybe see what these would look like with some optical glow so currently in this setup the angle of the spotlights that are these emitters control how wide the particles shoot out at the beginning if this is a really low number these are nice little streak let's kind of shooting across the wider they are the more a mess of particles it becomes I want a happy balance I noticed I was kind of guessing the lifespan of these particles based on how soon they needed to die at the middle of this black hole but just for fun and for nerds I decided to use a little expression to link the distance between the two nulls to the lifespan of the particles using one length expression to determine that first amount and then using a linear interpolation expression on the lifespan of the particle this is all to say the closer together the nulls the shorter the life span the farther apart they get the longer the particles live a visually check this within my comp but you're welcome to do anything with it you like obviously when you have great 3d locators like this you could add something like no light factory and use some to comp expressions to add in that lens flare that we just made to the origin of these particles and heck maybe another lens flare to the destination but enough in this sample comp let's get it into the shot because my comp is already 3d tracked I can paste these 3d layers in here and position them nicely adding some keyframes to have this lens flare slash origin follow the end of the staff and the destination to be trained right on to my head down to my hips I animated some things like the cone angle of the lights at the beginning and end to give me these cool wide bursts of particles that focus in in the middle and of course some keyframes to the lights to have them flicker and pop and give me a little bit of magic I'm loving the way this is looking and I'd love to embellish it even more with some of the great assets from production crate just like in last episode I think I'm addicted I'll add some smoke puffs to the wand right after it happens a little bit of an explosion kind of near my body as it disappears and I'm really liking the look of this magic but I feel like when I look at the original there are some more wild and kind of curvy tendrils that come out to the side I'm gonna duplicate my particular layer and also I'm gonna duplicate this first emitter here I'm going to rename this emitter beam itter and then in my second particular copy I'll switch the naming convention of the lights to B B Mitter as well you can see if I solo it that this top particular layer is just that one light now I want this beam to be thinner so I'm going to reduce the velocity of the particles in particular and I'm also going to adjust the cone angle to be closer to zero now I have a nice thin line following that same turbulence field but I actually want this to be on a different turbulence field and a little bit Wilder so I'm gonna go down to the turbulence settings and then mess a little bit with the offset and the effect position amount turning this up you can see these cool little wisps that go off to the side now in fact I might set some keyframes on the particle color because sometimes they seem to lean into red or pink here's the final result and I'm convinced that after some sound design this is gonna turn out beautifully so now if you'll indulge me let's take a look at this action movie kid video one more time what you do remember all the little moments throughout this reminding me of just how hard this shot was but how wonderful it is that it came together before we wrap up I'm going to cram in one more thing and that's a CG version of this same effect just like in so many of our episodes I think it's cool how simple it is to use mixer mode to create animated characters that work in After Effects so let's see if we could create something like that in less than ten minutes all right on mixer mode they've added a bunch of new characters including this average Joe and the best thing about Joe is that he looks like he's got some pretty straightforward pants and he's kind of on world looking shoes and while you could always rig your own 3d humanoid model or one that you find online it's really great that he's a default character immediately available I'll download a handful of animations for Joe including a simple walk cycle and maybe some dancing it'll pop up in cinema 4d where I can open up an FBX file I just saved and then over here I'll delete everything except the pants belts and shoes once that's done I can merge this file with another little cinema 4d file that I made I've also included an obj version of this as well but it's just a little spiral now this little spiral is going to be textured up with that glow effect later so what I'll do is I'll drag it to be a child of the hips here and kind of rotate and position it to look like a cone emitting from the top of the waistline once that's done a group everything here in the browser together and then I'll run steady bake X rec to export a cinema 4d sequence for After Effects now you can pop open After Effects import the background of your choice I'm gonna use this nice little exterior road shot I'll camera track it I'll add a ground plane that's set at the origin right here in the middle for the sake of normalization I'll align this solid to the road I'll attach the camera to this ground solid and then change its position to 960 by 540 by 0 rotation 2 to 7000 and then use a dummy solid to kind of gauge the scale then I'll hide the solid alright now we'll add a solid so we can apply element well go ahead and dive in and import our 3d sequence we'll start with a walk cycle comes in nicely it's this little set of jeans with these napkins sticking out the top of it wonderful but just to be more on Word theme I've created this version with a khaki pants texture which I can apply like that and then down on the illumination channel I can load in this file that I call glow in the texture I can scroll down to the illumination settings turn up the intensity and change the color to white we'll go ahead and say ok for now and see what it's looking like we've got a nice little pair of pants hanging out in the road let's go ahead and open up Group one and create a group null now I can scale them up properly move them back here and add a few keyframes to the position if I've guessed anywhere close to right it looked like he's walking right along that straight line beautiful now what about that napkins sticking out the top of him what should we do with that I know we'll apply this custom texture that was built just like our beam that we used in the previous shots I can drag that little comp right over into ours then hide it then with an element 3d I can find the custom layers twirl it open and under layer one I'll select the beam texture now if I jump back into my scene materials and click on this material right here for the diffuse channel I can use that custom layer so it looks a little stupid at first that's because we got to turn down the glossiness kind of boost the ambience a little bit and down under there Advanced tab will change the blending mode to add also at the bottom of advance we'll check draw back faces this will drop both sides of our spiral and while we're in here we'll go ahead and create a primitive plane right here at the bottom I'll scale it up and this will translate with him wherever he moves on the grounds material we'll go to the Advanced Settings and click on matte shadow all right let's jump out of here in element settings I'll make sure that the glow is enabled and that I've turned up a little bit of ambient occlusion I might even sample one of these dark points from the footage as my ambient occlusion color and there we go once you've set up something like this it's really easy to swap in different animations that you've saved and you can finesse the CG legs to your heart's content I know I'm only kind of scratching the surface here but that's a quick lesson on how you could do this we care for this exact same workflow in a bunch of our episodes and so my hope is that by now you're starting to roll this into your arsenal of things you can do in After Effects we've covered some simple effects and some more challenging ones the VFX dad and me hope see you learn something fun today I think that knowing how to erase things from a handheld shot as a skill that could prove useful in a million different ways we also to come problems that didn't have a solution until we invented one and honestly every VFX artist I know is a problem solver and the world needs problem solvers earlier I also said that mistakes are okay as long as you're willing to do the hard work of fixing them and the world needs hard workers this shot was stupid hard but the sweat put into rotor brushing these kids means that I got to have this genuine wonderful performance where the blocking wasn't awkward and we didn't need to avoid crossing each other's you see each time you add a constraint to a shot like it's got to be locked off or you can't have a character across a section people start to pick up on that that's why I really love capturing things live with all of their glorious problems and issues and fixing it in post one of the most wonderful things about being alive during the time of easy camera tracking and After Effects and awesome plugins and simplified tools like this is that a shot like this would have been really really really difficult to approach you know 10 years ago 20 years ago but now we can literally let our imagination come to life I can let my kids really interact with me running around like an idiot in this scene and their performance is so much better for it my children it's been a pleasure feel free to check out my fatherly pastime at action movie kids and check out even more VFX wisdom probably also scattered with dad jokes at red giant calm reach out to us anytime on Twitter to share the things that you've conjured at home and have a magical day

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 154,265

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, onward, half dad, action movie kid, pixar, onward tutorial, onward vfx tutorial

Id: QXRxx8LuSbs

Length: 49min 13sec (2953 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020