Cheap Tricks | Recreate a Druun Entirely in After Effects - No Plugins! (and FREE Template!)

[Music] welcome everyone it's me hashi and you're looking great today that is unless you unleashed a manifestation of human ill will upon yourself and have been turned to stone today we're creating the droon from raya and the last dragon an amorphous tendril storm of evil and in this high budget movie these are clearly complex simulations wielded by very talented animators and now that all of their hard work has come together on screen our job of replicating it is much simpler now it just so happens that i work for a company that makes cinema 4d redshift the trapcode suite the the goat of after effects particle simulations yes but i believe that we can do it entirely within after effects using no third-party plug-ins at all and i promised dewdrop not to die shortly after my introduction okay dad 100 after effects huh well in that case hey what's up daniel hashi here and welcome to another very exciting episode of [Music] cheap tricks and spoiler alert the last five minutes of this will be me covering this with trap code form but in the meantime i'll bet you've never tried this in after effects so let's start with a new composition let's make this one 2 000 by 1000 and we'll call it the slime texture add a new solid and then let's apply the effect generate cell pattern here we'll select the pillow cells and turn up the contrast just a little bit like that and then let's disperse them all the way we'll set their size to 100 and then under tiling options we're going to check enable tiling and we'll set the cell horizontal to 20 and this to 10. and this 120 and 10 will combine nicely to give me a true tileable texture so for example if i add the offset effect you can see that as i offset this pattern it's perfectly tiled horizontally and vertically now on top of this i'm going to add a distort turbulent displace i'm going to select the twist displacement and i'll turn up the size a little bit so the twist patches are about this big and maybe i'll keep the amount right around here now let's add some motion by alt clicking on the evolution of our cell pattern we'll say time times let's start with 250 and on the turbulent displace let's do the same thing we'll alt click on the evolution and say time times 250 also and in my turbulent displays i want to make sure that under my pinning options i'm selecting pin all locked you'll see all the edges snap back to lock there now i can play this back and see this cool stretchy windy cell pattern i'd like to add a little bit of complexity to this so i'm actually just going to duplicate my whole layer i'll change it to multiply and then under here i'll offset this texture just a little bit maybe like that or something and i'll also offset the turbulent displace not by too much just a little bit horizontally a little bit vertically and on the cell pattern i'm going to turn down the contrast so i have this nice variety of thick lines and thin lines going on and since the turbulent displace is similar and close i get this effect that the whole thing is kind of squashing and stretching around like that which is pretty neat now i would like to be able to see through these once i apply them to a sphere so let's add a new top adjustment layer and to this we'll add keying extract and here i can simply drag down the white point to something like this let's make it transparent for a moment and maybe i'll soften out the white point just a little bit like that and you see that kind of pinches together these and so they look more like stretchy pizza cheese as this thing goes along that's exactly what we want so now we can add a generate fill to this layer and i'm going to select basically a 50 percent gray and now we can use this as a sphere texture let's create a new composition this time 1200 by 1200 and i will call this one the slime ball now your naming conventions are pretty important so try to name these things that you'll at least know what they are uh i can bring in the slime texture and then i can apply effect perspective cc sphere and that'll turn it into this awesome sphere let's set its radius to 400 and you can see that this has created this really cool shell sphere that you can adjust the rotation of and it's also the motion texture that we had created early perfectly tiling around itself which is great so i'm going to add a time expression to the y rotation let's just say time times maybe negative 50 for now and that'll just give it a gentle spin as it stretches out and around like that and now ultimately there's going to be this glowing core in the middle of this sphere and for that i can go to the light settings and i'll adjust the light height all the way to 100. i'm basically looking at the back of the sphere right now and imagining that the back of that sphere would be you know lit kind of like this but the problem is the front of my sphere should be kind of silhouetted if there's a light source in there and luckily cc sphere has the option to render the outside the inside or the full sphere with these settings and you can obviously make two copies of your layer down here set one to inside one outside but i actually have a different idea which involves using after effects's essential graphics now essential graphics allow you to pre-comp something but allow you to retain some control over whatever properties you designate so for example in my essential graphics panel i'm going to select this slime ball layer and then on my timeline i'll open up the effects and i'm going to drag this render setting up here where it says default full and i'm also going to open up the lighting settings and drag up the light intensity here defaulting to 100 and now i'm going to create a new 1600 by 1600 comp and we'll call this the drone assembly comp now i can bring the slime ball right into here but if i twirl it open in the timeline you'll see that i have two essential properties that i can still utilize so i could say render the inside of that sphere from this other comp and i could duplicate it and tell this one to render the outside and just like we were saying earlier the outside shouldn't have all of this lighting and luckily that property got preserved and i can turn down the lighting of the outside of the ball but leave the inside turned up now again naming conventions are super important in a procedural comp so let's rename this one the slime ball front and we'll name this one the slime ball back and now with a sphere as two layers anytime i want i can just tuck tuck something right in between those two layers and now it's inside that sphere isn't that cool but actually i don't want this little animal thing i just need a glowing core and let's go real complex let's add a white solid with a little feathered mask and just sandwich it between those two layers and we're done and one really cool thing about this pair basically representing the inside and outside of the sphere is that i could duplicate these two layers down here and now if i just select these two innermost copies of the sphere i could do something like scale down a whole instance of the sphere a front and back and sandwich it inside here and maybe just offset the rotation a bit and i could even dive into the essential properties of the light intensity of this one and maybe turn it up for a little bit of a depth cue so look at this this late this whole thing is getting layered up and a little bit more complex now and as i play it through you get this really wild organic stretchy thing now i'm aware this still doesn't really look like the drone so let's take a few steps toward that i'm going to collapse all of these layers and then add a new top adjustment layer and we'll call this adjustment and we'll call this the distort and color correction layer now in this adjustment layer i'm going to add some stylize glow pretty much the default settings but i'll turn down the intensity to maybe point 4.3 or something like that and then i'll duplicate this glow one more time but this time i'm going to make the glow radius really big i'm going to make it wide like 270 wide and then i'm going to turn up the intensity just a little bit so you get this blooming core that kind of erodes away some of this and you'll also see that i'm getting this drop shadow effect that is a result of the glowing threshold but i don't need to deal with that right now but i would like this to look more like the colors of the droon so i can add a color correction cc toner where now if i want i could grab any color as the mid tone and it'll color in this cool sphere with that so we're going to go with kind of a purpley color like the drone in the movie have something like i don't know there and then last but not least we are going to add some distort turbulent displace now we're going to set this to the bulge mode and i'm going to turn up the size of the bulges from turbulent displace and one of the things i'm going to be careful not to do is i never want the amount to stretch so high that i get these you know warpy overly stretched pixels so i want this just to subtle number like you know 40. and i'm also going to add a time expression to its evolution like time times let's try 150 to begin with and maybe i'll dial up the complexity just a little bit and now when i play this back i have this really cool amoeba like squashy stretchy slimy sphere and i love this it's pretty wild and it's all just some really simple effects combining together to make this it's a slime ball one thing that can make it look even more realistic is if i add a top adjustment layer even above all this and i'm going to make this the motion blur effect where i'm going to go down to time and i'm going to use some pixel motion blur and now i'll set the shutter angle to a little bit higher and i'll also increase the shutter samples to something like eight and now you can see as i play through this there's some really cool motion blur which makes this look a lot more organic a lot more realistic but it is a little bit of a bear on the renderer so i'm gonna just turn off that layer for now and we can turn it on before we render the final one in the end all right now moving on to what i think was my favorite discovery of this whole process and that is creating a volumetric smoke cloud that moves around this sphere so the process is kind of similar we're going to create a new composition uh in this case 2000 by 1000 and we'll call this the smoke texture all right uh let me close this panel for now all right let's add a new solid and from here forward i'm just going to use fxconsole by videocopilot.net and uh it's this free plugin that allows you to do something like type fractal noise and then i can apply fractal noise just that simply uh i'll change this to the spline type and i will go to the transform settings and uncheck uniform scaling and i would really like the width of these clouds to be much wider so they're almost wrapping around this in some cases and let's dial up the complexity just a bit so this is kind of a nicer textured thing going on here and then on the evolution i'll alt click and add a time expression just like i've been before let's try time times 100 and that'll give us kind of a gently animated fractal noise like that one drawback of fractal noise is that's not tileable but i have a really great sheet for that which is to add a top adjustment layer and here i'll just apply the offset effect dial up the shift center until that seam is right here in the middle and now the two edges are already wrapped and if i add a mask here change it to subtract and then feather it a bit pressing f and dialing that up a bit now i have kind of an artificially tiled surface which is great now i can jump back to my project window and i'll create a new composition this one will be 1200 by 1200 just like the other sphere and we'll call this the smoke sphere just like that we'll drag in our smoke texture and then we'll apply cc sphere and then we can dial up its radius to about 400. let's type that in now i'd like to isolate some kind of transparent stripes from this so i'm going to apply the extract effect and i'd like it to be applied to the texture itself before it gets applied to the sphere so this lighting doesn't affect it so in here i can simply drag the white point down and now you'll see i get these cool strips of transparency going around this sphere and i really like that similar to before i'm going to add a time expression to the y rotation on this sphere so let's try time times maybe negative 150 or something like that so now we've got this nicely animated sphere with the strips on it the only problem is that this makes it really apparent that cc sphere is this impossibly thin shell is like zero pixel wide shell of a sphere with no real volume to these so the volume we're going to have to fake ourselves and again for that i'm going to turn to the essential graphics panel so i'll open that up and then up here under primary i'm going to switch this to the smoke sphere comp and now down here from the timeline i'm going to grab the render setting from my smoke texture just like that and also from the extract i'm going to grab the white point and bring that up into here as well now we're going to move to a new comp i'm going to drag the smoke sphere into its own comp like this and we'll rename it the smoke sphere front like that here i can reveal the layers essential properties and switch this to outside this should be kind of familiar from that last step and now to simulate some depth in here i'm going to add some radial fast blur and then i'll add some matte choker with matte choker i want to turn the geometric softness down because i want this to be just pure sharp expansion of this to do that i'll turn the gray level softness down to zero and then i'll turn the choke value to a negative number and watch as i turn this negative number up you'll start to see the edges of this globe swelling out and when i play through this it'll look a little bit like the mountains on a globe or something like that sticking out of the side which is really wonderful now my radial fast blur got rid of some of the detail of this cloudy pattern so my next cheat is to throw another instance of the smoke sphere on top of this here i can go to its essential properties and on the white point setting i can turn that all the way back up which will render the full sphere now to compensate for this expansion i'm just going to simply scale this layer up until it's basically covering my matte choker like this and then down here in the layer stack i'm going to press the track matte or preserve transparency switch like this so basically this top is acting as the texture and the bottom is acting as the alpha and now when i play through you see this cool funky extruded kind of textured cloudy thing now the matte choker left these edges very crisp so i'm going to add a top adjustment layer here i can soften the edges using roughen edges which is basically an overlay of a fractal dissolving of the borders so if i turn up the border like this you can see that a fractal is eating away all the sides of it i can stretch the width of this fractal out just a little bit and so you have more you know horizontal looking cloud shapes and i can turn up the complexity of these clouds and maybe i'll turn down the edge sharpness so i get some kind of billowed edges like this you'll see that we've got these kind of cloudy looking things going around that fractal pattern that's affecting the edges is staying static and it's actually kind of observable as the sphere moves through it but i'd like it to travel kind of along with it so the best way i could think of to do that was to add a time expression to the offset and in this case it needs to be a coordinate so i'll put a bracket there and then i'll say time times let's start with negative 1 000 so it'll move over to the left 1000 pixels per second and 0 frames in the y direction let's try that to begin with actually let's add some time to the y so it'll look like it's smoke kind of drifting up too time times negative 300 now let's play this back that fractal pattern on top is moving up and to the left as the sphere is rotating and now it's time to create the back of our sphere and all we've got to do here is duplicate this front comp rename it to the back and then once we're in here on this expression we can reverse the x part of it we'll make it positive 1000 it can still be drifting up like that on this roughing edges expression and then for the two sphere layers all we have to do is open up their essential properties and switch them to render the inside on both and now we should basically have the inverse of what we have on our other comp to see a quick preview of how these are working together i'll select these two comps and move them to their own composition for just a moment and we'll put the front and front and the back in back and now when i play what you should see is this somewhat thick layer of smoke spinning around itself and because it's two layers i could put a layer in between those two and it'll look like this slightly volumetric cloud orbiting around our cute little hedgehog here now one of the reasons i like going to all the trouble of creating this initial smoke sphere with the essential graphics is so if at any point i want to increase the rotation speed of this sphere all i have to do is come back to this initial smoke sphere comp where i can adjust this to a slightly faster speed for example and i could also adjust the overall white point up and down and as i bring it up all the way like that you'll see that in the final comp that smoke sphere will close up and if i were to dial it back down to something pretty sparse you'll see that it just becomes a few little teeny bits of clouds moving around them and if i want a finer pattern for the initial fractal noise i can always go in here and try to scale down some of these elements to get something a little bit more distinct in my final comp and look at that that's really cool i like this is what i was kind of going for these nice broken up striations like that really pretty really fun now i don't actually need this uh temporary comp so i'm just going to delete it for now sorry tuk tuk and then we're going to jump over to our drone assembly comp and this is where we're going to make these two layers look really cool so in our nesting doll style composition we're going to move the smoke sphere back here behind all of our layers like this and look at that it gets purple and it gets distorted just like the other layers and then we'll bring our smoke front right up here just below this top adjustment layer like that now you can see we've nested our original stretchy sphere within this kind of smoke sphere now i've found that in general it's good to kind of scale down the back of it just a little bit like this so the bright edges aren't sticking out and this is going to look even better when we apply some fake lighting cues to this so for the back let's add some tint and we'll turn the black value all the way up to maybe here something like that so it looks like it's glowing because of that glowing core in the middle we'll say that and now i'm going to copy this tint effect up to my sphere front and now we're going to do a really cool one layer trick for a rim light which is to add some transform to this and then we'll scale it down maybe to about let's go with 92 percent and then i'm going to use kind of a rarely used filter for me which is channel cc composite that's going to composite a copy of the original on top but i also want to make sure to uncheck the rgb only so it'll be the original scale of this layer so now if i solo this for just a second maybe these two layers you can see what's happening so it's a little bit like you know when clouds pass in front of the moon and they've got this really nice highlight right next to them on top of this all i'm going to still adjust the curves a little bit of all of this to make these clouds a little bit darker i want to kind of minimize the contrast in areas like that so let's turn down that just a little bit there we go let's get a quick preview of this and i don't know about you but the first time i saw this effect starting to come together all within after effects i was really proud of the program and one thing that you could do at any time is if you wanted to you know parent the front and back together so you could just scale the whole set of them like this they would work in this really cool way where they really are sandwiching around that ball in case you want to make them you know bigger or smaller you could make even like little like saturn rings around it like that look how weird that is anyway i'll make this a little bit bigger and now that i can see how the glow is affecting it i'm going to go to my sphere back and i'm going to turn down the tint amount and see if that darkens that back just a little bit yeah i think that looks a little bit more realistic uh as it were uh scale this down maybe like this and i'm also gonna adjust the amount of distort i think it was a little bit too much so let's turn it down to like 30 and we'll still have the size be pretty big let's see what this looks like really wild stuff and now at this point after effects is thinking a lot so depending on your machine it may be chugging through stuff i'm previewing here at half but i am still impressed by this fake volumetric cloud sphere i really just love it just goes to show what happens when you give a humble plug-in like cc sphere a chance to shine to rise up and uh oh gosh we got more i'm gonna move on it's time for the last component of this crazy drone which are those external splashes and tendrils of smoke and i've got a really weird way to approximate this uh we'll start with a small composition just 500 by 500 and we'll call this the splash card all right we're going to make sure that this is a longer comp about 30 seconds or something like that and once we're in here we're going to do exactly what we always do which is create a new solid and then add some fractal noise amazing how that works right i'm going to turn up the contrast of this little bit so i get some kind of darker patches like this and then i'm going to mess with the scale a bit i'm going to uncheck uniform scaling and i'm going to kind of widen this noise and i'm also going to really stretch out its height so i'm getting more of these vertical kind of lines and now i'm going to draw a little mask right up here in the top third kind of like you're making a window on a door or something a little patch like this and let's not forget to add a classic time expression to our evolution let's just say time times 350 allowing the fractal noise to flourish within this small box and now we're going to turn this into something really cool using cc ball action as you can see this turns your image into an array of little spheres that you can scatter to the wind you can rotate them in space and even twist them around a custom axis also just like a fractal plug-in there's an instability state which is very much like the evolution of the random pattern that these are being scattered by and you can maybe see how this is going to stand in for us not using my life partner all right let's reset to default for a moment and down here under grid spacing you can see that as i control this it kind of adjusts the number of spheres it's packing into the space i'm going to go all the way down to zero and then i'll turn up the size of these a little bit just so they kind of fill in solid like that again and now we'll scatter them just a teeny bit just something like this so they're a little bit spread out now a feature that i had never discovered of this was that you can twist not only around one of the axes but you can choose the brightness of the image and then this filter will rotate these particles based on the amount of brightness each one of them has so you see how it's done that the white ones are back here the black ones have curled all the way around and now as i scroll through the evolution this allows these particles to travel back and forth along this line pretty nifty right and this gives me a really cool little controlled set of particles to add some more life i'm going to add a time expression to the instability state maybe time times 180 something simple like that that'll allow these particles to be kind of twirling in between and amongst themselves as all of this happens and then i'm also going to add a time expression to the rotation property it's going to rotate around the x-axis and i'm going to say i'd like it to do this maybe at time times about a hundred but i'd also like it to wiggle a little bit so i'll add a plus wiggle maybe one by uh maybe 50. when i play this back it should look like kind of a continuous wave of random pixels sort of twirling around this circle all right so my whole shape is rotating a little bit too slowly and i think the fractal noise is moving too fast so let's kind of invert these let's turn the time down there and the time up here now i'm hoping for a more consistent rotation with a slow change in these yeah something like this kind of little splashes jumping in and out under the fractal noise i'm going to turn up the contrast a little bit more and now you can see we've got this really cool organic kind of pattern going on now one other thing that's kind of cool is that if you want to you could treat this a little bit like a depth mat and add an extract effect to it where you kind of chop out all of the brighter pixels and now you get this really cool illusion that makes it feel like these dark pixels are kind of coming up in front of something and then getting occluded by it as they go back in and kind of form this leading edge that disappears behind something and that's going to be really helpful for the next part of this this next stage is a little wild but it's a lot of fun so let's create a new composition this one is going to be 1600 by 1600 like our final assembly comp and we'll call this one the splash circle now inside here i'm going to drag in my splash card and i'm going to start arranging some splash cards just in a little row like this just duplicate four copies of them or something like that and then i'm gonna offset each one's timing just a bit because you'll recall these are all about 30 seconds long and we really only need about 10 seconds of this once it goes into the final assembly and that means that when i play back i now have this twirly whirly set of pixels that are kind of dancing around and what's nice about these is that these are small 500 by 500 comps but they're contributing to this larger higher resolution comp now to get this all to work we're going to need the help of several adjustment layers so we'll add an adjustment layer to the top and to it we will apply some turbulent displace now we would like to switch this mode to a vertical displacement which will basically move them up and down like a funky sine wave and we'll set that amount up like that and we'll mess with the size of this fractal a bit and if you look at the offset and where to move that back and forth in x it's basically like you know someone's shaking the end of a jump rope or something like that so let's add a time expression to the offset it's got to be two coordinate again so let's try time times maybe 600 for the x-axis and no translation in y then let's increase our complexity just a little bit give us a little more class you know and then we'll switch the pinning mode to pin vertical locked those are these two sides and the reason i want the two sides kind of locked together is because it'll really help out this next filter which is polar coordinates now if you've never used polar coordinates it's a bit of a mind trip we're going to convert this rectangular coordinate system to a polar one and we're going to turn that up all the way to 100. now what's just happened is we've wrapped these pixels around this radial thing and look how fun this is so we don't get confused later let's name this the adjustment layer and we'll call it polar that way we know this is where this effect happened and now our turbulent displace instead of just being up and down what it's really doing is it's moving along the sides of this circle which is pretty cool moving things in and out similarly down below the adjustment layer you can still see your original layers but as you move them up you move them toward the center of the circle down toward the edges of the circle and if you did something like stretch their height it increases how much of that circle they are covering and so i'm going to make them kind of tall and kind of going all the way back to the middle of the sphere like that and then when i play back i get this really cool funky flower of fractal particley things kind of fun right okay so at any point that we want we could always duplicate any of these splash cards and we can you know shrink them make them toward the center of the circle or we can widen them out and do all sorts of stuff but we've just got to think in a polar coordinate system which is kind of weird but it is a lot of fun to experiment with and you know maybe just for fun make one of these extra tall and that one will always kind of stick out a little bit more yeah you stick out a little bit more and we could keep duplicating splash cards until we have the level of complexity that we like or we can do a really simple cheat that i like to do which is adding a new adjustment layer we'll put this on the very top and i'm going to call this the adjustment copy and rotate and here i'm going to apply distort transform and i'm going to rotate this thing 90 degrees now boring right but if i switch the mode of that adjustment layer to multiply now it's multiplying on top of the original image and if i turn the opacity of this layer down to about 50 you can sort of see both of these two ghost layers and where they overlap is extra dark and is also this really funky intersection of different patterns of particles to this copy and rotate layer i could also add some additional turbulent displays if i would like and i'll just look at the default settings maybe i'll turn the amount up a little bit more that's kind of making these wavy i'll turn up the complexity a little bit and then let's add a simple time expression to the evolution we'll start with maybe time times 300 or something like that and now you'll see these two kind of funky distorted layers overlapping and messing with each other i might turn down the amount a little bit actually and maybe we'll switch the mode to twist yeah look at this wildness now looking at this up close a lot of these pixels are not uh completely opaque that may semi-transparent and i'm going to add a third adjustment layer to this all so we can really focus on and play with the alpha so let's call this one the adjustment to alpha and then under this let's add a matte choker now what you'll see immediately is that that really chokes this down to just the darkest of these particles and the choker actually makes them look a little bit more liquidy in nature which is really cool but i'd actually like to turn down the effect of what this is doing a bit i'd like to start with a really low softness low choke for my choke one value and i'll turn up the softness so i can get back a few of those half opaque pixels and then for choke number two i want this to be a negative choke and i want the softness of it to not be so drastic so as i turn this up you'll see that it's basically filling in these semi-transparent places and giving me this wacky wild flower of amazingness and honestly i think this is one of the coolest types of things you can do with after effects i mean it's using this silly little card using cc ball action and polar coordinating it into this amazing i'm looking it's like an artful tattoo flower or something like that i would pay to have this installed under my skin with ink but that's not exactly what we're after here we want to combine this craziness with our drone assembly comp remember this let me show you a good way that i have found to try to combine this wild splash circle with this crazy cotton candy ball so i'll bring in my splash circle and look at this it's wild it's getting colorized by our color control layer and stuff i'll hook it up to the controller might as well that way i can still use that controller null to move this whole shape around and when i play this back i get a really interesting combination it's very organic but these things don't feel very married you can see all of these are going in toward the center and you really lose that sense of this core opening up in stripes and stuff like that so i want to go play with this just a little bit more so let's jump back over to our splash circle and as you recall if we select our splash cards and move them away from the top of the comp it's the same as moving them away from the center of this polar coordinate system i can kind of shrink them down a little bit and try to find a good placement for all these layers that still gives this whole comp life but frees up the center a little bit i'm even going to lose that random extra card we added so let's see what this pattern looks like once it gets into our assembly comp and this is a little bit better you can see that the middle section is a little bit more exposed so i can still get a sense of what that rotation is doing but i'm getting the bonus of these cool wisps on the side now obviously these are too bright and i'd really like them to be taking on basically the color of the you know the front of this smoke sphere instead of what they are doing so i'm going to do a dumb cheat which is to duplicate my sphere front like this and then i'll use the splash circle as an alpha matte for it but no change will be apparent really until you kind of zoom out and scale up this copy of the smoke sphere front to cover up all the alpha of this splash circle so now what's happening is this splash circle is taking on all the properties and colors of the smoke sphere and also includes these cutouts for the slime sphere in the middle it's getting revealed i know that's a little convoluted but it's kind of cool right so let's play this back and you'll see that now we're starting to get a more cohesive ball that has these wild tendrils going off to the side and some smoke patterns in the middle and everything is starting to come together and with the motion blur turned on you get an even more realistic sense of these feeling like real smoke wisps and even if the shape of your splash circle is non-square kind of squashed like this or something you could still always add a distort transform effect and then modify the rotation so it'll look like these tendrils are rolling around this sphere so if i added a time times negative 100 or something like that to the rotation within this filter you get the sense that this ball is now kind of rolling along using its tendrils which is kind of cool too so like a tumbleweed kind of moving along and a little bit of better sense of motion and just one last tip before you go comping this into some live action footage i suggest a new adjustment layer way up top that you add some mesh warp two and we don't need this many points to warp our mesh let's try just three rows and maybe two columns or something so from here what we can do is if we select any of these points we can kind of start to squish down this bottom third in a way that makes it look like this drone has to kind of squash itself on the floor which is kind of cool you can even bring the edges out so it's sort of more like a you know if you're pushing something like a pillow down onto a hard surface it'll kind of warp like this and now you can see if i grab my controller for example um it'll be round when it's up above that line and then as it comes down you'll see the whole thing kind of pillow out and bloat as if it is making contact with the floor and so just monkey with a mesh warp that might give you a good flat looking floor and then real quick back to our splash circle comp one of the things that you could do is add a new adjustment layer and apply some cc vector blur now vector blur we've used before on cheap tricks to turn particle renders into more stylized or liquidy looking versions of themselves so as you turn the amount or map softness up you can get these looks that are a little bit more wet looking compared to the dry look of the individual particles so here you can see the result of that slightly more liquidy look to these tendrils which is pretty cool and wicked so i rented out two png sequences that i'll also share with you one is kind of dry and one's more of that wet look and one of the fun things you could do with these honestly is do a an exciting mix and match game where you just kind of paste some of these things together and you know like scale them rotate them around a little bit offset their timing and then you can give yourself a crazier more complex drone monsters that render pretty quickly and look how nicely they combine it's really kind of cool you can even add some expressions so these wiggle around and stuff like that have fun with it and also once you have these cool pre-rendered drone cycles you can just kind of place them in front of any piece of footage you like and look at that even with no tracking or anything here's a scary drone coming to try to get you and i know we didn't use any third-party plug-ins to generate this drone but if i were integrating it into live-action footage i would definitely use vfx super comp supercomp would make it super easy for me to integrate this drone by possibly even using one of their presets something like rays and haze which already is doing some crazy cool blending with the lighting at the top of this drone and if i wanted to i could go and customize some of this even more i could even customize the volume fog to match the angle of the lighting in this original footage and get a really cool look like this and even add some optical glow right to this layer so it looks great in comp i also don't want to forget the blur behind effect so it'll look like objects in the background are getting diffused by the edges of this smoke and anytime i wanted to do something new like maybe add a black solid as the cheapest way to add some kind of a contact shadow here by feathering that out i could dive into super comp's panel and just add this layer to my stack drag it under here and now everything is being integrated nicely so just in terms of integration supercomp could take your image from something like this to this using very little work now i'm sure many of you are wondering how a guy like me could stay in the hotel ae and not check into the trapcode suite and i'll admit it was difficult you could certainly do what we just learned in a few hours putting together this effect and tweaking it but sometimes time is precious and if you're a max on one subscriber with all the red giant goodies here's how you could replicate this effect just for fun i'll use universe gradient ramp to make a three color ramp as a fake psych and then i'll add one solid with the effect trap code form in the designer window i can create one system that's just a single particle one large slightly feathered particle and then i can press plus to add an additional system specifically a one layered sphere with more x particles than y to create these stripes i can change their color to be black and then i can also add a shadow lit block and change its color to kind of a light purple this combined with an animated fractal field turns these stripes into those latitudinal parts of our slime ball now i can simply duplicate this system and rotate it to give myself longitudinal detail i mess with the fractal details a bunch and then i add a fourth system that's also a one layer sphere which i will bloat in x and z and then i'll really crank up the number of particles now these particles should be black with some purple shadowlets and they should also have an exciting fractal field stepping out of the designer window reveals that with trapcode you're actually getting a true 3d particle system that you could actually move around it also gives me really cool control like this simple visualizer to affect the strength of the fractal for my black tendrils so it'll stay tight at the bottom and more loose up top and you can see that effect more clearly when i turn up the fractal strength i'll add some upward y drift to the fractal field and a little time expression to the y rotation of my form world and now we've made a significant leap toward the look of one of these things in just a few minutes now like last time we're going to add some post effects on top of this particle render to give it that extra drone look so let's start with a little bit of radial fast blur to blend these single particles together a bit then we'll add vector blur on the alpha channel with some ridge smoothness and math softness to just pinch those outer tendrils together and then i'll add another instance of vector blur affecting the lightness you can turn up the ridge smoothness and then crank it to a negative value and you'll get kind of a similar look to our cell pattern with these bright lights in the middle some cc light sweep can help you simulate lighting effects cheaply and a matte choker could be dialed in to make these blurry edges look like a more cohesive liquid and where would we be without some mesmerizing optical glow now in this trapcode build it's the size of the outer layer of particles and the complexity of their fractal field which gives you control over the look of your drone now one wild advantage of using trapcode is that this is actually a true 3d effect that you could position and orbit around just keep in mind that we've also added some post effects as cheats so you may need to adjust them or keyframe them to camera now here are our drones side by side and they each have their own charm i mean you could certainly combine techniques together if you like the splashiness of the trap code version and the smokiness of the after effects version either way i've got some free goodies for you in the links below you've got this after effects file using trapcode fully 3d fully adjustable and you've also got this customizable after effects only project file where you can control the color the spin direction how open or closed or how calm or chaotic this drone is there's also a pre-rendered drone with alpha and a fun mix and match example using all of these pre-rendered cards now victoria from adobe shared this thought by dylan marvin that really resonated with me the after effects paradox is that it was built to do things it wasn't built to do pretty perfect right and our from scratch version really shows that lots of sweat tears and imagination and our trap code form version is a great example of having a tool built to do what after effects just really really isn't built to do which is a fast and controllable single layer of 3d particle effects so if you've somehow never had the joy of working with trapcode you should definitely spend the weekend with a free trial and that's it for me my lovelies if you have any questions reach out to us at maxonvfx or red giant news on twitter you can also find me and personally ask me questions at action movie kid your most important resource is your own creativity and willpower so make me proud and i'll see you next time

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 102,050

Rating: 4.9855757 out of 5

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, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, maxon, maxon one

Id: n8_DvAOYRCE

Length: 50min 52sec (3052 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021