Cheap Tricks | Sonic the Hedgehog VFX Tutorial

nice to see you in 2020 everyone I'm Hoshi your action movie dad and today we're gonna cover a few quick things will crank our footage up to sonic speed create some motion trails with trapcode particular and even make some of our own little scenes like this one with Sonic himself or this one with Sonic himself and you know what it's our scene so it doesn't even have to be Sonic all we need now is the title screen so on your mark get set download a Sega themed font and apply some universe luster and then splash it in the face with VHS and because Quicksilver on the flash exists so do a lot of very awesome tutorials on superhuman speed I always recommend you check out a variety of techniques in case one suits you better there are some awesome key things that I think really helps sell the speed of a character there are smearing of the character graphic trails bonus elements like glows and electricity environmental effects like dust getting kicked up and displacement ripples I'm gonna start showing you a lot of these techniques in this really straightforward simple shot then we'll get into some more dynamic and 3d shops that look a lot cooler but I won't labor over each setting as much and lastly we'll talk about a trapcode particular template that you can download right now at any time you can use the table of contents below to navigate right to whatever you want to learn also throughout this and all of my videos I often utilize video co-pilots free effects console it's this little thing that pops up when I select effects sometimes for me it's a much faster way of applying effects especially when I made a rating quickly so with that let's get started usually you film someone doing a regular action and then speed it up in post but there are a few things that you can do to make your fast-forwarded performance look just a little bit better now if you don't know what's mere frames are they're a really cool way that animation sometimes compensates for quick motion without having to have a character pop from one spot to another too quickly there are some amazing examples and demos of smear frames online let's talk about how we could create some of these smear frames when speeding up footage in After Effects let's start with this jogger in a static shot and here's her at real speed I can use time remapping to speed her up so she runs across in just one second but now when I play back it looks a little bit odd and in fact this spacing happens to make her look like she's kind of doing a weird glide or something and that's where something as simple as frame blending can help you out now you're probably already familiar but there are two types of frame blending in After Effects one that uses opacity to blend frames together and one that uses optical flow to actually generate new unique frames in this case opacity frame blending actually looks pretty good it's less stuttery and you get sort of the sense that arms and legs are moving and she's a little bit fainter like she's motion blurred but when we zoom in you can see that we might actually want more samples than this and that's where a combination of echo and optical flow will come in let me turn our frame blending for a second and add the effect time echo now when you apply echo one echo will appear from about a frame ago and everything looks brighter that's because the default number of echoes is set to 1 echo time is a negative 0.03 3 seconds ago that's one frame ago if you're working in 30 frames per second I'm in 24 frames per second so it should actually be a negative 1 over 24 but let's set the operator mode to minimum which kind of extracts our darker values and echoes them now you can play with different operators to get different results depending on your shot now if I crank up the number of echoes I get something like this my very own Michelle gondry video it's neat but these echoes are too far apart and since this section is actually a lot of frames scrunched together I could actually set the echo time to a smaller interval like negative 1 over 48 or maybe even negative 1 over 200 and now we've got a tighter arrangement now here at the bottom of echo we've got decay this is like the opacity of each subsequent echo after the last so if I said this is something like 0.9 it'll look like the echoes are fading out looks pretty neat in motion but depending on the quality you're going for this is still actually not a great number of samples so let's start cranking down the equity to a really low number now in theory there should be more samples that are physically closer to each other but my original footage only has so many frame that's why I can only see like five echoes here even though the echo number is at the nineteen here's where optical flow frame blending comes in handy now check it out if you can imagine the echo effect is now showing nineteen interpolations of negative 0.001 seconds ago and since After Effects is using optical flow it's actually created nineteen unique images that all overlay together nicely like a smear frame now an obvious note for every frame the computer needs to synthesize an overlay to produce this image your render time will compound but man you can get some really crazy looks so as you play around find a setting that works for you and then consider pre-rendering this bit before moving on depending on the type of shot having this as a basis is a great starting point for adding in some additional effects that are more Sonic themed a human and animal SuperSpeed is often represented in film and animation by emulating the effects that we see of real-life fast things like dust trails contrails sonic booms oh I just got that setting a sonic just just like the drive at Sonic and the flash are often accompanied by long graphic trails or electricity Sonic has some pretty clean lines and trails and most versions of the flash have a bit more grit to them and in my tinkering around I found that once again trapcode particular is really good at replicating a lot of these kind of effects since I don't know what your shot looks like you'll need to have a good grasp of the basics of how we're using particular here the premise is really simple we're gonna create a stand in 3d card that animates along with our subject then we'll attach multiple particle emitters to that card that emit trails of particles that fade out over time sometimes your motion will come from you animating the emitters position through your scene but if your subjects relatively fixed within frame we may use particulars wind settings to simulate motion in this running shot for example I'm gonna make a 3d null that I keyframe along with this subject it's pretty easy in this case next I'll create a point light called emitter and parent it to the null I'll make sure the position is zeroed out and then I can duplicate the layer and rename it feet and to slide it down here to where the feet touch the ground now because this is really simple as I scrub through you can see that we've got locators that move right along with our character let's create a solid with particular now I'll change the emitter type to lights and if I named my emitter properly I should automatically have a nice trail of particles that emits from my character I'm going to turn down the velocity to zero the emitter size down to zero as well and that should give me a simple straight line right behind her another value to keep an eye on is the velocity from motion slider here it's pretty awesome for adding momentum to particles in some instances but it's not always great for graphic trails so right now I'll turn it down a lot next let's change the particle life to 0.5 and set the particle type to Street lit now a streak lit is like a bunch of bristles from a brush and it looked good when you have a really high particle count I'll add the fade-out preset to my opacity over time and then I'll change the blending mode to add let's also change the color to a sonic blue and then down here at the bottom of particle settings you have some options for your streak lit to customize the look playing it back here's a nice basic streak and since that emitter is parented to the body null I could nudge the position of the emitter to work best for the shot and just for fun let's option or alt-click on the position to add this expression this expression will still allow me to move where the emitter is but it'll give me a delightful little bob to the y position as this jogger is running so basically the first number here in the Y category is the amplitude of a sine wave and this time times 30 is the frequency it looks kind of cute now to smooth this sine wave out a little bit I'm going to jump back into particular and then under emitter I'll select the position subframe and set it to 10 times linear depending on how fast your motion is you could also select smooth or even exact as well now in this wide shot this one emitter creates a pretty nice streak that fits our blurred character but if we had had a larger subject in frame with more distinct features just one Street commit or may not do and one of the things that's great about using light emitters in particular is that at any point I can simply duplicate the light and now I automatically have a secondary point generating the same type of streaks so for example if I were working in a more 3d shot like this one I could roughly track in that body and null to the character and then add some keyframes to these Parenthood and duplicated light emitters placing them to really conform more with a specific movement of your character placing them on the head or torso or hands whatever stands out in your shot so remember that even though I'm presenting it really simply right here this technique can give you some really robust results now let's write adding in some ground smoke I'm going to create a solid with particular and do some of the same steps as before under the emitter type will select lights but importantly I'll click on this box here and change the light naming to feet now if I turn the velocity and emitter size back to zero I should see some particles being emitted from that secondary light down by the feet I'll use some cloudlet particles all sample the color from my image it's kind of gray and it'll add some curves to my size and opacity over life now smoke starts small and then it grows out as it dissipates so my size will grow over time and my opacity will ramp up quickly at the beginning and then slowly fade out under lighting I can also enable shadow lets to give this a smokier feel and then it's very likely that I'll crank the opacity all the way down to something like one with just a little bit of random opacity across the particles down under physics I'll turn up the air resistance a little bit and add a little bit of negative Y wind and I'll also let the turbulence field affect the position of these particles and I'll probably turn down the scale of the turbulence as well now if we've done our job right we should have something that looks like smoke being turned up from her feet as she runs along now just like any particular layer you could play with these settings until you're blue in the face well just keep in mind the environment of your shot like a desert would have a lot of dust bright white spaceship corridor not so much Sonic sometimes has electricity that emits from him and there are a few options you have in After Effects when it comes to electricity depending how much time you want to spend you could always go with stock elements like action VFX has a free lightning pack on their website and one of the very best options you have is visiting our friends over at production crate they have several amazing stock electricity effects available to anyone and even more beautiful ones for pro members and on top of that they have some really great content covering the use of these elements so I highly recommend that you check those out now how about non stock related options well then it's the advanced lightening plug-in that comes with After Effects and you can also create electricity style trails with particular we'll do that a little bit later as well andrew kramer has of course the best tutorial in the world about compositing advanced lightning and learning some detailed ways that you can make its animation look more directional so put that on your viewing list as well I am NOT gonna get even half that fancy here instead I'm gonna use small bursts of advanced lightning using the strike mode and I'll cheat wherever I can for example I'll use a two comp expression to set the origin point of this lightning to the same location as one of the emitter lights on the body then I can clip this lightning solid down to a small like two to six frame animation I can duplicate out this little blip a bunch of times and then go to each one and just change the Lightning direction to a different spot in frame giving me these cool quick little bursts of electricity mix these with some spark hits from your favorite stock collection or a particular emitter and you can really crank up the energy of your shot now while this shot covered a lot of the kinds of things will do it's still a very dynamic shot and you could try color correcting it added in camera shake or some other top filters but since speed is dynamic it'd be better to have a shot with more motion so let's move on to something more interesting in the opening of the trailer there are some nice wide shots that basically replace Sonic with this little ball of light and the motion is pretty cool let's do something similar on top of this more interesting piece of footage now here we've got the camera moving it's a nice racetrack we have some other cars for comparison to create a sonic trail that runs along this track with basically the same setup as before first off we'll set up the scene will camera track this beast and then create a ground plane and origin we'll also add a few nulls as close to where these floodlights are placed as possible then I'll normalize the scale of this project by rotating the ground plane around to be square with the footage then parenting all of my 3d tracking guides and the camera to it now I can change the position of this ground plane to 960 by 540 by 0 and the rotation to 270 by zero by zero now I'll create a dummy solid that's the same as the comp dimensions make it 3d and then I can adjust the scale of my ground plane and to let dummy solid looks like it's a healthy size within the frame this actually turned out to be a pretty good scale to begin with now I can delete that dummy and unparent everything else there are lots of benefits to doing this before embarking on any 3d tracked scene I'll talk about it in detail about six and a half minutes into my Aquaman part 1 episode if you want to hear a really detailed description of why I do this now we've got a nice scene let's create our null stand-in I'll make a 3d null and I'll create a point light called emitter that I attach to it as you're out of the position and then I'll also duplicate this light and rename this one feet now the orientation of this null is at 0 because we've normalized our scene and if we move it using the x and z gizmos it'll stay right flat on this ground plane I'll take a moment to set a few position keyframes and then once I've made enough I can select all of these middle key frames right click and say Rove over time so the velocity remains constant across the whole thing next I'm going to clean up this path using the tangent controls a bit but doing it by eye from this camera view would actually knock the points out of alignment with a ground plane so to do that I'll switch to a two views option and I'll show the top view over here and watch in this monitor as I adjust the path once that's all taken care of I'll create a solid called trail and I'll add trapcode particular we'll do the same thing we did before setting the emitter to lights reducing the emitter size to zero cranking up the particle count setting the position subframe to maybe ten times smooth this time and we'll have the velocity from motion at zero and when I play it back I should get this nice stroke being drawn in 3d that really lets me see this path I can use this view to make some minor adjustments to the path again from the top view so I don't knock them below the ground plane by accident this is looking great so let's switch our particle type to streak lit change the color to a light blue and the blend mode to add will add a few additional streaks and crank up the particle size to sonic sized we'll set the opacity to fade out over time just like this preset here and we'll adjust the lifespan of this trail to be about 0.5 seconds or maybe a little longer point eight seconds and now we'll twirl down to the physics and under turbulence field I'll turn up the effects position just so I get a nice little bit of smoky wisp at the end of this trail let's play that back nice now let's add some foot smoke this will be just like before we'll create a particular layer set the emitter to be lights named feet emitter size zero the particles will maybe have some velocity this time but I'll counter that with a bit of air resistance down under physics and then all the standard smoky stuff smoke --let particles grayish with shadow let's size growing over time opacity fading out over time and the opacity cranked nearly to zero add some turbulence to the position of these two and a little negative Y win so they raised off the ground and you've got a nice smoky trail next let's add a solid called flare now in place of any actual subject Sonic is going to be represented here by a little ball of light for which I will grab knoll light factory let's dive into the designer and then browse through some presets I'm gonna go with this one called blue giant hey then we'll make sure our blending mode is add and then we can check this handy little use lights box and tell it that our light is named emitter and boom instant flare I'll set some key frames so the flare decreases in size as it gets farther away and I'll also add a little bit of a wiggle expression to give the brightness a little bit of a flicker and maybe we could tint this guy a little more blue too next let's create a light cast on the ground from Sonic a load in this texture card lay it flat on the ground plane and then scale it up to kind of fill most of frame then I'll use CC Tyler to scale the texture down within this card and luckily you'll never see much of this card at once so the repeating pattern doesn't really matter in this case now that I have this 3d layer I can create another 3d solid that's flat to the ground and parented to the body mil make sure the position is zeroed out and then I'll draw a neat little feathered ellipse on it now I can set this as an alpha mat for that layer below and you can see that now I have a slightly texture to ground glow that moves nicely along with the body here's that soloed and now let's add in some advanced lightening but with some expressions to help us make short work of it I'll add in a black solid with advanced lightening applied and then I'll change the mode to strike and I'll scale down the core and the glow a bit this is a wide shot also we can change the blending mode of this layer to add now I'm going to rename my lamp locators with unique names and then watch how just a few expressions will make this so easy I'll alter option click on the origin point for the lightning and I'll add a standard to comp expression using the lamp one as the location and as that gets applied the start of lightening snaps right to this lamp over here now let's copy and paste this expression to the direction locator but we'll change the part in quotes to say emitter and then BAM we've got lightning connecting these two 3d locators for free now this doesn't look good the whole time we'll want to tinker with lightning settings a bit and trim down these layers using the alt or option bracket shortcuts I can trim this lightning layer to last a few frames long and then as I duplicate layer if I can position them to different points of the timeline so the lightning strikes coincide with the moments where Sonic's closer to different sources and easily edit the expression by changing the naming to lamp two or three as Sona gets farther back collapsing everything down you can see how we've spread these little lightning bits out over the clip and when we play through the whole thing that's kind of fun and now we can use those lamp locators one more time by copying their position and pasting them onto some stock spark bursts I'll switch these layers to not accept lights and I'll move their anchor point to line up with the hotspot and now I can simply scale place and time these sparks with lightning strikes last touches I'll apply Magic Bullet Looks to quickly shop through a couple of different color options and then do some final tinkering with the glow levels of lightning to crank up the look of this streak just a bit more I'll also apply some optical glow and kind of fun shot you could easily use this technique to replicate any wide shot like these from the Sonic trailer but what about close-up hero shots like this well let's combine a few skills you hopefully gathered from our time together well combine a bit of what we've covered today with some of those fractal tips from the Captain Marvel episode and we'll also rely on our classic cheap Trick's pipeline for bringing in animated characters into After Effects this first job we can produce by simply adding a running sonic in front of a moving stock background and layering it a bunch of effects after that will flex a little bit more and see if we can utilize some camera tracking plus some complex lighting to play Sonic or perhaps even the flash in a traveling shot like this step one is going to sketchfab to find some free downloadable models in the case of Sonic it's quite easy to find one that's downloadable and animated I'll pop up at cinema 4d where once again I'll stay I'm not an expert so I'm trying to get better teaching things in cinema I wonder if any opportunities for me to get better at this program or to be able to teach you cooler things will present themselves I mean think of the things we could learn if we dive deeper into the 3d side of visual effects on cheap tricks anyway let's start by opening up this animated FBX it looks like Sonic got unlinked from his textures but no worries I'll just go down here open up the texture manager select all those textures and then say edit realing textures pointing cinema to the folder where those bad boys are stored and you can see they're reeling right here I'm gonna go ahead and delete these two lights as I'm not gonna use them anyway and there you go we can see it nicely now and Sonic comes with multiple animated takes so I'll go to window take manager where I can preview any of these loops I really like this jog 1 since he's looking a little bit more straight ahead so now I could use Riptide Pro or actually how about the free steady baked X rec to export a cinema 4d sequence that I can import into element back in After Effects let's start a new project with a solid with element applied and we'll dive into element and import 3d sequence he's a little big so I'll check normalize size over here and then I'll also turn down the glossiness of these textures inherited and then I'll pop back out to AE under group one I'll create a null object so I can position and scale Sonic and I'll also create a new camera so I can move around at will now when using a simple looped animation like this something I found can be really nice are the deform tools and element especially for something straightforward like this because I could enable Bend to rock sonic kind of back and forth as if he were banking and I could also use twist - maybe imply a little more direction here or there if I wanted just for fun I'll apply a wiggle expression to the bend angle adding a seed random to lock in that wiggle motion and I'll also throw on some real smart motion blur to make this action feel a little bit smoother and speaking of smooth I think sonic exported with a frame zero that's repeating in this loop so I'm gonna go ahead and delete this repeated frame manually and make sure that element gets the message too now these are simple mistakes that even a cinema 4d expert like myself can make from time to time alright so I know he's a cartoon character from a video game but perhaps we can add a bit more detail on him then he's got now I'll pop into Photoshop and mess with these very basic textures by overlaying and stamping this hair pattern all around I'll also monkey a bit with his eye colors and then inside element I can try mixing the hair into something that has a little bit more of a normal bump variety and gloss up his eyes a bit it's not a phenomenal reworking but I think it looks a little bit better now let's add some lighting I'll create two point lights that basically have two keyframes moving them from front to back and a few keyframes to have their intensity fade up and then down now if I add a loop expression to the intensity and the position and offset this one on the right a little bit I get kind of a simulated character running through street lights or down a tunnel look bottom line it helps me sell the idea that the characters traveling and for these to look right I'll need to make sure that shadows in element are enabled specifically raytrace shadows since I'm using point lights if you don't want to use ray tracing you could always set this up with spotlights instead and speaking of those I'll actually add a little pop spot light that's kind of blue and out here in front of Sonic and just like when we simulated lightning in this episode I'm gonna do a very similar thing here adding a wiggle expression with a posterized time on it setting the value at 12 gives me little to frame pops of light that are just randomly jumping around and pointing at different parts of his body now I'll render out Sonic as a PNG sequence so we can save a little time and also I can treat him a little bit like any keyed piece of footage you have of running in front of a green screen or something like that and you can do all these following steps to that same type of footage now one of my favorite things to do in After Effects is to combine simple and unexpected effects to create delightful results when we created our Captain Marvel template we talked a lot about procedural templates where one piece of footage feeds into a system that spits out a cool result based largely on the footage input now watch how quickly we can get a great result from slapping a few things together I'll place my footage with the Alpha Channel in its own comp called source and then I'll drag that into a new comp called effect now we'll use copies of this layer to create a unique sonic speed look first let's quickly take care of the outer and inner glow now you could just use layer styles here I suppose but I like having a little more control so for the outer glow we'll take a copy of the footage fill it blue add some fast box blur I'll do two instances so there's a small and a large fringe to create some fake fall-off and then to help this from looking too Photoshop II and clean I'll add some turbulent displace to kind of give the edge a little more life for the inner glow I'll duplicate that footage layer again invert the Alpha Channel fill it with blue apply a negative symbol show and then at a fast box blur to this layer then I can use the set mat effect to contain that inner glow I'll set both the outer and inner glow to add blending mode and adjust their opacities a bit and there we go outer inner glow now let's add some cool pulsing I'll create a black solid and apply radio waves now for the wave type I'll select image contours and then point it to the original footage layer below now you can see that these little outlines are emanating from the middle if I turn up to frequency and expansion while also reducing the lifespan I can get some cool quick repeating outlines that move outward kind of at the pace of him running I can adjust the start width and the fade in and out time and then apply some CC radial blur a straight zoom and just blur out these pulses a little bit now if I apply a set Matt effect and under channel I select the original Sonic layer these waves will stay nicely clipped within his body but give me this cool outward pulse next is my favorite creating some electric contours now again I'll start with a copy of the layer and then I'll apply find edges which does just what it says I'll check invert and now we've got some cool neon outlines going on I'll add some brightness and contrast to really clamp down these values so we've got just a few lines here and there and now comes the interesting part I'm gonna apply Colorama I'll move it to the top here and solo it for a moment now Colorama takes all the values from the original image and remaps them to an output cycle represented here so for example if I change this to a ramp gray it's basically just mapping the image brightness to a black and white looking image why do this well Colorama has this really unique ability to repeat the output cycle at a custom value so as I turn up the repetitions here the start getting wrapped around to the other side creating these interesting zebra stripes if I turn it up I'll put it back down to around two and now when I turn on my find edges again there's a new edge that appears created right between where the previous edges were found this process is a bit of a dice roll but it breaks up the electricity from being so cleanly motivated by just the edges and creates a bit of electric chaos which I really like next let's apply some fractal noise we'll crank up the contrast and turn down the brightness maybe adjust the scale of the fractal and then we'll apply a time expression to the evolution this should give me some wandering patches of black and white now how is this useful well the fractal has a blending mode setting and if I set it to multiply you can see that what this does is it punches out random but evolving sections of our traced edges if I add a few keyframes to the offset turbulent settings I can key this fractal shape to generally drift up over time meaning it'll reveal the found edges bits in a generally upward motion like this and now that you've seen very plainly what we're creating we can switch this blending mode to add and finish this off we've got to crack all these lines up a bit so we'll add a couple instances of turbulent displace first we'll set it to use cross displacement and adjust the amount and size to give me just a couple little waves that knock these lines a bit off from their original edge then I'll duplicate the effect I'll switch back to standard turbulent mode and this time I'll really crank down the size and turn up the complexity and when we find the right balance it'll give us some nice small little electric shapes like this next you could add a couple instances of glow one of the small radius one of the larger radius and then maybe apply some CC toner to this layer to make your electricity whatever colour you want it to be though because I know myself I'm actually going to clear these out and opted for optical glow instead of these because I just really liked the color the vibrance and fall-off settings offered there look at that now playing this back we've got some really nice electric crackle that's relatively automated and since its procedural we can actually throw anything back in our source comp tweak the settings a bit and it'll look like the contours and details are covered and dancing lightning now this process takes longer to explain out loud than to actually do so if you try it once or twice you'll be able to do this like it's nothing in fact you can almost save this whole effect group as a preset save yourself some time now let's pepper in some distinct custom electric arcs I'm gonna create these in a new composition I'll simply animate some advanced lightning to animate a cross screen with just a few keyframes and then I'll animate a little particular emitter to go right along that same path emitting some blue sparks with some motion blur on them I'll make sure they're lined up and then a loop out all of these keyframes so I end with multiple distinct lines of electricity going across screen then I'll have an adjustment layer on top of that and use some warp and Bezier curves to kind of create this nice front-loaded arc kind of like the curve of a wing or something like that I'll bring in this layer and make it 3d and move the anchor point to the beginning of the arc over here and now by duplicating and rotating a few copies of this card I can blanket Sonic in this little cage of electric zaps that are flying past him I can offset these layers all a little bit and as you can see from this 2d card view you could parent a handful of these arcs to like a central null to help you transform the whole shape of this electric cage as needed and that's pretty cool-looking lastly a trail isn't really visible from this closed front angle but maybe I could add a bit of picked up smoke to mimic some ground interaction I just need a solid with particular and then I'll repeat a lot of the same steps I did creating those smoke Latrell earlier the main difference is that instead of the source emitter moving around it's actually a relatively static and frame so I will use particulars wind settings specifically the Z wind to simulate motion here it blows back the particles quickly away from camera and creates the illusion of some motion here even if it ends up being pretty subtle in the final comment from here finishing this shot is pretty simple I grabbed most of my stock footage today from videohive and here's a nice tunnel travel shot that could fill out the rest of the shot nicely I'll place it in the background and time remap it so the speed feels about right now because it's a blurry tunnel moving quickly I'm actually able to create a pretty decent loop by just utilizing one of the darker frames as loop point I'll tint this footage a little bit blue and I'll also add an adjustment layer that kind of acts as a fake ground bloom from Sonic a few top-level curves adjustments and tweaks and I've got this shot which happily avoids having to show any ground contact and when searching for clips for the intro of this episode I saw this shot of the flash and thought it was pretty cool so what have we tried to mimic that shot using Sonic I think it's worth a go in fact I think we could accomplish it pretty quickly so we'll start with this footage it's important that it's nighttime here because effects like trails and glows really look better in front of dark backgrounds this footage is actually already reversed and also it feels a little bit slow so I'm gonna speed it up a bit at first and then I'm going to export a new QuickTime of it that way the after effects camera tracker feels like it'll have the best shot if it's a nice clean piece of footage instead of a time reversed and remanded so I'll bringing that new piece of footage to its own comp and then let's run the camera tracker let's cross our fingers and toes and whoa we did it with an error of only one pixel way to go after effects now let's make a scene I'll scrub to the middle of this clip and right here I'll set the ground plane and origin create a camera and a solid and then we'll scrub through the clip creating some more solids on the ground and some nulls wherever there are lights that got tracked once those are all created I'll normalize my scene so I know the orientation and scale are not too extreme and then heck let's get right into it I'll add a solid with element and then I'll use that same running sonic I'll jump back out and I'll create a sonic null and if everything worked out right there should be a sonic running right in place in the middle of this clip right at road level all right let's scale him and position him a little bit over here and since this is a really flat scene and smooth enough I'm gonna do something I wouldn't usually advise and I'm an apparent Sonic's null to the camera so just for giggles let's play that back and hey this trick can totally fail with less smooth footage but since it looks ok I'm gonna roll with it now I think I can get away with just two position keyframes one for Sonic farther from camera and then one closer to camera by the end I'll set a few key frames for the orientation so he feels properly aligned with the road and then remember that deform bend trick well I'll set the bend access to Y and then I'll add a few key frames throughout to give Sonic some nice Naruto banking now we can integrate Sonic even more by jumping into element and adding a ground plane that'll actually travel along with him it's got to be big enough that he could really cast shadows in kind of any direction and also could be good if there are a bit of street normal mapping to it or something so I'll grab this asphalt texture and apply it and then in the advanced settings I'll disable that material from casting shadows I'll set the ambient occlusion mode to receive ray-traced ambient occlusion and then I'll check the match shadow switch it also appears Sonic's a little lower than the ground so I'll actually adjust his position while I'm in here let's head back outside where we can enable the ray-traced ambient occlusion which gives sonic a nice contact point and then let's add a point light with some diffusion built into its shadow then we'll copy its position from this first streetlight here then an element will enable the ray-traced shadows and lookie here we have a light casting an awesome shadow onto the ground plane attached to Sonic which is in turn attached to the camera as it glides through the shot and I couldn't be more excited the sonic element himself is really cartoonish but the cast shadow somehow immediately makes him feel more grounded in this world so I'm gonna duplicate this point light a bunch and then copy and paste the positions from all these lamppost nulls I think element maxes out at 8 lights so I'm just gonna use five of these locators for streetlights and reserve a few for some other effects because I couldn't quickly figure out how to give these lights a real fall off on their shadows I'm actually just gonna keyframe the shadow darkness to go up as Sonic runs past them and then fade out again I'll create all of these keyframes at the same time and I'll press u to reveal them all together and I'm going to slide them to match the timing of my scene alright so let's try playing that back and oh my god Becky look at those shadows now I know he's not colored or composited well into the scene yet but as a base render I think we're really getting there let's add a new spotlight that I can place behind Sonic it'll be pointed forward at his back creating kind of a rim light now this rim is both to kind of pop him away from the background and also supposed to kind of be like light emanating behind him caused by that speed trail I'm gonna add some real smart motion blur to this and then I'm gonna go ahead and pre-render a PNG sequence of Sonic and his cast shadows it says it's gonna take about six or seven minutes so maybe I'll pop over to sketchfab in the mean time and do a quick search for models of the flash there are several pretty awesome free ones available but I really feel like supporting our creative community so I'm actually gonna buy this model from eager X now unfortunately when I open this file all of the textures seem to have become unlinked and not even past in here they're actually really well named in the folder so I'm gonna need to take a second and quickly apply each of these textures and their normals back onto this model now that I finished that silly process I really don't ever want to do it again and luckily our good friend Harry Frank actually made a tutorial on this specific thing when you have a complicated object with a lot of different textures you can use cinema 4d to bake the object and texture and a one simple object one simple texture that's exactly what I want and I'm gonna run that process right now this is all for the sake of having a simple model that I can use with mix mo and then element once I'm more proficient with cinema 4d I might actually do more of my work in here with these nice full res textures but for now let's head over to mixin mode calm upload our model of the flash that we just exported place the simple rigging dots and bam we've got a rig flash we'll click over to animations and search for runs and it looks like this simple running one works pretty well I will mess with the style and speed and the character arm space until I get a loop that I feel like has the energy of the flash and then I'll download that back in cinema 4d I can apply that combined texture to the FBX I just exported and then I can run steady bake one more time to export a cinema 4d sequence and now that my sonic render is done I can dive back into After Effects open up my element layer and import my run cycle for the flash I'll properly scale him to be a little bit taller than Sonic and then after adjusting the amount of Bend in this taller character I get this running sonic render running flash renderer who could be happier let's set up our effects levels using sonic I'm going to rearrange my layers so I just have the nice background and the rendered out Sonic up top along with the Sonic No then I'll create two point lights I'll rename one emitter and one feet and parent them to the Sonic null we should be pretty familiar with doing this by this point just like before I'll add a solid with particular and set it up for some nice streak lit particles to follow Sonic one thing I'll do at the very beginning under the emission extras I'm going to enable the pre run to allow a particular to be generating particles earlier I'll also add a phantom keyframe to the Sonic null position to create a bit of extra curve in that trail leading up to frame 1 after playing around with one large speed trail for a while setting a few keyframes to try to keep it nicely centered I decided it's time to listen to my own advice and make this particle trail smaller and duplicate the emitter that way I can use multiple streak emitters to more proportionally represent Sonic's shape I think it looks a lot better now I can super quickly at a flickering lens flare behind this Hedgehog by adding a solid with no light factory which I can link right to that first emitter and then use a wiggle expression on the brightness we're building to something cool now I can feel it let's duplicate our sonic layer and apply our electric cocktail of find edges fractal noise and turbulent this place and set that layer to add then we can duplicate that layer and make a copy where the turbulent displace has turned up even more placing these electricity lines outside Sonic then we can move that layer behind him at this point I think it's a good idea to finally bring in our old friends super comp we've actually only got six active layers right now which is pretty surprising for this and I think they can really start to inform how nice the overall shot could look so let's select these six layers and then go to our GV effects super comp super comp combines and outputs these layers into one new layer and opens up our super comp mixing window and the best part of this new comping environment is that all the layers are aware of each other also this actually blends the layers together using a 32-bit color blending space even if your project is an 8 bits this generally means that it's harder to blow out your image when you're combining additive layers so let's look at this lens flare for example it's not as bright as before and it's fall off as a little bit gentler so we'll actually jump down to that layer and dial up the brightness a bit and tint the flare more blue we can finally make sonic look more married to this scene by adding in a nice haze in Super Comp too kind of matches black levels and I'll also turn up the shadow amount to give them a soft darker interior then I'll add two instances of light wrap one that's tight to his body and one that's a little more diffuse I'll add in some optical glow to my electricity layers it'll also add some extra heat blur behind this top layer I noticed that my ground shadows are getting a little washed out with this light wrap and what is Sonic without shadow so I'll duplicate Sonic's layer rename it to shadow and do just a rough mask of the ground shadow and then I can add that into super comp without any light wrap next I'll scroll up to the top of my layer stack and add an adjustment layer above my Super Comp layer here I can add Magic Bullet Looks so I can pick a look that's a little bit more evocative of that original flash shot that I'm emulating now a lot of these look pretty cool and for now I will settle on onslaught it changes the look of a few things so I'm gonna adjust the color on Sonic a bit and it's all looking neat but I want to add a few extra things I'll start with some floating particles in the air I don't know what they are but they're visible in this flash shot and you know what I bet that they're mostly motion enhancing floaties or em EFS as we call them in this bit I just made up actually a lot of houses I know call the stuff crap in the air no joke to creat these particles I'm using particular again and I'm simply creating a particular layer with a box emitter and a new null called air particle generator I'll parent this null to the camera drag it a bit behind camera and then on the position of particular box emitter I'll use a to world expression you'll see that this puts a bunch of crap in the air I'll give it a life span of one second have the opacity fade out over time turn the size down and make them cloudlet particles so their shape starters uniform enable some motion blur tint them blue and now if I Solo that we've got some nice particles trailing away through the air now here's like an exaggerated side view to show you what's going on we've got the camera moving and the emitter attached behind it with particles being born right into its field of view and then fading out all i have to do to incorporate this and any other new layers into super comp is to open up the super comp panel and click on the plus sign here under source layers now let's do what we did on that last step of our racetrack scene and add a bunch of small bursts of advanced lightning to our scene since everything's pretty fixed I'm just gonna add some three frame lightning strikes that either come from off screen or maybe toward one of these street lights in the scene I'll create about four of those and then I think I'll polish off this shot with some awesome assets production great I'll grab a few of their very cool Lightning animations and then this lens flare called crystal optics and then in like the laziest way possible I will slap these layers on top of my sonic render at a few key moments and now check out this result now you'll remember that a few minutes ago we also rendered out this asset so what if we were to do a straight swap out whether a Sonic layer well it all looks pretty great with a little color correction repositioning those streaklight generators and repositioning the targets of those lightning strikes we've got a pretty nice scene going just using what we've got here now the flash usually has some additional effects going on around him specifically kind of this trail of distortion some brighter lightning and at least in the shot they've opted to have the flash with a more traditional run speed meaning that his foot contact is actually sliding along the pavement as it moves under him they've added these little light bursts when his feet are close to the ground which act as a nice crutch for our eyes to kind of ignore this discrepancy I'm feeling pretty lazy so once again production crate has got my back with this nice little lightning asset I'm gonna duplicate it a bunch of times and line it up with each time the Flash's feet touch the ground then I can pre comp all of those foot contact points together for simplicity we'll also dive into the procedural lightning lairs and mess with some of the settings and to lay off some lightning that's a little bit smaller with brighter hot spots and now I want to add a displacement trail behind him and the very simple way to do that is to duplicate my streak lit trails layer I'll rename it blur and then here I can reduce the number of particles and increase their velocity so they spread out a little bit and that instantly gives me this nice dispersed smoky trail behind him but now comes the coolest part if I add this layer into super comp and set it as an additive layer I can use some heat blur to both blur and even displace the background behind this layer after messing around with the settings for a second I love the way this stuff looks and during these later shots I totally forgot about our good friend echo which if I add to this flash layer I can get this really cool little bit of bobbing trail that glows behind him then on my top adjustment layer I'm going to add in some universe chromatic aberration which will pull apart the colors at the edge of frame and also create a bit of a blurry vignette and I can even add some lens texture to literally make this shot grittier so let's play that back [Music] so now with everything combined we've created two nice little VFX shots using the exact same setup and I think this is a great place to start wrapping up for our red giant complete peeps I've prepared a template for you to get started on your SuperSpeed journey these are primarily particular presets with a little optical glow mixed in so particular is a requirement the template features this body stand-in with three types of light emitters attached Streak 'let's ground smoke and one thing that I didn't really get to use in my sample shots today electricity now the street lifts and smoke are very much like in our examples today and the electricity is also generated with particular it's actually a stream of sphere particles that use a combination of particular turbulence fields mixed with some small wiggle expressions on the emitters themselves to create these shapes up top we have the master controls here's where you can decide what type of shot you're using this template for turn up the wind speed and you'll get particles flowing in Z which is ideal for shots like this if your subject is moving through frame no Z wind is necessary you can leave it right at zero in either case your workflow should be like this you place your footage at the bottom then set the position and orientation keyframes of this 3d body standing to move along with your subject now this body controller is a shape layer so you can jump in and change these shapes to whatever fits your subject the best truly it's just for your visual reference position the body stand-in in actual 3d space meaning as your subject gets farther away push the body back in z space don't just scale it down if you want higher camera fidelity you can always track your camera and normalize your scene before you begin you don't need to be precise with the body placement the fewer number of keyframes the smoother your trails will look and if your subject isn't moving through space because the camera is following them turn up the wind speed to match their running speed and then rotate your camera so that Z direction matches that of your show after you track the body you can duplicate any of these emitters and keyframe them yourself to create multiple electric burst source tree clips or smoke trails I think the electricity particles work really well when you have three or more on the master controls layer we have a master amount dial right up top which you can use to turn these effects all the way up or down under that there are some Advanced Options the electricity for example has a bunch of things like life thickness flicker speed and the likelihood that it'll occur you can turn this all the way up to 100 if you want constant electricity and below that we have the wiggle controls which will help you affect the wiggle of the actual emitters and then the turbulence settings so you can change how much the electricity is affected by that field the smoke and the streak have some basic controls here under advanced as well each one of these effects is in its own particular layer which you could turn on or off as needed for example maybe you just want the streak or some electricity to come from someone's fist as they punch something but you don't need the smoke obviously this template will just help you get started you can dive in and customize any of these particular layers as you like you can even take all the elements and mix them together in super calm and maybe use that smoke as an additive layer with some heat blur and Distortion and marry these simple effects presented in this template with a few thoughtful compositing choices and I can't wait to see what you create as always I thank you for joining us here for our cheap tricks series I'm so excited that over the next year I'll have the opportunity to learn more 3d skills and teach them to you along the way you can download all of these templates right now through the link in the description below and you can always reach out to us at red giant news or me personally at action movie kid and please share anything you're proud of or even stuff that you've got in progress we love knowing what you're up to and also before you go be sure to subscribe to the channel there's a rumor going around that a Seth Worley film is about to drop here and you don't want to miss it thank you so much I'll see you soon my friends and have a wonderful day making something you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 247,595

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, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, sonic, sonic the hedgehog, sonic the movie, sega, mpc, cheap tricks, daniel hashimoto

Id: EopXNjHkV7c

Length: 56min 49sec (3409 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020