Create an Atmospheric Smoke Effect in Adobe After Effects

hi everyone and welcome to how to create atmospheric smoke in Adobe After Effects CC in this lesson we'll learn how to create animates and control some nice atmospheric smoke to add some drama and movement into our project and scene so let's begin by creating a new composition by going to composition and a new composition or ctrl n on the keyboard and let's go ahead and rename this smoke make sure you're happy with the rest of the settings here and then click OK next we want to create a new solid layer by going to layer new and solids and let's rename this BG for background and then make sure the color is set to black and then click OK now we want to duplicate this background so go to edit to go to duplicate or control D on the keyboard and now we're going to press ENTER on the keyboard and rename this fractal noise one like so now with the fractal noise layer selected go to effect go to noise and grain and select a fractal noise and this will apply the fractal noise to our fractal noise layer now we can start creating our smoke by playing about with the fractal noise settings so let's go ahead and set the contrast to something like 75 just to change the look and intensity of your smoke so you can actually experiment with this like so so we're going to set this to 75 and now under transform you can scale it up or down to make the smoke appear larger or smaller like so and you can also uncheck uniform scaling if we bring that back to 100 and to uniform scaling and you can change the width and the height separately now as well so let's go ahead and change that so okay just set the width to 400 and let's set the height to something like 250 cool now let's set the evolution to a hundred and this is how we're going to animate the clouds so if we play about with the wheel here like so you can see how the clouds start to move like so so let's bring that back to a hundred now in order to animate the loop what we need to do is we need to alt click evolution here so hold alt on the keyboard and click on the stopwatch here like so and now under here we're going to change that to time x 150 oops x 150 and this will give us a looping animation for our clouds cool so now for you go to the preview panel here and click play you'll see a preview of the subtle movement like so excellent now in order to animate the direction of the smoke let's say if we wanted the movement to go from left from the left side of the screen to the right we'll need to adjust and animate the offset turbulence now let's go as said now we can find the offset turbulence here and what we need to do here is we need to create another continuous loop by holding alt on the keyboard and clicking on the stopwatch again and from here we want to type in the following so type in open square brackets valley open square brackets 0 close square brackets and then we're going to put + time times 100 value open square brackets 1 close square brackets - time times 20 close square brackets and this will make our clouds move from left to right and subtly move to the top as well so it gives a sense of that the smoke is traveling upwards as well and we can click on the play button to see what that looks like excellent now if we wanted the smoker to move even further up we can change the value here to something bigger like let's say 70 and now if we click on the play button here you can see the smoke is traveling upwards in a more vertical direction like so but let's go ahead and keep it more subtle so let's change that back to something like 30 so it looks like it's traveling a little bit that way and we can also change the look and the amount of details our smoke has by playing with the complexity value so let's go ahead and find the complexity value which is here and let's change that from 6 to something like 20 so you can see if we move the complexity like so you can change some details of our smoke so let's change that back to 20 now what we can do is we can add some opacity to our smoke just to make it a little bit transparent so let's go ahead and close the effects here with fractal noise selected press T 4 opacity and let's bring this down to something like 20% and this will make our smoke appear lighter and more transparent now if you wanted to add some shape to our smoke we can also create a mask by right clicking on the layer selecting mask and selecting a new mask and now we can change the way that our smoke looks so let's go ahead and move these vertices using our selection tool I'm just going to make it out that the smoke is traveling from the bottom left of our scene to the top right like so now by doing that you'll see that our smoke now has this really harsh sharp edge so in order to smooth that out let's go ahead and press F to create a feather and increase the feather like so something like 500 and we can increase the bottom here like so excellent now all that's left is to preview our smoke by clicking on the preview button it can see now we have a nice subtle smoke effect which is traveling from the bottom left of the screen to the top right so there we have it how to create some atmospheric smoke for our scene I hope you've learnt a lot from this demo and that you can apply these skills to your own workflows I have a lot of fun creating this lesson so thanks for watching good luck creating your own atmospheric smoke animations and I'll see you next time on tuts plus you

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 159,874

Keywords: Smoke Effect in Adobe After Effects, after effects smoke, after effects, after effects tutorial, smoke, adobe after effects, motion graphics, tutorial, smoke effect, after effect tutorial, smoke effect in after effects, particles, after effects tutorials, after effects smoke template, 3d text, after effects smoke text, after effects smoke tutorial, visual effects, adobe, effects, vfx, after effects smoke animation, after effects intro, after effects template

Id: ptQ6Re6JvWM

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019