Create Realistic Looking Fire In Adobe After Effects

hey everyone this is Lyndon here really excited for this motion or a tutorial so in this episode we're going to create this really cool flame effect it's pretty realistic this also got this a nice motion graphic feel to it so hopefully we share the opinion this is a pretty cool effect so throughout this tutorial we should be covering a lot of knowledge tricks and technique that should make this a really nice learning experience but also hopefully this will be a good opportunity just to ignite some really cool ideas that go alongside this one so now that we're all excited and ready to learn ready to do something off and let's go ahead and start this tutorial okay so the first thing we're going to do is drag our logo into a new composition maybe you have a logo of your own that you'd like to apply this fire effect to it's really cool what we're going to do is scale that sounds we'll hit s to open the scale parameter we'll turn it down to about 20 go ahead and move this down so hold shift so it's only moves vertically so the first thing we're going to do is create a new solid so we'll make this white I just called it something like fire math so what I'm going to do now is find the ellipse tool and we'll double click on now this solid is a perfect square so it's going to create a perfect circle then what we'll do is double click on this mask and we'll hold ctrl and shift and we'll scale this down so we'll make it about the same size of the logo hold shift move this down we can even turn off the visibility of the layer so we can properly transform this sphere okay so that looks pretty good there so we'll add a little bit of margin around the edges and then what we'll do is grab this top point here and then we'll hold shift and move it upwards so just like this so this is going to be the fire kind of burning off of the logo okay so hopefully that makes a little bit of sense so far so one thing to keep in mind when you're creating this fire effect is not to feather anything out too much you know because if you actually look at realistic fire everything's pretty sharp there's not much like greyscale on fire itself pretty black or white so we're going a little bit of feather just to make it look natural but not too much so we'll do like four pixels a feather now what we want to do see we want a little bit more feather here at the top but a little less at the bottom so we're going to so I'm pretty cool what we're going to do is create a blur map because it's pretty useful you may find yourself using this later on the future so we're going to create a new solid we'll call this blur map and I'll grab the rectangular mask tool and will mask out lye the top half here and we'll add a lot feather just like that and then we'll add a solid composite effect so it fills in the transparency with a color like black so now we need to pre compose this blur map so precompose blur map move all attributes okay so there's our blur map so now we can add this really cool effect call of compound blur we'll apply this directly to the fire math and the cool thing about compound blurs we're able to choose a blur layer so it's not like fast blur where you just blur the whole screen we can actually choose a blur layer or blur map that defines how blurry each section of the screen needs to be so up here is going to be more blurry because the blur map is white all right so hopefully it makes sense so far so we'll choose the blur layer we'll choose blur map oh hi you can see what it did so up here where there's white they blurred more and down where it's darker didn't lose much so that's really cool so we don't want to add that much blur so we'll turn this down to about 12 also just double click on the compound blur effect go to the compositing options and turn it down to about 75 there we go so that just helps the look of our flame so far but also let's introduce you to blur Maps and how you can use them and also know that you're not limited to the geometry of this blur map you can create whatever you want and this compound blur effect is going to follow your blur map so that's really cool so if we're going to finish this tutorial in a decent time we need to go ahead and move on so the next thing we're going to do is kind of at some wiggle to this flame effect so we need to create a displacement map and that's how we're going to make this flame Kyle wiggle around from create a new solid we'll call this wiggle map whatever doesn't matter and we'll apply fractal noise so fractal noise is a nice way to add kind of random displacement you should make sense a little later on so we'll turn the scale up to maybe about 800 some pretty large will turn the complexity down to about 2 so you can see here we got these just kind of black and white shaded areas this is going to work really good for for just kind of wiggling the flame around all right so we need to animate this up we're right because as the flame burns up or do needs to have like an upward motion to this displacement map so we're going to do this with an expression pay close attention because we're going to be using the same expression throughout the rest of the tutorial so hold alternate click the stopwatch and we'll tighten this expression so there's two values in a position parameter there's the x value and the y value so we're going to create an array right so we do square brackets and put a comma so the left side of the comment that finds the first value and the right side that comma defines the second base so for the horizontal motion we just want to do 0 there's no horizontal motion and on the right side of the comma we want it to change we want to move so we'll type in time because we'll have this value to increase at times let's see the value of time only increases one unit per second that's pretty slow relative to the speed we want this fractal noise to move upward so we need to multiply time by some value so we'll create a standard for how fast effect is going to move we'll do about 1500 right so there we go there's our expression so far but it's moving down work as it starts up here from a quorum is towards the composition as the value grows so it is multiply this by a negative value so negative 1500 so that will move upward there we go so now let's pre compose this map so layer precompose move all attributes ok so let's go and turn this off let's create a new adjustment layer we'll apply the displacement map to the adjustment layer yeah we'll go over here to the effect to preset to apply displacement map and for the layer of this displacement map we'll choose wiggle map the one we just created and what we can do is actually displace this horizontally and vertically just like that okay so you can see it's going to wiggle or effect around so it's definitely wiggling the effect around but not exactly in the way that we want so what we want is for the top to displace a lot but the bottom need to stay pretty stationary because the object that's burning off isn't moving much so we got think of a way to do this well to achieve this we need to understand how this placement Maps work right so in displacement maps dark areas displace in one direction bright area is this place in another direction but since it's like mathematically speaking if you go between that not displacing at all so basically where there's gray there is no displacement so that's what we can do we can create a gray solid and it's 50% gray and we'll mask out the bottom half because we don't want the bottom half to this place we had a lot feathers of this and check that out our bottom no longer displaces because we have that gray solid covering the fractal noise so hopefully you get to understand the way displacement Maps it shouldn't make sense so we just adjust this max so that it just displaces the right amount of flame every good so we have this kind of candle shape moving around here and we can adjust these values to make it look good okay looking good we got this nice like I said it's like a birthday candle kind of look here the next step is actually to create some real turbulent displacement this is the cool part so we're going to do this in the same way we're going to create a displacement map and use a displacement map effect to create the distortion now some of you may be thinking about turbulent displace but we can't use that because we can't control the amount of this places just like we did with this Google map 6e with displacement maps being customized the displacement maps to distort certain areas and like in this case we want the top two more displace in the bottom so we can really customize these displacement map so this is really cool let's go ahead and create a new solid call this distortion map and we'll apply a fractal noise effect alright so the way we want this displacement map the Cal look will uncheck uniform scale we want to stretch this kind of vertically right because we want to create these like vertical streams of displacement right hopefully that'll make sense well stretch this like four hundred something kind of like that will turn out the contrast kind of a lot so somewhat kind of like this so so the lower the contrast is the more grayscale areas those are going to be so we're going to increase the contrast kind of a lot so yeah something like that let's add a little fast ler over this effect where this out just a little bit something like that repeat edge pixels so that makes it look better but just to get back a little bit of detail at a turbulent displace bring down the side to about 25 bringing down the amount to about 15 turn the complexity up to about three there we go hopefully that'll help turn the size now yeah something like that should look pretty good that looks pretty great now we do need to animate this upward just like the other one so an expression to the offset turbulence create an array for the x-value will do zero and for the Y value will do time times negative 1500 so it tried to more similar expression so it animates at the same rate we can also attach this turbo at this place offset with an expression so we'll grab the pickup hearings attach it to the fractal noise offset all right looks pretty good we can also add a little bit animation to the evolution so it is time x maybe 800 that looks pretty cool in it and in the same way we do need to add at gray feathering to the bottom so that doesn't displace the bottom like it does the top so so we'll create a gray solid and we'll mask it out on the bottom half which add a lot feather to it okay so something kind of like that at a lot feather and then we'll pre compose the gray solid in the distortion map together so pre-compose move up visual attributes distortion map we'll make a new adjustment layer so and we'll apply a displacement map effect all right so for the displacement layer we'll choose the layer we just created the distortion map there we go and for the vertical with a zero I'm going to increase the horizontal just like that so we'll see how this looks this is exciting let's see how it looks ooh that looks really nice looking really good so we have this nice displacement map effect we can just kind of choose how much we went to this place this is looking really nice so far maybe you guys by now are getting a good sense about how we're creating this with displacement map you know blur maps all this stuff so now this effect is definitely missing a few key details it's not fading out right the fire's not dying out here at the top correctly just instantly getting cut off doesn't look right so that's we're going to focus on now let's turn off the distortion in the wiggle and then we're going to we're going to do this in a really clever way what we're going to do is create a black solid we call this fade doesn't matter does it but it doesn't really need to be a faith the fire needs to have a nice turbulent debt you'll see what I'm talking about it will grab the rectangular mask tool and just kind of mask out the top pack just like this so like I said it doesn't need to be a fade so we're not going to apply very much feather so maybe do like 75 pixels of feather at this point we're going to add a turbulent displace effect to this black solid azuma cool what we're going to do is really crease the amount so for now 200 we might need to adjust that value and we're going to increase the complexity so AHA maybe you guys get what's going on here so now what we're going to do is animate the offset turbulence of this turbulence place effect pretty much the same of the other ones for the X which is 0 for the Y loaded time times negative 1500 and this is going to animate upwards so we have this hopefully pretty realistic fade out of the fire here so like in the same way I kind of want this to be streams just like the other one so I'll unlock this scale parameters here and increase the scale wide to about 150 maybe even 200 this is I did that since I stretched it vertically I'll need to turn down the speed of this tert offset turbulence just stretched it twice as much vertically don't need to divide this by two so we'll do 750 instead of 1,500 all right looking pretty good so it's kind of an issue here like to spread out vertically so we'll turn the side down to about 50 and also turn the amount down a little bit so 150 and this point we can even since we stretched it vertically we can turn down the feather to about 50 and yeah looking pretty good let's bring this down perfect perfect just like that so now the fire quad dies out in a natural way at the top here so let's go ahead and see how this looks on with all our distortion with our distortion so looking much better now but a little bit a little bit of strange displacement here and how I'll fix this is just ask fast blur to the fade layer so add a regular fast blur this blur it out till it looks kind of natural just like that okay perfect yeah so the only thing that this flame effect is really missing now is some texture we need to add some texture to this flame effect so what I'll do is create a new solid I'm going to call this texture and we're getting pretty close to finishing this effect so hopefully you guys are still excited about all these different unique techniques were applying to this effect so we'll type in fractal noise we're going to use fractal image again to create the texture of this flame so I'll go to the transform settings and uncheck uniform scale like I said before we want to create like these vertical streams I'll turn the height to about 800 and the scale whip can come down to about 60 all right there's something kind of like that now I'd like to add a fast blur effect so just a regular fast blur and I want to do this instead of messing with the complexity because honestly the complexity kind of messes up the structure of the fractal is a lot so I can add a factor in stead of messing with the complexity so I'll just do a little bit of fast blur here not much and I just kind of mess with the scale width here something kind of like that and now to make it look less streaming more turbulent well a turbulent displace effect so this is going to help it look more like fire so we'll go to the complexity here turn it up to about two or three we'll bring the size down to about 25 and the amount come down a decent bit so yeah we just add a little bit turbulence here to make it look natural now we also need to animate this so I an expression to the offset and square brackets a comma left slide will do 0 on the right side with its time times negative 1,500 and we'll also attach the turbulent displace offset to the fragran all is turbulent offset there we go we have a nice fire texture now how do we apply this texture to our other flame effect well what we'll do is go to texture and we'll do multiply well it doesn't work because in the work because there's transparency so what we have to do is get rid of transparency by creating a an adjustment layer and add a solid composite effect to this adjustment layer so apply salt composite to the adjustment layer and we'll fill this the transparency in with blank so there we go now the multiply blending mode is work since we don't have transparency anymore all right let's make a few adjustments to texture now we can kind of see it on our fire effect we should increase the contrast and also may bring out the brightness a little all right so what it want to be pretty sharp black and white not many grayscale areas may be kind of get what I'm going for here all right that looks really sweet what I'll do now is I see duplicate this texture effect just make a few adjustments on this one I want to make less contrast but also more brightness something kind of like this and for the transformer bring down the height maybe something more like 4 or 500 and I just make it maybe an adjustment to the offset turbulence so go down here to the expression and maybe do I don't know 1300 just at so it adds a little variation okay let's go ahead and blend this in with the rest of the effect so before after it adds a little more detail it's really cool all right so let's not forget about a logo I mean we created this the right circular shape for the logo that we haven't really dealt with the logo much let's go ahead and think about how we're going to do this logo so this logo has transparency in the center and almost feel the same with black so fix this I'll add a solid composite effect fill this in with a black color and only want this all-composite effect to fill in the center here so we'll grab the ellipse tool double click on it and we'll apply the Selleck composite effect to this elliptical mask so we'll go down here to the compositing option to the plus and we'll just turn down the expansion of this mask so yeah something like that so basically we need to cut out on the part of the flame where the logo is so I'll add a fill effect to the logo we'll make this black I also add a little fast blur we just blur this out a little bit all right so at this point what we need to do is add a gradient effect to the logo and we'll choose a radio ramp I may place it about right there something kind of like that and now let's add a curves effect so the reason why I'm adding a curves effect is because it's too like sharp or corny here I'm just kind of bringing down the brightness so it has to move things out so maybe this is making a little bit of sense so far yeah looking really good now another thing I like to do is add a little stream of fire Chi coming down on the effect it make it look like it okay consuming or burning around the logo or whatever object you're burning so I'll go to logo draw this kind of mask here and it's not going to work because we have all these solid composite effects and fills but what I'll do I'm gonna do something pretty Savage I actually add a fill effect and turn the opacity all the way down just like that and I'll double click on the fill effect go to the compositing options and hit that down second mass so there we go doesn't matter what effects are going on up here we have this still effect working that's kinda like a mask so that's a really useful technique a little bit of feather to that mask and decent bit of feather like that and I'll drag this logo just above the fire mask just like that okay maybe I add a little more feather to that triangle thing there yeah that's looking really nice okay looking really cool so let's think about how we're going to apply this logo to this effect now we got it cut out and everything we got the right you know spot cut out and got the structure of the flame looking right here's how we're going to do this we're going to do something pretty awesome so pay attention to this part what we'll do is go up here to our project window and this is our main composition so we'll call this flame then we'll duplicate flame and we'll call this logo so let's go in here into this logo composition and we'll start turning certain layers off so we'll turn these texture layers off we'll turn this fire math layer off and we'll just leave the distortion effects on turn the state off yeah all that stuff so we just left the logo in the distortion effects now let's go up here to the logo and turn off all these layers that are messing up the logo so we'll turn off the curve gradient ramp all that stuff still there we go they have just a logo left so there's a logo and I probably actually want to darken the logo just so yeah so I'm gonna kind of like this then let's go back to our project window won't drag the logo composition and flame conversation grab them both and drag them into a new composition okay there we go we'll drag with flame above the logo and do a screen blending mode boom just like that maybe that makes sense so we need to scale up the logo just a little bit someone have these kind of dark edges here do 20 there we go looking really really nice really really nice just like that so now some of you may not like how its kind of distorting the logo here we can easily fix this it's just going to the look either one logo or flame composition and then what we'll do is create a new gray solid so make this 50% bright okay and we'll double click on the elliptical mask tool scale it down drag it down and then just really feather it out just like that so we'll hit control X we'll cut this or copy it and we'll go into the distortion map hit ctrl V so that's going to help this store Shin not to exist where where the logo is so it doesn't distort a logo so much and we can also paste a copy of this into the wiggle map so the ctrl V just like that then now it's not going to wiggle our logo too much now's the fun part we pretty much finished all the geometry that fire all those different effects but now it's for the fun part we're going to add the color and glow to this flame so yeah definitely fun part what we'll do is add a solid composite so it's a good idea to do that just to be sure there's no transparency before you start the effect so we'll just in just pure black hit OK and let's go ahead and add a curves effect we'll add a little bit of color to this from the start so we'll go to the red I'm just kind of bring the red up a little bit turn the blue down just kind of leaving some of the greens in there that looks pretty good so it's always a good idea to actually add unsharp mask so that I kind of get rid of some of those soft gray colors and make it look like a bright sharp flame trying to radius up to about 30 mm out 75 yeah it looks really good if the colors look good let's go ahead and add our first glow effect and so and so most of the color actually needs to be in the glow there's not need to be much color in the curves here otherwise it's going to look too vibrant to fake so we're going to add a lock color in the glow rather than the flame itself let's go to go threshold turn down to about 25 the glow rays can be about 75 to the glow operation to screen add our own custom colors so we'll go to colors a and B and for the color looping we'll do a is greater than B let's go to color B and make this kind of orangish color and the color a needs to be a little brighter more yellow kind of like that looks good let's go ahead and duplicate this clone we'll add more of a broad expanding glow so maybe well let's say 350 400 something like that and yeah looks pretty good looks pretty sweet actually add one more glow so this will kind of be a glow to complement the highlights so we'll turn the glow threshold all the way up to 90 so it only gets those highlights turn that radius up to about 35 and the operation will be screened turn the intensity down to about 4.5 so yeah some of the mechanics blend those highlights in a little better oh that's looking good yeah the color and glow always really helps the intensity or brightness of the effect so wow this turned out really nice I'm really like satisfied with how this turned out really brightened tint turbulence nice dynamic motion graphic my law additives fire simulation really cool man so this has definitely been pretty fun going over all these ideas and being creative with the defense going through a good tutorial can definitely be a really nice productive experience you guys be sure to check out all the other tutorials here on the motion or a website oh and the symbols are really awesome as well even if you are a pretty talented experienced artist templates are a really good way to jumpstart your creativity and save you a lot of time so yeah be sure to browse the templates at motion or a calm anyway that is all for this tutorial it's been really fun my name is Linden and I hope to see you in the next tutorial thank you

Channel: Motion Array Tutorials

Views: 54,214

Keywords: fire, after effects, motion grpahics, burning logo, burn logo, burning, motion graphics, mograph, adobe after effects fire, after effects fire, ae fire, tutoiral, tutorials, tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, fire tutorial, video editing, animation, mograph fire, compositing, composite, explosions, fire in after effects, motion graphics fire, make fire in after effects, fire effects in after effects, awesome fire in after effects, epic fire, how to create fire in after effects

Id: 5XJrFpKp4QM

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2017