Crossfire Particle FX Tutorial! 100% After Effects! + LIVE Tour!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to be taking a look at creating this destructive crossfire effect inside of After Effects without any third-party plugins so let's go and take a look at what we're gonna be creating [Music] now what makes this effect really cool is that it's entirely procedural so I can rotate the direction of this blast and all of the effects will update so things like the particles the direction of the force and even the way that the pieces chip off of the title so there's a lot of different ways that you can use these techniques so I would recommend you guys watch all the way through lots of great tips and tricks throughout you won't regret it unlike all of those other tutorials of mine even I regret them now before we dive deeper into the tutorial I do have some exciting news to share as many of you know Video Copilot has always been about sharing tips and techniques with the community so for the past several months we've been working on an idea to create an event where we can do this face to face and of course we made a trailer so here's a video about our mini tour and hopefully this is just the beginning [Music] hey what's up guys Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and we've got some very exciting news we are coming to Europe and we're bringing our new show Video Copilot live [Music] it's a four city tour we're going to London we're going to Paris we're going to Barcelona and we're going to Berlin it's gonna be crazy and the crazy part is it it's only weeks away this is actually my first time ever visiting Europe so even if the show doesn't work out like it's gonna be a lot of fun the show is a full day of presentations from top designers that are going to be showing you practical tips and tricks and real useful advice for all of you designers out there and of course I'll be doing a presentation and hopefully we'll have some fun surprises as well we've got some amazing venues across Europe we're gonna have an after-party it's gonna be a great time you might say we spared no expense well I can't say that but definitely no dinosaurs I can't say that either we're partnering with our friends at the motion designers community we're really excited about this show tickets are available now so if you're in Europe come hang out with us and we'll see you at the show I think this might be too much light but it could be be wrong so if you're anywhere near Europe in the next few weeks it's gonna be a lot of fun and be great to have you of course I'll be recording my presentations posted online and if you have an idea on maybe where we should take the show next just let us know anyways lots of exciting things is here but for now let's go ahead and get started first we're gonna create some nice-looking text then we're gonna create a mat that looks something like this and that's gonna be used to create the whole the rough edges on the text and even the direction of the effect all right first thing we're going to do is create a new composition will set this to 1920 by 812 five seconds and we'll call this crossfire hmm crossfire and then hit okay then we'll take the text tool we'll click in here we'll type the number five I'm using this font called astrolabe which is just a nice bold font then we'll go ahead scale this up Center it and then we're going to pre compose it so I'll choose layer pre compose call this text edit and this way we can change the next to anything we want later on so head okay and now we want to add a little bit of a three-dimensional look so to do that we need to create a bevel profile so we'll choose layer style inner glow and we'll go down to the settings we'll set the blend mode to normal set the color to black set the technique to precise and the size to about 6 now to use it as a bump map we need to pre-compose it so choose layer pre-compose I'll call this bevel profile move all attributes and hit OK then we'll create a new solid and we're gonna make it 50% gray hit OK we'll call this glass now to create our bump effect we're gonna use the CC glass effect so type glass into the effects here grab CC glass drop it on our solid then we're gonna go over to the surface option and we're gonna set the bevel profile as our bump map and now we can start seeing some depth let's set the softness down to zero and the displacement down to zero and that we have a nice sharp bevel now in order to get our transparency back let's put the glass layer below the bevel profile and then we'll set the track matte to alpha matte you can toggle the switches here now to add some 3d lighting let's set the light setting to a e lights and then we can create some After Effects lights set at the point 100 hit OK let's make sure the lights are on top and then we can move it over let me push it back in z space and hit T and turn the intensity up so that looks pretty good then we'll hit control D duplicate and put another light down here maybe turn the brightness down just a bit alright so that looks pretty good but we want to add some more dimension to our bevel profile so let's lock our crossfire comp and double-click on the bevel profile slide it over here side-by-side and now we're gonna make some changes to the bevel profile so first thing we'll do is create a new solid call this hexagon hit OK and we're gonna add the effect she hexed I'll drop that on to our solid now let's invert the Alpha so we'll take the invert effect drop that on set the channel to the Alpha Channel and so now we have a nice pattern there's also a cool transparency switch if you click that it'll use the transparency from the layers below now let's set the radius to maybe 10 and hit T we'll lower the opacity down maybe about 5% and maybe even set the radius to 6 alright so that looks pretty good but another thing I want to do is adjust the bevel profile now to do that I can go into the inner glow settings and instead of using a color let's use a gradient now I'm going to invert the dark and light color now let's move the white color about here and then we'll put another point with gray at about 67% is good then hit OK then we'll set this to gradient and we can even change the size and will affect the bevel so play around with that now let's go ahead and add some actual texture so we'll go to the footage here we'll close this and it will take the cement texture and drop it into our bevel profile and what I want to do is go over here add the curves adjustment and we'll set this to multiply and turn on our transparency switch now it's pretty noisy so what I like to do with texture is just flatten it out and then just add a little bit of texture and here I can turn off the hexagons just for a second so we could see this cool so this way it's not so noisy there's some flat parts and just has a little bit of variance then I'll hit T and we'll set the opacity down to about 20% and then we'll turn the hexagon back on and maybe we'll even turn this down about 3% so that looks pretty good we'll close our bevel profile well jump back over to our main comp and it'll drop the cement texture into the comp with our lights turn on the transparency switch will set this to say overlay and let's get rid of the color by using a tint effect drop that on there and that looks pretty good we could hit T and just drop the intensity down we just want to add a little bit of variation now the other thing we can do is adjust our lights as well back like that a bit more alright now we can pre compose everything ctrl a it will choose layer pre compose and we'll call this title look and hit okay and then we'll take a copy hit ctrl D to duplicate and we just want to add a little bit of depth so we'll type in radial blur and drop that onto the bottom copy and what we want to do is set it to fading zoom and turn the amount down to about negative 22 and then we'll add a curves adjustment we can look at the transparency here and we'll go to the Alpha Channel and we're just gonna crank it up and then go to the RGB and drop it down so it's just kind of a dark background so just a little bit of fake depth here for our title and then we'll do one more precompose hold down shift choose layer pre-compose I'll just call this type and hit OK alright so this is looking pretty good now most tutorials would probably just stop right here but we're not wasting your time we're giving you the good stuff right after these messages the ultimate challenge and we're back now it's time to create some destruction and this is a very important step because it drives all of the other effects that we're gonna be creating later so let's create a new solid and it will keep the width the same we're gonna set the height to 50 we're gonna call this slice noir to hit okay and what I want to do is pre-compose it right away so layer pre-compose we're gonna leave all the attributes and hit OK and that way the comp stays the same size as the layer so we'll double click and I'm going to add a rectangle mask just by double clicking on it and it makes it the same size as the layer I'm gonna hit em go down to the expansion and just turn it down maybe negative 6 then we're gonna add the effect roughing edges so we'll take rough and edges drop it on there and let's set the border to about 13 or 14 and then turn the scale up a bit and then we're gonna do one thing that's kind of strange is we're gonna precompose it and we're gonna move all the attributes we're gonna call this slice roughen and hit OK so now we'll jump back to our crossfire layer and then let's set the slice layer to yellow so it's easier to see and we'll turn it off and then we'll select our type layer and then we're gonna add an effect called set mat now I should point out that we have a plugin called FX console that allows you to search through effects a lot faster and it works kind of like this you select a layer you hit control space you get a search bar and you can just type in an effects a set and then hit enter and so it's just very easy to add effects without having to go through and drag and drop so you can keep using this but I would recommend downloading the free plug-in from Video Copilot dotnet FX console so we will take the set mat effect drop it onto our type we're gonna select our slice layer and we can turn off stretch mat now we can invert this and we kind of have the idea but here's the problem if I take our slice layer hit R and I rotate it the effect doesn't update so what I want to do is turn on the collapse transformation switch and now if I rotate the layer it will update in the set Matt effect now this is an important step because our entire system is gonna work around this one slice layer now before we go on let's just create a background so we'll create a new solid we'll call this background set this to a twelve hit OK then add the ramp effect so gradient ramp and of course you can search it in the effects presets we're gonna set this to radial swap the colors and just make this just a nice wide gradient and we'll put it down into the bottom alright so next we're going to create our burned edge now the key to procedural is continuously reusing the same assets so we're gonna click on the type layer and we're gonna choose edit duplicate we'll take the bottom copy don't call this burned edge and it will solo the layer we're gonna add a fast blur fast box blur and we'll set this to six and iteration to one and then we'll add a curves adjustment and we'll go to the alpha Channel and we're gonna crank this up and basically what we're doing is eroding the edge so that it's a little bit larger than our cut alright so we want to get rid of some of the extra overflow on the sides so we're gonna add another set matte effect and we don't even have to do anything just turn it on and then add one more set matte effect and we're gonna set it to the slice layer and now we have a perfect burned edge so we can turn that back on and you can see the difference here now the other thing I'm going to do is add a fractal noise on top of it so we'll choose fractal noise hit enter and we'll set the brightness to about 20 and we'll go down to the transform and we'll turn this down and the idea is that we're trying to create like an ember looking of fact so that's pretty good for now and then we're going to add a color correction tint effect and we're going to set the color to say orange then hit OK alright so next we're gonna add some broken edges around the burn marks so for that we're gonna be using this texture rocky edge we're gonna drop this into our project now we only want it to show up around the letters so we're gonna take a copy of our type choose edit duplicate we're gonna put it above the rocky edge and choose alpha matte and so now if we take the rocky edge and move it around it stays inside of the shape of our letters now one thing we're going to do is click on the type go to the effects and delete the set matte effect because we don't mind if the rocky edges goes a little bit past the burn mark and in fact we do want it to overlap a little bit so it feels a bit more random now let's go and duplicate it for the bottom choose edit duplicate we'll take the rocky layer here and we're gonna take the rotation tool and just rotate it hold shift and then move it down now we want the broken edges to stay with the slice so we'll take both copies hold ctrl this time select both and then we're gonna parent the slice layer now just for reference if I hit R and I rotate this all of our effects are moving together so set that back down to zero alright so now we're gonna add a laser blast and we're gonna be using another free plug-in from Video Copilot called saber now you can check it out in the description link to download we're gonna create a new solid we'll call this saber hit OK and we'll come over here we'll type saber drop that on our solid and we get this really nice looking laser blast but I do want to change the size of the layer a little bit smaller so it renders even faster so we'll set the width to 124 by say 600 and we're gonna put it straight across just like that set the transfer mode to screen and we'll put it on the top and we can play around with the different presets here not sure that looks pretty good now maybe I'll take the end size and scale it down and maybe turn the brightness up now I'm actually gonna take the layer and stretch it out a bit and then we're gonna animate it so hit P bring up the position and we're gonna move it off frame go forward about seven or eight frames slide it past and now we have to decide where do we want this impact to be now let's go ahead just to make it easy we'll set the impact at one second so we'll slide this forward and we want it to be covering most of the effect so let's try how about like that that's pretty good so we can trim this now out in the bracket and now we have our laser blast another quick thing if we go to about here I'm gonna duplicate this edit duplicate which want to create a flash so hit P and turn off the keyframes and actually we'll right click and choose transform reset and what I'll do is solo this and let's move the position to about a point and then set it to default maybe turn up the intensity that's pretty good and then we'll hit s and scale it up so we just wanted a nice flash of light maybe even go to the render settings from the gamma down just so it's a nice flash and we're gonna set it to be one frame long Shh nice now the other thing to consider is that we need the effect to turn on at a certain point so what we could do is just take the rocky edge and move it over so that it starts just as the impact happens now we could also do the same thing to the slice layer itself so if we open it up we can trim this down so that it's off and then on and so now if we look at this we're starting to get the idea now the other thing that's important is let's take the saber and the hotspot and parent it to our slice layer and what's cool about that is that I can actually hit the R rotate this and you can start to see how this is all going to work together now speaking of working together we want to sync the color to the saber into the burned edge and in order to do that we need to set up a simple expression so let's return the rotation back to zero and on our slice layer what I'm gonna do is choose effect expression control color control and we'll just change this to color and we'll set the color of this to sort of that orange color now what we want to do is link all of the different instances of color to this one color control now a quick way to do that is that we can lock the setting up here and then go down into the different places so we have it on the burned edges so if we open that up we have the tent effect that's on the burned edges and if we alt click on the color we can pick with the control for the color at the top and then just click away and then we can close that now we also want to link the Sabre color so we can hit E open up Sabre color alt click take the pick whip drag it up to the color click away and we'll also do it to the flash color as well so we'll hit E open up Sabre alt click on the color pick whip to the color so now if we change this color we change it everywhere and we've got rotation so we are well on our way now before we add some particles let's see if we can melt the edge of the letter a little bit so here's what we'll do first will unlock the effects in control there and what I want to do is open up the bevel profile comp so we'll hit backslash and slide this over to the side here now to create the burned edge we're gonna create a new solid and it will make it 1920 by 256 we'll call this Vern hit OK they'll add the fractal noise effect drop it onto the solid set it to dynamic invert and we'll set the transfer mode to darken and then we're gonna take the rectangle tool and we just want to create a nice thin cut out hit F or bring up the feather properties and just soften it I want to turn on the transparency switch there and so now you can start to see that we're affecting the bump map now let's bring this edge in a bit so don't get this hard cut off they'll go to the transform in size down the scale of the fractal and maybe bring the contrast down and the brightness up so now we have this kind of nice effect now we do want it to rotate with our slice but we don't want to have to do it manually we want to be procedural we want to be all connected so here's what we'll do we'll set the rotation back to zero so we need to set up an expression link now we can link between comps what we're gonna do is move this bevel down to the bottom here and then we're gonna go to our main crossfire comp and we're gonna scroll down to the slice layer and expand the transform and now we can see the position and the rotation then we're gonna take our burn layer hit P then hold shift hit R and take the position of the rotation we're going to alt click the position now we're gonna pick whip the position now we're gonna alt click the rotation we're gonna pick whip the rotation we click away you can just put this right back where it was now if we click on the burn layer again we can make a few changes here one thing I want to do is change the blending mode to none and that'll just make it a little bit tighter around the edge and then we just play around just kind of see what we like could hit F and maybe change the amount of feathering and even sort of move this around a bit but what's nice is that we get a really realistic three-dimensional bump effect we can even lower the opacity which will just blend it in a little bit more and the other thing to keep in mind is that this is the bevel profile so we can change things like turning the hexagon effect off and now we have a more concrete looking text so there's a lot of things that you can do just by changing the bump map layer now we also want to turn this effect on at the right time so we'll truncate the beginning of this and that way it's off and then it's on all right let me close this and we'll jump back into our main comp now let's move on to creating some particle effects so what we're gonna do is set the rotation back to zero and we're gonna take our type layer that just has the cut out and we're going to duplicate it edit duplicate or hit return and call this particle effects now we only want the particles that come out of the cutout so we're gonna turn off invert and now we have a selection of just that part and then if we select this layer we can add the effect called pixel poly now if we drop the pixel poly effect on our particle layer and turn off the set mat we can actually see what this does it sort of smashes the pieces sort of shatters them now what we want to do is move the start time over to our impact point so if we hold ctrl and move this we can move it kind of slow and I think right about there we could turn the set mat back on set the grid spacing down to about twelve and that'll just make smaller pieces and then we can do things like play around with the randomness and the force amount and this is a really good start to our particle effects and let's actually move this up above below the saber layers alright so we've got some basic destruction but we want to link it together with all of the rest of the effects so let's start out by setting the label color to pink so it's a little bit easier to see the particle layers and we'll go over here to the pixel poly effect and we notice that we have a force center so we don't have a direction we only have a location of the force so in this case the force that's blowing these particles is in the middle so if I move it around the particles shoot that way if I move it down below the particles shoot up so what we need to do is connect it to the location where the laser is coming from so over to the side alright so this looks like it's going in the right direction but how can we link the position to the rotation of our slice effect well here's a cool solution if we click on our slice layer we can add another expression controller for a point control now we're gonna move that point close to where it was a second ago off to the left and then we'll lock the effects control and then go into the particle effects hit e go down to the pixel poly and for the force center we're gonna alt click and pick whip the point control so this is almost the solution so let's just go to about here if I rotate the slice layer something is happening with our particles and they're no longer staying in sync and the reason why is that the point is not updating based on the rotation so in order to get the point to update based on the rotation here's how you fix that now first unlock this and then we'll go to our slice layer and for our point control we're gonna add an expression so we're gonna alt click on the stopwatch and we're gonna type to world parentheses value parentheses now the point has jumped down here so what we're gonna do is just move it back up so maybe right here and so now if we rotate the slice the direction of the force stays in line alright so now we have that expression set up we can start working on the look of these particles now one thing I want to do is add a little bit more randomness so it doesn't just look like triangles now to do that we'll create a new solid make it comps eyes or and call it holes and hit OK then we're gonna take the fractal noise effect and drop that on to our layer now what we're gonna do is set the scale down and turn the contrast up really high maybe the complexity down to about three and then we'll go ahead and pre compose this layer pre compose we're gonna move all attributes we're gonna call this holes map and hit OK now we'll move this to the bottom and turn it off then we'll select our particle effects layer we're gonna add a set mat effect so type set mat drop that on here we're going to choose the holes map and we're gonna set it to luminance now if we move it up before the pixel poly effect and slide over solo you can actually see now we've created little holes in this effect and we can invert it to create a slightly different look but basically we created some sort of rougher looking pieces all right so this is looking a lot better what we could do is rotate the slice one more time just so that we can work on these particles and let's play around with the particle settings so let's turn up the speed randomness to 100 now we can increase the direction randomness which makes it kind of shoot in all different directions now if we want to add density what we can do is duplicate the particle layer control D and then just make some changes so maybe we'll set this to 15 and we can turn the force up or we could turn it down this is a really cool effect where you have some particles that linger after the destruction and sometimes it's cool if they're if they're pretty small you can even have them even slower than that check that out play around with this invert setting it just creates a slightly different look based on the noise but that's really nice and there is a spinning but you want to be careful with that it can start looking a little bit weird now we could also turn the gravity on to say 0.1 and 0.1 and we could probably set up an expression controller for this as well but there's just a couple of these now another thing we'll do is duplicate this again ctrl D and now we want to create more like sparked layers now to do that we're going to use a color tint effect so choose effect color correction tint and we're gonna link this color to our control color so let's lock that jump into our particle effect hit E open up the 10th and we're gonna map the colors to that we'll just map them both Rico and we'll rename this to particle sparks and I'll set the label color to blue now let's change the settings we'll unlock and change the settings maybe slow the force down a bit and we'll turn the spinning down and the grid spacing so that's pretty cool now I want to reduce the amount of particles so it's kind of an interesting way to do that I used this checkerboard effect and I put it before all my layers and I just played around with the width and set this to stencil alpha so now we can see some empty patches if we turn this on and off so just a nice randomness all right so let's keep moving on it what I'm gonna do is duplicate this particle effect and we're gonna just change the settings again so maybe increase the speed turn the randomness down just kind of create a nice straight line effect now another thing that we need to account for is the explosiveness of this effect so what we should probably be thinking about is how we can make the time start a little bit sooner so if we hold ctrl and shift it just a bit we can make it seem like the effect is starting more explosively because it happens really quickly now what I'm going to do is take all of our particle layers and shrink them down to the one-second mark so they turn on sort of instantaneously same thing with our other particle effects let's make it seem like they start a bit sooner pretty good now we need something to be a bit faster you know that's something good now another thing to keep in mind is that we can put some of the layers behind the title and behind the burn marks and it just creates more depth and sometimes you need things to be more visible and so you can put all of the effects behind and that way your title stays more readable so for now we'll just leave them all on top now again we can rotate the effect and it still works nicely now if you want to add motion blur and you don't care about render times we can create a new adjustment layer and we'll call this force motion blur and we can find the effect called force motion blur put that on top and we actually get some pretty good looking motion blur cool thing is you can just turn it off while you're working now the other cool thing is that I have included in this project file a free clip from our action essentials collection this is a very strange clip that I find myself using quite often and it's basically a particle stream that dissipates now what we're gonna do is drop this in above the force motion blur slide it over and we're going to scale it up and s scale it up rotate it I just want to sync it up there it is and now we have a nice smoky effect now to make it a little bit more intense we'll add a curves adjustment and just boost the alpha channel a little bit it's pretty good and then we could duplicate the layer scale it down maybe we flip it just for a little randomness and hit T and lower the opacity and we can even put this below the title as well just so we have smoke on both sides so there we go bring the opacity down we don't want to be too strong alright so now let's add some color correction and some nice glow effects all right so to add some glow effects we're gonna create a new adjustment layer and we'll put it above the motion blur we'll call this glow and what we're gonna do is choose channel shift channels and this is a cool technique that I like to use for colored glow and we're gonna set the Alpha to saturation and then we're gonna do another effect called solid composite it will set that to black basically this allows us to select the colored particles and now we can add the normal glow effect stylize glow and let's say will turn and then we'll duplicate it control D and then turn up the size of it and then duplicate it again and that's good and then we'll set the transfer mode of the adjustment layer to say screen and then we get a nice glow now I'm also going to add a hue and saturation effect and just to make it a little bit brighter go to the cyan color and just turn up the lightness and then maybe on our slice control let's set this to like a darker blue it's pretty good now to make the glow even a little bit more bright we're gonna add a curves adjustment just boost it up a bit alright so that's looking pretty good and now we can add some overall color correction so we'll go to the top create a new adjustment layer well hit return hit cc we'll go over here I'll type curves maybe add a tint effect and how about a noise effect alright so what we'll do is set the tent down to about 20% we're gonna add some curve contrast and just add a little bit of noise I like to do about like four or five all right so this is looking pretty good and of course we want to make sure that the particle effects are parented to our slice layer and that way when we rotate everything will stay in sync all right let's go ahead and move our slice layer up to the top here and of course we can change the colors and just keep in mind that when you play around with a color you also want to adjust the glow settings so very cool now one more quick thing that we can do is add some camera shake so a quick way to do that is with an adjustment layer below the color correction we'll just call this shake and we're gonna add an expression control slider it'll just hit return call this shake and then we're gonna add an effect called transform and basically what we want to do is take the position add a wiggle expression so we alt click on the position I want to type wiggle maybe like 7 point 5 comma pick whip the slider and then at the very end one more parenthesis so now if we animate the shake value so we'll set a keyframe hit you move forward and maybe you set it to like 50 move this over a bit let's try that and maybe have it go down to 0 and just to get the edge fixed we could do a motion tile effect and place it before everything turn out mirror edges and set the output to about 125 and 125 and that sort of repeats the edge but it should work pretty good you can also scale it up a little bit so let's take a look alright so maybe we'll just slow this down a bit we can maybe edit the curve value and just fade it down a bit and I think the motion blur works with the transform so if you turn it on for the layer then you get a little bit of camera motion blur now we can take this effect even further and add some bent broken edges on the outside of the text and the way to do that would be taking the slice comp choosing edit copy and then jump into the text layer and choose edit paste now we want to link it back up with the main comp so we can take the expressions that we made earlier hit EEE hold down shift select the position and rotation choose edit copy expression only then jump back to the text layer choose edit paste and then we'll move it down to the bottom and then we're gonna duplicate our title so we'll choose edit duplicate and then what we're gonna do is turn the slice layer on set the track matte to alpha matte and if we look at that with the solo button we can see that we just made a cut out then let's make an adjustment layer put it below the main title select it and we're gonna choose turbulent displace and we'll drop that on there and it'll turn the size down a bit and turn the amount up then if we unsolo the layer you can see that it's actually protruding a bit now we can turn up the complexity maybe to two the other thing we can do is change the color of the slice so we'll choose color correction tint and we'll set both colors to white now if we jump back into our main comp you can see we added a really nice detail now if we want to create something a little bit more similar to the shredded example where it's not just a straight line so if we select the rough and edges and turn the border amount up we can actually just start creating a more general destruction pattern alright so we've used a lot of different techniques here today and that is really the secret is blending together different ideas to create new things and there's really infinite possibilities sometimes I get questions like Andrew are you ever gonna run out of tutorials and the answer is probably all right so lots of cool technique in this tutorial I had a blast working on it hope you guys enjoyed it and as always please visit the website Video Copilot net always great to be here I'm Andrew Kramer and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 2,055,299

Rating: 4.9692888 out of 5

Keywords: after effects, tutorial, explosion, particles, logo, sparks

Id: g5O0U8ck2GU

Length: 40min 35sec (2435 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/OmarAOrtizM]

Praise the Lord!

[u/tweezydinero]

Always love watching Andrew’s stuff. It’s always super well done and I love the emphasis on doing it all without third party plugins.