Doctor Strange Shield Effect - Part 1 || After Effects Tutorial || No Paid Plugins!!

hey guys this is hari from zero fx and in this video we will see how we can recreate the doctor strange shield effect completely inside after effects without using any paid plugins and also without using any stock footages so everything will be built from scratch and the goal here is to make the shield as close to the movie as possible unlike this so let's do this create a new composition 1920x1920 and 24 frames per second now let's import the shield image from your project files this one drag it into the composition there you go that's the shield reference image now let's create a new solid and the idea here is to create this entire shield shape using mask shapes so click and hold the masks and select the ellipse tool double click it to create a circular mask if you can't see the mask just toggle this mask visibility option and after that double click to mask hold ctrl shift and drag it to actually scale it from the center and line it with the inner circle like this all right now select the pen tool and draw a mask by following the reference image okay do the same thing for another one but make sure you start at a different point for each single mask this gives some nice variation when we apply the cyber effect i will show you that when we use the sample effect but for now just remember that you need to start the mask at a different point for all these identical shapes okay once you're done with inner shape just shift select all these masks hit ctrl d to duplicate position them above double click them to select all those masks and hold ctrl shift and left click drag to scale them up and align them with the next shape of the shield and also give some rotation for some variation again all these are being done keeping the cyber effect in mind okay we now completed the inner ring shape restrain the solid inner ring okay there you go that's how it looks only with the masks nice now let's concentrate on the next part of the shield select a rectangular mask shape okay but before that create a new solid and now double click the mask hold ctrl shift and drag the shape to match the reference and also rotate it so that you align it with the reference image and also do the necessary adjustments like this okay ctrl d to duplicate the mask double click it and rotate it i'm holding shift at this point to actually snap it to 45 degrees now let's change the mask to elliptical mask you can just click and hold on the mask shape to do that double click it and and just like before align it with the circular shape here after that select the pen tool and dry mask to cover this part of the shield all right do the necessary adjustments if you feel like it something like this now draw this other shape okay the mask is continuing in order to create a new mask you can select the black solid and then click on the composition this will automatically create a new mask shape alright now do the same thing for the opposite side click the pen tool dry mask all right and okay to fix it just like before click the black solid click with the pen tool again to create a new mask there you go so once these mask shapes are done select all those masks by holding ctrl four five six seven hit ctrl d to duplicate them position the member just like before for convenience and then double click all these mask shapes and rotate them by holding the shift to snap them into position now select masks four five six seven okay let's move them to the top okay now let's select all these mask shapes hit ctrl d to duplicate them i can position them above for convenience select all the masks and holding shift just rotate them to snap them 45 degrees there you go and that finishes the middle shape we can call it middle ring okay now create a new solid and let's finish the remaining shape double click the circular mask and scale it down to match the circle right here there you go like that if you can't see the mask properly you can actually change its color by double clicking this and changing it to something more vibrant there you go now hit ctrl d to duplicate the mask ctrl shift drag to scale it up and line it with this circle all right hit ctrl d again and line it up with the outer circle all right and let's name this outer ring underscore one now create a new solid and create the final circle shape so double click the mask scale it down to match the outer circle there we go and let's name this outer ring underscore two so all right so this finishes the mask shapes there you go we have an inner ring a middle ring outer ring one and ordering two so all these shapes are actually being split based on the difference from the movies in the movies the shields were actually split like this into different sections and they move individually so we're actually replicating that here now for the circular text shape over here using the mask would be an overkill and also not that convenient so let's first create the circular text shape and then we will see what we can do so let's create a new text layer layer new text and type something like we have some text within the scene now let me just quickly show you how to bend the text into a circle shape in order to do that double click the mask tool to actually create a circular mask and also let's align this mask with this large text right here at the base of this large text here something like this now under the text options we can see that there are path options open them and we can actually select the path to mask one and there you go that bends the text into a circle shape we can change the font size and everything but the text will stay aligned with the mask okay but we need some chinese text that's actually very easy to do just go to google translate and translate anything like whatever that comes into your mind yes something like that and once the translation is done select the chinese letters hit ctrl c to copy head into the after effects and hit ctrl v to paste it there you go now let's change the font to a chinese font i'm using this simpson font i downloaded from internet there you go okay let me remove this comma right here there you go backspace okay we can also increase the text spacing right here uh something like that and and to fill the remaining area we can simply hit ctrl c and ctrl v to duplicate the text again unless your chinese it's hard to notice it so not a problem now let's pre-compose this by hitting ctrl shift c to large text okay all right now let's create this inner text head into the last text comp hit ctrl c to copy the text file and paste it in the main comp ctrl v let's kill down the mask so that it lines up with this inner text right here something like this okay the font size is too big double click to select the text and decrease the font size so that it matches with the reference image okay that looks good now to fill the remaining area just like before select everything hit ctrl c and ctrl v to duplicate now we can see some overlapping to fix that we can actually select the area and hit backspace to remove the text so do this until you see no overlapping there you go so once you're done hit ctrl shift c to pre-compose and name this inner text okay let's copy paste the text one more time and i'll finally create this outer text so let's scale the circular mask to align with the outer text okay this time align it with inside i just want to show you something else so inside the text options open the text path options and there is an option called reverse path there you go so this way the text will be aligned outside the circular mask rather than inside like before so hit ctrl c and ctrl v to paste the remaining area hit backspace to remove any overlapping text all right and that finishes the entire shield shape so we have some mask shapes and some text shapes so finally precompose this ctrl shift c and name this outer text now it's time to add some cyber effects so select the inner ring shape go to effects and presets and apply a cyber effect this is a free plugin from videocopilot.net it's an extremely useful plugin especially made for light servers but you can use it for almost a lot of things and the preset change the preset to arc reactor this worked best for me and under customize score options change the code type to layer masks so this uses the mask shapes we just created as the emitters for this app effect so that's looking pretty cool so change the blue color to an orange color and also decrease the saturation a bit maybe fifty percent all right that looks okay decrease the core size maybe uh 0.2 okay that's looking okay and now go to the distortion settings and under glow distortion make the distortion zero all right now go to the code distortion and this is the one responsible for all these funkiness or whatever you want to call it so decrease the distortion amount to maybe like 10. okay we need it but in a very subtle manner so let me just uh show you real quick what's happening here there you go okay the noise speed seems to be too much so decrease the noise speed maybe 0.2 so we want this to be like very subtle all right that's looking good the reason why i'm doing all this is to give some life to the shield like instead of using a static image of a shield i just want to make this here dynamic also let's increase the noise scale to maybe 200 to spread out the distortions okay all right so you can see some nice distortions right here right here very subtle of it finally increase the core softness to something like 1.2 okay maybe increasive amount too now increase the glow bias to increase the glow width and also increase this glow spread to spread out this intensity there you go now duplicate the server effect and to the bottom copy increase the core size to 1 and decrease the glow bias to 0.2 and also decrease the glow spread so we're kind of reverting back to the original values so i want this effect to be very sharp this time now go to the start size and decrease it all the way down to zero percent okay also decrease the and offset to something like this maybe fifty percent this reduces his habit effect to fifty percent of the shape and also decrease the core softness to zero like i said i want this to be very sharp also maybe decrease the core size to a low value maybe 0.7 okay okay now if we i'll click the mask evolution and write a simple expression like time times 10 and check this out this will animate the masks over time like there you go so this gives some extra life to the shield so i just don't want to use a static image that's it and also mask evolution is the reason why i asked you to draw these mass shapes starting at a different origin points because mask evolution takes origin point into consideration and actually creates the mask shape based on that so if you see this right here for this mask shape the origin point is here for this shape the origin point is here this it's over here so because you created the mask shapes like this this gives some nice variation otherwise it will look something like this so yeah keep that in mind while creating the mask shapes now if you go to the render settings and under composite settings if you change this to add there you go this adds the saber to effect onto the saber one effect and also maybe decrease the previous surface intensity to maybe 25 percent there you go that's looking good let's preview this there you go that's looking pretty good maybe decrease the core size to even less 0.5 all right and also decrease and offset to maybe 25 percent okay i want this to cover very tiny area now hit ctrl d to duplicate the cyber effect and to this final copy increase the start offset to maybe something like this 75 and also increase the end offset to 100 now if you check this out there you go we have two animated several layers working at different positions at the same time and like i said before this gives some extra life to the shield effect that's looking pretty good okay now we can simply copy this server effects shift select and hit ctrl c select the next mask shape and hit ctrl v to paste it there you go now let's copy this one more time and select the outer ring one and hit ctrl v to paste it and do the same thing for the last layer so let's change the blending mode of all these layers to screen and check this out okay we have a very repetitive pattern right here don't worry we will fix it so let's select this outer ring one and under cyber3 effect let's hide the mask for a second go to the start offset and maybe just dispersion to something like this 54 percent decrease the end offset so that the two cyber effects are opposite or at a very good distance from each other also let's select this inner mask shape and rotate it to give some nice variation to the cyber effects also rotate this outer mask there you go so do the same thing for this outer layer select the 73 effect decrease send offset something like this and also decrease the start offset yeah something like that maybe something like this okay okay that's looking good now for this outer layer let's increase the distortion so select this outer layer a black solid 4 go to the core distortion settings and increase the distortion amount to 25 there you go this gives some nice distortion so increase the same thing for the sabbat 2 and sabbath 3 effects there you go 7 3 core distortion amount to 25 there you go i'm just showing you all the possibilities for this zapper effects so you have control over a lot of things when you use the cyber effect to create the doctor's doctors shield and you can tweak all these settings to customize it to your personal liking so that's pretty cool and if you want you can increase the distortion for the entire shield so like i said all personal preference okay now what about these text layers well we can fake things using fractal noise let's do just that select the large text and add a fractal noise effect to it fractal noise right okay increase the contrast to 300 nice and change the blending mode to none this actually makes the black parts of the image look really good now play solid composite effect and change the color to black this gets rid of the alpha channel all right now let's apply glow effect and decrease the threshold all the way down to zero increase the radius to maybe 100 and decrease the intensity maybe point one now let's apply a vc color vibrance effect to it this is also a free plugin from videocopilot.net it's very good when it comes to applying colors to glow effects so give it an orange color 35 and also decrease the saturation okay that's looking all right here's the transfer motor screen and if the text is too flat let's add a turbulent displace effect to it apply it all the way above decrease the size to a very less value maybe 10 there you go and increase the complexity to three or maybe too much two okay so again this is to add some randomness also there are certain artifacts right here we can fix it by changing the overflow to clip see that's fixed let me just show you what this thing is doing so when it's set to alloy hdr results let's concentrate on this portion like info panel right here we can see that we are getting some negative values and this is the reason why we are getting all these artifacts and when we set this to clip this will clip all the black values to zero and also all the white values to one and this will fix any artifacts that you are facing in the composition always keep this thing in mind this is not true just for this one time scenario you will face this issue a lot of times in your various composites so always look for your brightest value and your darkest value and make sure it's clipped to one and zero this is very important also it's looking too bright so under vc color vibrance effect decrease the brightness to something like this so that it matches the surrounding shield image there you go yeah that's looking good and now under fractal noise i'll click the evolution and write time times 100 so just like before this will make the text look dynamic okay now let's copy all these effects hit ctrl c and select in a text and paste it ctrl v and set the transform of the screen do the same thing and paste them in the outer text and set the transfer mode to screen and there you go that finishes the shield effect it's looking pretty good so i feel like all this extra work is really worth it and also i just want to quickly show you something really cool so using cyber effects to create the shield has a very good advantage especially when it comes to animating the shield so let me isolate the cyber2 layer and we can actually animate the end offset from 0 to 100 okay one second let me increase the start size to 100 okay so we can actually animate the shield like what you see in the movies like where the ancient one shows doctor strange so this thing i don't know what it's called but you can do all those effects if you set up the scene this way and that's pretty cool are you ready [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: zero fx

Views: 12,695

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Id: wPLrlRkxYLg

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022