ENERGY BALL VFX - Adobe After Effects Tutorial

[Music] [Music] hey guys and welcome to another very exciting visual effects tutorial in this video I'm going to show you how to create an energy ball inside of Adobe After Effects now this is going to be an intermediate tutorial we will be using quite a lot of layers different effects some pre composing as well as simple expressions and if any of that sounds rather unfamiliar to you I highly recommend that you do go and check out some of the more basic tutorials that I have on my channel first but now before I talk your ears off let's jump right into the tutorial welcome to the wonderful world of Adobe After Effects and this time I am NOT going to start out with an empty composition however my setup is really nice and easy so let me take you through it I have a composition here with a tutorial mp4 file at the bottom and as always if you do want to follow along you will find a download link to this file in the description of the video the clip itself is just a short video of water getting mats spawning and energy ball and then throwing it in my face and I've already baked this this integration effect into the footage if you want to know how I created this disintegration effect just leave me your comment down below and I can create a separate too tall for that the other things I've done in my composition I've applied some simple color grading with an adjustment layer just to give it a little bit more of an interesting greenish tint and I've tracked Walters left hand with a simple motion track and I've tracked his right hand and I've created another null object right in the center here where we can then attach the energy ball to up until he throws it in my face but the very first thing we need to do is we need to create this growing energy ball that Walter is spawning for that let's create a new composition and do note that I'm actually set up to use 32 bits per channel and I highly recommend that you do the same simply because the effect we're going to create is going to contain a lot of glow and shine and gradient style effects so using 32 bits per channel is going to be very beneficial but now let's create a new composition I am going to call this one energy ball comp and because the ball is usually square you may be tempted to set your composition to a square aspect ratio but the CC sphere effect which we are going to use to create this effect doesn't quite work with square resolution so keep this at something standard like 1920 by 1080 10 seconds for the duration should be more than enough and then simply hit OK here we are in a brand new empty composition and let's start out by creating that undulating energy effect that we want for our energy ball for that let's create a new solid layer I'm going to call this one sphere noise and the color doesn't really matter but black is pretty cool so let's simply hit OK and let's apply a turbulent noise effect to this layer if you want you can also use a fractal noise there isn't really a right way to create an energy ball there's so many different options in so many different ways to create a similar effect so just use whatever makes sense to you I'm going to use turbulent noise so let's apply that to our sphere noise layer and in the settings for the turbulent noise effect I'm going to change my fractal type from basic over to turbulent sharp and I'm also going to invert it this kind of gives you these more energy like trails but if we're scrubbing through our composition it just a static boring image so let's alt click onto the stopwatch icon next to the evolution to add an expression and in the expression editor I'm simply going to type time start 500 let's click outside of the expression editor and let's scrub through our composition and you now have this undulating energy style effect however I want this effect to look a little bit more Webley a little bit more energy like it's a little bit too random for that let's search for and apply the CC glass effect to our sphere noise layer and by default nothing at all will happen so let's come into the settings for the CC glass effect and expand the surface tab and let's change the bump map from sphere noise which is just the current layer over to none you'll suddenly see all these weird glassy reflection he bumps happening which is kind of cool but not quite what we want instead less again in the settings change this displacement from plus 100 let's just lower it and keep lowering it negative to maybe almost negative 200 so we're creating this really organic key looking webby energy pattern feel free to play with the light and the shading options for the CC glass effect but if we scrub through I think this actually already looks pretty cool let's zoom back out and you may notice that we just have a screen full of noise which is not what we want we want a sphere like structure and for that you guessed it let's apply the CC sphere effect to this layer and there you go it is now a sphere and if you scrub through you can see the effect applied to the sphere now let's bump the radius up a little bit I still want to leave a fair amount of space around the sphere for glow and other elements that we are going to add later but I think that's actually not too bad and you may notice that the light seems to predominantly come from the left sides of the right side of the spheres a little bit dark in order to fix that up simply come into the CC sphere effect and expand the light settings and on the light height let's change this from 40 to exact 90s or the light is kind of coming straight at the sphere and everything is evenly lit and now we have the base pattern for our energy ball created next you may notice that our energy ball is always the same size but if you check out the clip of Walter and me water's actually spawning the ball from his hands and it thinking she probably started are really nice and small kind of grow in size grow in size growing size until he throws it in my face so let's return to our energy ball comp and let's make the sphere kind of grow out from nothing over the course of maybe four to five seconds as with everything there's plenty of different ways to achieve this let's collapse at the layer for now and I'm going to use a mat but I'm not actually going to use a track mat I'm going to go a slightly different route because I feel it's just going to be a little bit more flexible so first thing I want to do let's create a new solid layer let's call this layer via Matt and hit okay and let's grab the ellipse tool let's draw a round circular mask right in the middle of this layer to cover the entire sphere and then some so fairly big yep that's not too bad let's open up the mask settings and maybe I'll have the energy ball grow or the cause of four seconds so let's come to exactly four seconds and enable the stopwatch icon on the mask path and let's go back to zero and now I want to scale this mask down and I'm going to hold down control and shift so the mask remains in the center of the composition and it scales down uniformly let's scale this down to pretty much nothing so now the mask just appears and kind of covers up the entire sphere don't worry we're going to invert this in a second but the edge is just a little bit too harsh so I'm going to increase the mask feather to maybe around the hundred mark or so so that's actually not too bad but the Matt still feels a little bit too even and we are trying to create a fairly organic and noisy effect so what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for the turbulent displace effect and apply that to the sphere mat layer to give this noise a little bit of animation let's alt click onto the evolution property and in the expression editor let's go with x star 100 if you scrub through this now you can kind of see it spreads a little bit more organically I think the displacement is a bit too strong so maybe I'll lower the amount to about thirty that's not too bad so there it is and there the mat spreads all over the sphere let's come back collapse our layer and I'm actually going to grab my sphere mat layer and drag it to the bottom of the composition and I'm going to disable the visibility because we don't actually need it and now I'm actually going to precompose this layer I'm going to call this layer C a matte comp and make sure to move all attributes into the new composition and then simply hit OK now because I am actually on the latest version of Adobe After Effects I technically don't have to pre compose this layer anymore but for all of you who are still on early versions of After Effects let's pre compose it so you won't have any issues following along with this tutorial and now that we've precomposed it let's apply this mat to the sphere yes technically you could simply drag this new composition above the sphere noise layer and change to track Med option over to alpha matte and there you go however I'm not going to do that let's undo all that and let's drag this layer back to the bottom and instead going to use a set mat effect I just feel it's going to be a little bit more flexible and it's going to allow us to use this mat on layers where we don't want to cover up a glow or shine or some other elements that we want to extend past the area of the mat therefore the way I'm actually going to apply this mat is to reselect my sphere noise layer come into the effects and presets panel and let's search for the set mat effect and you will find this effect in the channel group and let's apply the set mat effect to a sphere noise layer and I'm actually going to drag it before my CC spheres I'm just going to drop it right there and I'm going to change my take mat from over from the sphere noise layer which is just the current layer to my sphere mat comp and now it's going to apply this layer as a trap mat via this effect you will not have this drop down in earlier versions of After Effects but this is why I technically didn't have to pre compose it but I'm just going to leave this on source don't worry about this for now should all work just fine no matter which version of After Effects you're on and now if you want and play this back cool we now have our energy ball appear however it does look a little boring like it's being revealed by a mat which well it is but I don't want this to look a little bit more interesting and organic for that I'm actually going to animate the brightness of the turbulent nose effect so it starts out really weak and frilly and kind of fills in as that energy ball develops for that let's come to 4 seconds where our energy ball is fully formed reselect the sphere noise layer and come up into the turbulent noise effect and let's set a keyframe on the brightness and the contrast and let's come back to the very beginning and am I temporarily disable the set matte effect so I can see my entire energy ball and we're going to jack up the contrast and lower the bright and some kind of ending up with these really weak strings and just darkening this even more so what I want to have happen is kind of just that it appears slowly so it kind of come in there so organically forms and comes back in might actually bring this up a little I think it's a little bit too dark now so kind of forms and then slowly fills in and now if re-enable the set Matt effect should combine those two effects cool that is looking so much better it just doesn't have that flat matt reveal effect anymore because we combined a number of different layers and varying effects to add a little bit more detail to it all next I'm still finding my energy ball looking a little bit flat so I'm actually going to create a second layer of noise and kind of overlay it just to give it a little bit more volume just look a little bit more interesting for that let's simply duplicate this sphere noise layer and I'm going to call this layer noise highlights let's also change the blend mode from normal over to at and this will make your entire energy ball just a bit brighter because right now both of those noise patterns are exactly the same so what I want to do on my noise highlights I want to come up into my turbulent noise effect let's expand the transform properties and this offset turbulence allows you to kind of shift this effect off a little bit so I'm actually going to shift this over might actually also scale this up just a little bit so we have kind of two layers of noise on top of each other what I might also do let's press you to real the keyframes and press K to jump to the next keyframe and let me disable the bottom sphere noise I'm actually on this top one I kind of want this to be a little bit more contrasty so I want to push in a bit more contrast and maybe lower the brightness a little bit I just want like a few really really strong streaks standing out in the end I'm just going to tweak these a little bit now for re-enable the base layer I kind of just have these bright little tracks just over the top of it so that actually just looks a little bit more interesting so it looks a little more volumetric just like there's a little bit more going on with that effect and if you are looking for something slightly different you can always come back onto your base sphere noise and then the turbulence effect just change the fractal type or the noise type from let's say soft linear maybe to block so you're kind of getting a little bit more of like it digitally feel and obviously you can kind of keep tweaking this I think I'm just going to keep it on soft linear for now I kind of do like this effect let's remind our composition and play what we have so far cool and that is actually looking really nice next let's add a little bit of shine so that it looks like there's energy radiating from the core of this energy ball outputs for that let's simply duplicate the noise highlights layer and again this is going to make it even brighter let me actually rename this layer to noise highlights shine and depending on what you have available if you have trapcode charm that is a great effect to apply to this layer if you don't have this effect you can also apply a CC radial fast blur effect so let's do that and in the settings for this effect make sure you change the zoom from standard over to brightest so only the brightest area of this layer are going to start shining and then you can kind of jack up the amount are you kind of going to create this really cool shining effect and what's great about this setup is that if you scrub through this you will see the shine animate so you kind of getting this really really bright sparks just where the brightest parts of this highlights it so that's actually looking really really cool this kind of forming and building up this energy ball so that's really nice let's play this back cool that looks really nice one thing that I'm still finding lacking with this energy ball though is that once it's fully developed I would imagine that in the core it's got this really hot piece of energy right in the center and right now it's kind of a little bit fluffy because the energy kind of moves about everywhere I want something that's really nice and solid to tell me that in the core of this ball there's a huge amount of energy we can achieve this by adding a light flare and a little bit of flickering right into the center of this energy ball and for that let's again create a new solid layer I'm going to call this one live flare and let's hit OK and let's go into the effects and presets panel and search for the light flares effect the light flares effect that I'm going to use is the light flares effect from the ignite Express plugins pack you can download this pack for free again I'm going to put a link to that down in the description of the video so you should have this effect available once you've installed plugins so let's simply apply the light flares effect from the ignite plugin pack to the light flares layer and flare type actually want to change this over to anamorphic streak so this gives us this really hot streak and I'm going to place that right in the center of my composition and let me also change the blend mode on the light flare layer order to at so now we've got this live flare sitting right in the middle of our energy ball and this actually looking really nice I do find the lens flare just a little bit too wide though so what I'm going to do in the light flares effect let's expand the Rays option and I think I might actually reduce the length scale to maybe point seven and I might actually do the same for the width I don't want it to be too prominent so it looks a little bit better so now the next thing I need to do is I need to animate this lens flare to kind of come in with this energy ball so at probably about three seconds in just want to have this lens flare appear just a little bit earlier I think that actually looks alright let's enable the stopwatch icon for the intensity on the light flares effect and let's come to the beginning and let's crank this down to zero so now we have this energy ball kind of appear and come out of nothing and that actually looks pretty cool maybe what I want to do is I might actually Jack the scale about finding the centers a bit too low so maybe I'm going to Jack this up to about a thousand yeah it looks all right but I think I now I need to reduce the length scale a little bit feel free to tweak this in any way you want that actually doesn't look too bad so I've got almost a thousand on the scale and point three and point four on the length and the width scale so I think that actually gives it quite a bit of power right in the center hmm I feel that's probably a little bit too much actually I think I might lower the scale and adjust the length and width scale properties just a little bit but again feel free to tweak this to your liking cool finally the last thing I want to do with this lens flare is just add a little bit of flicker so it seems a little bit unstable and for that I'm going to alt click onto the stopwatch icon next to the intensity and let's add a little expression I'm going to type wiggle open round brackets eight comma point two and close round bracket so I'm kind of going to randomize and kind of jiggle this property this intensity property around by a value of up to point two eight times a second so now if you scrub through this you should see yeah can you see how the flare does jitters and just add a little bit of instability and just intensity to this energy ball I really like this effect let's once again collapse all of our layers and next let's add a little bit of energy diffusion to the outside of this energy ball by that I mean imagine the surface of the Sun where you have a lot of Sun flares because there's so much energy on the surface as current being radiated outward so I kind of want to add the same effect to our energy ball for that I'm actually going to select our noise highlights layer and duplicate it and let's drag this upwards just underneath the light flares layer and let's rename this to energy diffusion next in the CC sphere effect on the energy fusion layer let's increase the radius a little bit so we're kind of pushing this there's being pushed outwards just a little bit probably to maybe about there and I might also come up into the turbulent noise effect and press you to reveal the keyframes and come to the last keyframe here I'm just going to jack up the contrast a little bit more and maybe a little bit more on the brightness I just want like really frilly little bits of energy being floating off into the distance and I might also for that open up the transform I mean I'll scale it down just a little bit so it looks a little bit more fine and maybe I'll bring the CC sphere in just a touch so we're just kind of just a little bit on the surface so let's check this out cool that's actually not too bad at all now I think I don't actually want the effect to be covering the inside of the sphere and the easiest way to do that is just come up to four seconds where our energy ball is fully developed let's grab the ellipse tool and if you can't click into the center make sure you have no effect selected and let's draw a mask right into the center of the sphere so probably about there let's change the mask mode over to subtract so we're just kind of taking the center of this diffusion out so that the center of the energy ball is nice and solid and let's expand the mask properties and increase the mask feather also going to push this out a little bit on the expansion so we're just getting these diffusion lines on the very outside and still at four seconds let's enable the mask path let's come back and let's shrink this mask down so we're kind of having this diffusion lines appear probably about there you kind of see them come in on the outside of the energy ball so it's just adding just that a little bit of intensity might actually increase the contrast even further and again just make sure you're doing that when you're on the keyframe for the contrast otherwise is going to go a little bit weird so that's kind of just adding just add a little bit of extra diffusion if you now play this back you can see a little bit of this this rim going on around the energy ball kind of like this effect but obviously feel free to tweak this to your liking finally the last thing I want to do with our effect is actually at a more solid rim around the outside now you can actually see a fairly solid rim already but it just no it just doesn't look very interesting it looks a little bit flat on the outside so let's again collapse all of our layers and one more time let's create a new solid I am going to call this one sphere rim let's hit OK and again let's drag this below the light flares layer because I really want a line flares to be at the very top let's temporarily disable the visibility and let's again use the ellipse tool make sure we add exactly four seconds where all of the other keyframes are ready and let's add another mask right into the center of the composition you can actually also press alt and single quotes who enable the grid so you kind of know exactly where you need to place it and it's going to places right in the center hold down control and shift so the mask sits exactly in the center and scales uniformly let's just bring this out to exactly the outer edge of our energy ball alt in single quote to hide the grid and the effect I'm now going to apply is one of my absolute favorites it's the saber effect from Video Copilot again it's a free effect that you can download and you will find a link down in the description of the video so let's simply grab the same effect and apply it to our sphere rim layer obviously we're not going to see anything because we have the visibility disabled so let's re-enable the visibility and this is what saber looks like obviously this is not really what we are going for so in the saber effect let's expand the customize call settings and change the core type from Sabre to layer mask so Sabre will take the mask that we've drawn right around the outside of our energy ball and apply the Sabre effect to that finally let's change the mode from normal over to add to kind of add this on top of everything and it's getting a little bit too bright I'm also not a big fan of this default preset so in the save effect you can select from a huge amount of different presets and the one that I personally thought that kind of cool was the Sola preset so let's apply that and again it's just it's a little bit too bright right it looks cool but it's just it's just a little bit too intense now so one of the things I'm going to do is I'm actually going to lower this chorus I see and the same effect just a little bit so we just get this really fiery outside of the energy ball happening but I'm finding that the noise layers themselves are probably a little bit too bright now that we're adding everything up so I'm actually going to come down into my sphere noise so this is the base noise layer and let's press u to make sure we are on that last keyframe press J to jump forward to the previous keyframe it's going to bring down the brightness just a little bit so we're not overdoing it I want it nice and bright but I don't know overkill it either so I kind of want that to look really nice and solid maybe just a tiny bit more so maybe about minus 15 or so I want this to still feel like an energy ball but I don't want it to be just fully blown out that doesn't actually look too bad maybe I'll reselect my noise highlights layer and bring up the brightness on my tubular noise effect and maybe a little bit more contrast that way we get fewer but brighter highlights on our energy ball and as I said and as I keep saying all the time just tweak this to your liking until you're really happy with this the last thing we need to do if we come back to the beginning is you will find that while the saber effect is visible all of the time obviously we also need this to appear with our energy ball coming in I'm going to do this I'm actually going to come to about 5 seconds or so select the serum layer and let's place a keyframe on the core size I might also review the opacity of this layer and set a keyframe on that it's going to come back a little bit so maybe about three and a half or so let's lower the opacity to zero and the cosines to zero let's select both keyframes press f9 to enable Bezier interpolation and now what we should see is kind of just see that rims slowly kind of creep in right about there yeah that looks much cooler so let's remind our composition and let's play back our energy ball effect cool and that is looking pretty good now the timing I feel could definitely be a little bit faster but we can always do that once we composite it back on to our original shot I do want this RIM to come in a little bit quicker as well it's just it's taking a little bit too long to kind of kick in so I'm just going to pull this forward and crunch this down so it just appears just a little bit quicker and obviously color wise it's up to you what colors you want I don't mind this red but I might actually shift this a little bit over more into maybe like a bluish green just said works a little better with that just that energy feel and it doesn't feel quite as fiery so maybe just a little bit of a greenish green tint of blue that's actually not too bad you can obviously also just apply color grading layers to the whole thing and you know @vc color vibrance or other color adjustment effects just make this your own but I think for the energy ball itself that actually looks pretty cool so let's play this back one more time and then we can jump back and composite this into our original shot cool I really like how that's looking now the last thing I might do on this light flare itself I might apply a hue and saturation effect to it I'm going to shift the color off this layer a little bit I'm just not a big fan of this blue I definitely want it to be more green I think I'll also bring down the saturation by quite a bit to make it blend in a little bit better not stand out so much so that looks a whole lot nicer already so now that we've got our energy ball created let's go back to the tutorial and composite this energy ball into Walters hands just as a quick reminder this is what our composition looked like so water's just spawning the energy ball and then rolling it in my face and I'm just integrating now because I've already done all of the tracking this is actually quite simple but I also don't want is too much time on this part of the tutorial was mainly around you creating the energy ball but I also want to finish this with a little of a conclusion so let's come back to our project let's drag our energy ball comp into our current composition and there it is let's change the blend mode over to screen I'm going to scale this layer down a little bit so the size of the energy ball is a little bit more appropriate for the scene and I'll place it right and Walters hands and let's just timing wise align this so right here it's probably when I want yep that's actually it timing wise it actually works out quite well so this is where all the spawns the energy ball let's just place it right in the middle there that's kind of cool and let's parent it to the walther hand middle null layer that I've already tracked but you can do this is really not difficult just a simple motion tracking is kind of parenting layer to it so that actually looks pretty good obviously towards the end I haven't done anything with it it's just kind of get stuck or what I might do is right here let's reveal the position enable keyframes on the position move forward maybe a few frames and just move this energy ball right through me so it's kind of from there it's kind of flies across obviously you want to enable motion blur on the composition and on the layout so that when it gets flung you can't get this really nice motion blur happening here so that's really nice a few other things you may want to do you may for example add some color grading to this energy ball using for example the free VC color vibrance effect but again you can use whatever color effects you prefer I'm kind of liking this effect though the green looks nice and cool already but maybe I'll shift this a little bit more into the bluish green don't go too subtle you know if you're gonna make an energy ball you may as well make it look nice and dramatic and finally the last thing I might want to apply is also just a glow effect so I'm going to use stylize glow for that and here it is very important that your project is set to 32 bits per channel otherwise this might look a little bit low-quality I am going to jack up the glow radius by quite a lot but maybe I'll bring down the intensity so it's not just totally blown out I do want this to be pretty intense though that's actually looking pretty good so I'm going to remind my composition hide all of my null objects collapse all Malaya's and let's play back the final energy ball effect [Music] and that's all there is to it I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did I would greatly appreciate it if you could give it a thumbs up favourite it and share it with the world if you do want to see some boku filmmaking envision effects tutorials just like this one and you new here please consider subscribing and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the section below thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 283,997

Keywords: After Effects, Tutorial, Energy Ball, Street Fighter, VFX, Visual Effects, Plugin, Free, Orb, Magic, Intermediate, Surfaced Studio, Turbulent Noise, Optical Flare, Expressions, Wiggle, Track Matte, Ignite Express, Video Copilot Saber, Video Copilot Color Vibrance

Id: d3Pwy0XKweI

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2017