Fire Burning House - After Effects Tutorial

okay we are on in three two one hey hello and welcome to promotion news because today i'm live in front of this burning house well the house isn't actually burning and i'm not live so just follow me into after effects [Music] whoo that was hot and well actually not it was actually pretty cool because i actually forgot to put on my shoes and as we had to shoot outside during night times and it's almost winter here well you get it but let's directly jump into this what will we learn today so to be honest creating that fire is really super simple because there are already super cool pre-made assets out there where the guys from action vfx here have filmed hundreds of real fire elements hey and while we are on their page their black friday sale will start on the 25th of november and on the first day all the fx elements in the library will be 55 off and 50 for the remaining days of the sale and hey that's not all all annual subscription plans will receive two times the amount of monthly assets also if you renew your annual plan next year you still get double the elements and last but not least if you want to purchase some of the great assets you can use the link in the description down below and also support my channel with that so we do not have to create the fire ourselves well what are we going to do then drag and drop the assets into the shot and done well yeah this is where most of the tutorials end so today we will start from where all the others end because today you will learn everything you will need to know to make a fire burn shot look realistic well besides the obvious i can already see your comments here so here is an example this is the footage i shot and those are all the fire assets i placed within the shot and it looks so great that you could almost show this to your parents and they'll probably say wow this is so nice and then they will probably cancel your afterwax subscription and send you to university hey and this is already two things we do not want so let's improve that because now i show you the plate that i have created out of my footage still without any fire and i hope you see the difference and when your parents see that they will probably renew your after effects subscription but they may still send you to university but this time it's the film university in hollywood so how have i achieved that well after i finished the presenter shot i left the camera rolling and filmed practical light versions of the house and you can go one step further and do some crazy uh so crazy stuff i can hardly tell you you can try something that is called pre-production yes believe it or not but that makes sense for almost everything you do in the vfx industry so what i did is i took a picture of the house a few days before shooting and tried out some fire elements so in the night when i was shooting i already knew in which door and which window there would be flames so now i took a flickering light source and you can do this in the advanced and easy way this one i have here has some pre-made presets such as party or [Music] end of the party police and also some fire and planes perfect but i totally understand that not everyone has one of those by hands hey but everyone has a smartphone by hand so i searched for a free app and i found that there are quite a lot out there that do exactly the same like my pro led panel and the good thing is that you can even ask your friends and then you have enough smartphones aka light sources to fire up the whole place hey because that is what i did now for the sake of this tutorial let's only work on a few fire spots and not the whole house so here in after effects i have the presenter footage as well as the light reference footage and bring it on top now let's search for a nice part within the footage and mask it out and also feather it and we can add the light as the word add already says by adding it with the add blending mode and hey you can also lighten up the room by using the light and blending mode and you can also try screen to bring it on your screen for example so really play with this to find the look you're after in after effects okay stop so because that is super important to understand some commented on my teaser here whoa that looks so realistic but here is a secret it is super unrealistic it looks like hollywood or netflix wants us to believe that a burning house would look like indeed you would barely see something because of the smoke and also the flames would move super fast almost like it would be speed up so if i would have tried to make it realistic you may have commented something like so keep that in mind so are you going for a cinematic realism or realistic realism that sentence makes no sense at all but you can quote me on that if you like one second screenshot time so now let's bring out two fire elements inside the room and quickly mask out the door hey and there would also be smoke inside the room so let's also add that again everything stacked up in the depth so now let's add the burning door frame and there are assets especially for that and in front let's also add a ground fire oh oh i forgot the light pass over here or maybe you simply did not have the time or the lights or the app so as promised let's fake that in post-production so what i did is i simply shot a clip that is brighter so you can see all the details and you can do that for example if you are shooting this earlier before sunset or simply go up with the iso settings on your camera or make the exposure time longer which shouldn't be any problem because we are shooting from a tripod so now let's put this on top and roto out the shape of the part you want to be lit and feather it now apply the lumetri color effect to it because your shot should be cold as you have probably filmed it during night time with barely any sunlight so to get it from looking cold to look warm simply change the color temperature within the effect great almost there but we want this to flicker and we can do that with the opacity of our layers so you could go all crazy and keyframe it hey or simply apply an easy expression on the opacity hold down your alt button while clicking on the keyframe stopwatch and now you can type in an expression so type in wiggle and after effects will automatically autofill it for you now simply insert the two missing numbers so the first one is how often per second it should happen and the next number defines how much so in this way the opacity will change its value in a range of 20 percent and it will do it 12 times a second hey and for all of you who think this is not advanced enough let's bring this one step further you could also create the wall by creating a new layer in 3d space therefore simply check the 3d switch over here and scale and position it to line up with the wall and if this is too tricky simply mask out the details and now you can position a real well a fake real light in 3d space and work on the intensity color and so on and position it exactly where the fire will be and now you have a realistic falloff and some more flexibility and still you can apply an expression to make the light flicker but this time not on the opacity but on the intensity of the light here now simply change the blending mode of the fake practical light to add and you are good to go okay now let's add more stuff to it particles for example and i did that again stacked in the depths so some elements behind the smoke on top of the fire and some on top of everything and to bring this even closer to a final result let's add two more post production effects to it so first would be a heat distortion well again be super careful with what is realistic and what not most tutorials out there simply overdo it with that heat distortion happens when you shoot through the heat onto something so in this shot there simply would not be any heat distortion as there is no heat in between the camera and the fire but maybe there would be some for example in the doors and windows as we shoot through the fire outside into the room hey and we can do that with a turbulent displace so to get the look and feel right here's how i set this up but before i do so let's quickly watch what the effect is doing so here's a simple grid and the main sliders for the turbulent displays are the amount and the size and at the moment i have set both of them to 100 but be aware this is not the default so when i decrease the size you see that i get more detail in the displacement and the amount is there to find well the right amount of displacement and hey the complexity simply gives you more wrinkles within the wrinkles so what does heat actually do well warm air goes upwards so let's do this with the effect when i click on the offset here i can move it around and when i move it up you see that the whole displacement goes up when you for example take a close look at one of those curves here so i duplicate the footage apply the effect and now we apply the displacement to the layer create a look with size and amount and animate the offset upwards but why have we actually duplicated the layer well now you can go down with the transparency with that layer and create some offset ghosting really great and super realistic so and if you want to overdo it and have enough time to really work on a shot here's a trick that we also do on feature films for that extra amount of detail that besides ourselves no one else notices but when we watch our shot on the big screen it makes us super proud and then we tell all our friends hey have you seen that and i've actually done this and that over here so here's what i would do there you could use the fire elements that sit on top as a mat for an adjustment layer to drive the intensity of a blur that is applied to the layer so when you watch through the flame the image is not only distorted but also blurred based on where the fire is wow but back to the real world and to stuff that actually makes a difference and not just overtime and frustration a glow because a glow helps a lot and there are many methods to do that as well as many plugins so here's how i do it i create two glows and most vfx artists do that one for a small glow around the object you want to glow and one that has a really large radius to bring the whole shot together and almost work like a haze or halo for the whole shot but my workflow is still a little bit different i create both of them on separate adjustment layers so let's start with the small glow and i do that because now i can define the areas that i want to glow by adding a mask and i can also define the glow a little bit with the feathering amount and for the overall one i want everything to be included so it sits on top of the small defined glow with a really really large radius so it blends everything together and of course for both of them i use separate thresholds as the first one should really only pick up the real bright parts but the second one almost works as a extra fake light source to push the practical light even more and last but not least i added a police car lens flare on top of everything to make it more dramatic and i did that in post production of course well i could have used the light led panel with the settings you just saw before but on set i decided to use that to give me a bit of a rim light from the burning house and i think we will stop here now because this is already a lot of information for today and if you need more let me know in the comments below what you would also would add to the shot or what you would have done different and also if you want to use some of the assets from action vfx there's a link in the video description that also supports my channel and also feel free to comment like share and subscribe if you want to have more of those videos and for now i wish you a lot of fun playing with fire in after effects

Channel: flomotion

Views: 24,740

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, fire, flames, throught the fire and the flames, dragonforce, actionvfx, action vfx, pre production, post production, after effects, green screen, after effects new features, heat, heat distortion, turbulent displace, glow, adjustment layer, practical light, house, fire fighter, smoke, police, anchor man, night shot, day for night, color temperature, lumetri color, film riot, action essentials 2, visual effects, after effects tutorial

Id: gS9XPws6SAY

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021