Glowing Outline Effect | After Effects Tutorial

guys joshua femme here live in la and welcome to yet another creative week with herman huang aka coffee liquor today we're going to be talking about this cool glowing outline effect creative week is a time when we step in every day with one of my friends that's more creative and more talented than myself and conquer a lot of really cool topics coffee liquor is going to be releasing one video every day this week diving into the incredible world of vfx you can actually download the project file that herman's going to be using so you can follow along in the link below try this though watch this tutorial all the way through once just sitting back and relaxing soaking it in and then download the project file and then watch it a second time and then actually do the tutorial with me while editing with the project file but first of course we're going to be talking about envato elements if you're watching this video you're probably a video editor and envato elements is a video editor's dream it's a subscription service that gives you unlimited downloads of the most incredible stock footage like cloud and fog overlays aerial footage fire lightning they also have incredible vfx packs premiere and after effects templates sound effects royalty free music and literally anything you could ever want as a video editor just by clicking the link below you can get a 70 discount for your first month basically you're just paying nine bucks and that's it i use elements literally in some regard every day thanks for the sick introduction as usual josh how's it going everyone it's herman here and today we're going to learn how to do this glowing outline effect that can be applied to any design that you want there's a popular video featuring a glowing tattoo that i thought looked really dope and actually looked really really similar to an effect that i did a few years back for a web commercial now there's already a lot of tutorials out there featuring the glowing outline effect however they're all in a bit of a doodle style so if you're looking for a slick alternative that you can use for literally any type of content then hopefully this tutorial is for you in this case i'm using a sick box design for a deck of cards from my friend will so let's get into how to do it now before we get into after effects though before we do anything i want you to go ahead and download a free plugin by video copilot called saver it's such a dope plugin that allows you to do endless things and you're going to have a lot of fun with but that's primarily the tool that we're going to be using to do the glowing outline effect now if you need a hand following along then you can go ahead and download the project file for this tutorial in the description below it even comes with a footage so you don't have to worry about it however i do recommend that you first watch through the entire tutorial once just so you get a better understanding of all the steps before you go ahead and try it yourself so let's launch after effects and get started on how to do this effect so we have hopped over into after effects and we've imported the footage that we'll be using in this case this beautifully designed deck of cards and we're going to be basically outlining the details of this design over here so first we're going to drop this into a new composition by dragging it over this icon which will create a new composition and the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to 3d track this object now this is the method that i actually learned from vfx maria and she made an awesome holographic tutorial that is on the joshua family channel so you should check that out after this tutorial if you're interested in doing something along those lines but i'm going to be borrowing the method that she taught which is the first hit ctrl y to create a solid i'm going to change the color to black i'm going to draw a mask around the area only isolating the deck of cards so how i do that is by first hitting t on this black solid so that i can change the opacity i can see through where i'm drawing and i'm going to hit this pen tool over here and i'm going to draw a mask around this deck of cards i'm going to hit m to bring up the mask path and i'm going to hit the stopwatch because i'm going to animate the pen tool so that it follows this deck of cards so once i've keyframed it this is what it looks like i'm going to actually change the mode to subtract and then also hit f to bring up the mass feather and i just feathered it out so that it wouldn't be too harsh of a line so i'm gonna change the opacity back to 100 by hitting t to bring up the opacity again and then now as you can see i have darkened the areas so that it isolates only the design of playing cards what we're going to do now is we're going to highlight both of these we're going to hit ctrl shift c so we can pre-comp this and we're going to call it footage isolated hit okay and what's going to happen now is i'm going to trim the footage so it only includes the parts where i actually want the animation to happen so that the 3d tracker won't do some weird stuff especially over here where i flip the deck of cards it's really not going to like that trust me i've tried and while highlighting this layer i'm going to pull up something called effects console by hitting the shortcut control spacebar it's a free plugin by video copilot that basically saves some time from going all the way and reaching over to this effects and presets panel to find your effect when i can just hit a shortcut and type in what i'm looking for which in this case is 3d camera tracker and then it's going to work its 3d camera tracking magic so we just wait until it's done once it has done so as you can see there are now tracking markers that track to the design of the playing cards which is awesome now we're going to be using this later so i'm going to choose a point where i want to use as a reference to kind of start animating so somewhere around here is not bad i'm going to actually duplicate this by hitting ctrl d and i'm going to right click it hit time and then freeze frame and i can just delete the 3d camera tracker because this is just a reference frame for me to know where to animate we're going to actually rename this and call it reference and then we'll even change the color so i don't confuse myself so once the reference layer is created the first thing that we want to do to start the animation of the design is going to be creating masks over the area that you want the glowing outline effect to apply to so you can manually make this by just drawing it out with the pen tool kind of like this or if it's a more intricate design like what i'm using right now and there's a nice contrast between the brighter lines and also the darker background then you can use something called autotrace which will do all the hard work for you so while highlighting this layer i'm going to go to layer and i'm going to go to auto trace and then i'm going to basically use the luminance which is the brightness of the image to determine where it's going to trace and you can play around with the tolerance and threshold and minimum area and all this fancy stuff to see what'll give you the best results now i'm going to be applying this to a new layer which is why i check this and then when i hit ok it's going to create a new layer with a bunch of these masks and then mask around the area that's bright so if i click this layer and then hit m as you can see it has created all these masks for me now i'm going to delete the ones that are irrelevant which in this case would be like the border over here and for lines like these where it could be straighter i can manually fix them up but in this case i'm just going to keep it simple for tutorial sake and just use it as is once you have this traced out we're going to rename it to glowing outline because we're going to be using these masks as data to create that glowing outline effect and the effect itself that we're using is another free plugin by video copilot as you can tell they make a lot of amazing stuff and they make it for free now the effect that i'm using is called saber so before you get started i recommend downloading this and then there's so many applications that you can apply with this effect and this is just one of many now before we continue if you're liking the video so far please check out my instagram page at coffeelicker and you can see what i've been working on shoot me a dm if you want to chat or if you've got any questions as well because i'd be more than happy to reply back all right let's continue now before we change any of these parameters we're going to go to the customize core and we're going to change the core type to layer mask and look at what happens it's like a bright blob and that's because the core size is really big and we have to shift all these things around so i'm going to lower it so that i can actually see some lines and as you can see it traces over the mask paths now we're going to change the blending mode over here to something like screen so we can see through it and you can play with these settings as much as you want i'm not going to get into too much detail since it'll be up to your taste now in this case i'm just going to keep it like this and i'm going to get into how to actually animate the glowing outline so first i want to change the offset to something like 40 instead of 100 and basically it means that the lines don't fill up all the way and then i'm going to change the mask evolution by hitting the stopwatch over here and i keyframe it so that it starts at zero i'm going to hit u to bring up all my keyframes and actually i deleted the default keyframes from the masks so it'd be cleaner to look at but make sure to keep your mask paths because that's important and after i jump a few seconds forward let's just say somewhere around here i'm going to change the rotation so it's something like this so if i play it through as you can see the lines are now animating and how i made it look like the lines appear from nothing is that i hit the stopwatch for the end offset and i animated it so i'm going to hit mu and then u again to bring up my keyframes for everything and then i changed the end offset to start with zero so that the lines formed from nothing and to keep things simple i animated it so that the lines would vanish as well so you're essentially done the glowing outline effect however we want to track this to the deck of cards so it's going to be moving around now remember how we made that 3d camera track earlier we are finally going to use that data to track the design so we're going to click on the effect so that these tracking points appear and then we're going to draw an area that i can apply it to which is this it'll make this red target circle in the middle and we're just going to right click it and we're going to create a solid and camera then over here you can now see that there is a solid and there's a camera now with a solid we're going to hit ctrl shift y and that'll bring these solid settings for the solid over here and we're going to change the dimensions so it matches the resolution of this whole comp so it's not 1350 by 1350. it's actually 1080 by 1350 and then i'm going to hit okay and what we're gonna do now is pre-comp the solid by hitting ctrl shift c we're gonna call this glowing outline tracked and this time we're going to leave all attributes okay this is uh pretty important you don't want to move all attributes for this one you want to leave it in and we're going to take this glowing outline effect and we're going to hit ctrl x to cut it out of this comp we're going to go into the glowing outline track over here and we're going to hit ctrl v so we can paste it in like so and we're just going to hide the solid so it's only showing this design now as you can see the comp is actually a lot smaller than we want it to be so all we have to do is hit s bring up the scale so it's something that matches in this case i'm going to change the blending mode to screen again because it defaults back to something else now if you play it through it is actually tracked to the footage but we don't see that because we still have this reference layer over here which we can now delete another thing we can hide or delete is by going into this footage isolated layer that we had earlier and hiding this black box and then when we go back to our main layer we can finally watch the results of our hard work congratulations guys you are finally done the glowing outline effect now if i break down the one that i worked on earlier the only difference is that i spent a little more time refining everything and i'm going to break down the effects that i used as well to polish it up now as you can see instead of just one layer of applying saver i created a few layers all isolating different parts of the design so it's up to you on how much time you want to spend on animating the design but i always believe that the devil is in the details and that's what sets aside from something that looks okay to something a lot more refined and the other difference is that i darken the footage underneath to make the glowing outline stand out even more and i also added a globe now i use a plugin called deep glow because i think it gives really nice results but you can just use the built-in glow in after effects but once you have the basics down you now know how to do it yourself and as you can see the more time that you put into it the more polished the effect will look and that's it guys that is how you make any design glow in this intricate way that's sure to make your next video sick now i highly encourage you to try this with different designs different objects and even explore more what sabre has to offer and be sure to tag josh and myself because we're both excited to see where you take this effect and what you do with it as usual stay tuned to the next tutorial sub to josh because he's got a lot of amazing tutorials and check out some other ones that i've done on his channel as well if you enjoyed this one if you haven't done so already check out my instagram the handle is at coffee liquor so you can see what i've been up to so it's time to wrap this up until the next tutorial over back to josh herman thank you so much for yet another incredible vfx tutorial please make sure to watch all the other incredible tutorials that we have in this month's creative week with herman huang i got two more videos for you to check out right here remember you can get a first month of envato elements for only nine dollars in the link below we've stopped doing the free month offer that's been an offer that's been going on for about six months it finally came to an end but you can still get the first month for nine dollars every subscription really helps the channel so please make sure to check it out thanks so much for watching guys and as always remember to keep it chill

Channel: Olufemii

Views: 43,256

Keywords: VFX, After, Effects, how to, animations, line effects, glow, preset, pack, plugin, after, effects, tutorial, dance video, dance animation, cole bennet line effect, blotter media tutorial, blottermedia tutorial, glowing scribble animation, glowing scribble animation in after effects, glowing scribble animations, scribble animation, glowing outline effect, after effects tutorial, premiere pro, premiere pro tutorial

Id: oh_EwRcLYig

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020