Hitfilm Effects Lab - Create Planets in Hitfilm 2017

if you've wanted to make planets in hitfilm then you're in luck because that's what we're going to talk about today hey everybody Mike Miller from trying visual here and today we're going to learn how to create this planet effect in hitfilm express just go ahead and create a new project I'm going to leave this at 1080p 24 frames per second I'm going to go ahead and import some media and create a new composite shot I'm going to name this planet set up and I'm going to leave it at 1080p 24 frames per second while I'm at it I'm going to create three more composite shots Earth Day and I'm going to make this 3000 by 1500 also going to create earth night which will also be 3000 by 1500 and clouds which I will leave at 3000 by 1500 I don't necessarily have to put my source images in the composite shots like I've done I could just use the layers directly but I've set these up as composite shots for something that we're going to do later on in this tutorial in the meantime and my clouds composite shot I'm going to drag in my clouds image I'm going to pull birth night into Earth night and earth day into Earth Day in the planets setup comp I'm going to drag in Earth Day earth night and clouds I'm going to turn off clouds and Earth night and just focus on Earth Day come up to the effects tab and type in sphere the spear filter obviously wraps some image around an imaginary sphere and the first set of controls are the radius and use source as radius determines the size of the sphere and we're going to take this up to 500 use source as determines whether the layer that the sphere filter has been placed on uses itself as the surface texture for the sphere an environment map for the sphere or an environment layer for the sphere for what we're doing today we're only going to be using surface texture so we will not be discussing these environment map environment layer reflection or refraction controls today since we're using their layer as a surface texture let's twirl open the surface texture controls the scale determines the size of the texture and how it wraps around the sphere we will want it at 100% but let me take this down to 25 for a moment zoom in a little bit and then come down to these bottom controls wrap X and wrap wide by default they're set to reflect and you can see here where this edge of the surface texture is meeting this edge of the surface texture it does in fact reflect seamlessly around the sphere I can change these from reflect to tile tile does not reverse the image when it meets horizontally or vertically I'm going to set these back to reflect and I'm going to take the scale back up to 100% scale ratio is determined by the aspect ratio of the source layer or source image because my textures are 3000 by 1500 the scale ratio should be set to to the position controls let me set the location of the sphere in 3d space either directly by adjusting the x and y values using these controls and the Z value by using this depth slider or if I reset that back to zero create a new point which I will make 3d and name this planet point and come back into the sphere controls I can set the transform from to the planet point now if I move the planet point around in 3d space it will affect the positioning of my planet and really that's the basics of creating planets in hitfilm express you take a source image to use as the his texture and a sinus fear filter to it then connected to a point once connected to a point you are free to move your planet around and rotate it any way you see fit as we look at the sphere filter we can see that the texture of our earth map has been reversed and this is why I placed my textures and embedded composite shots I'm going to jump back into the earth de-embedded composite open up its transform properties click this chain to unlink the horizontal and vertical scale and I'm going to change the X scale from 100 to negative 100 I'm going to go ahead and come back into the Earth night composite shot and do the same thing I could reverse my clouds I don't really care which way they go back in my planet setup comp I can now see that the earth texture is correctly wrapped around the sphere let's create a new scene light which I'm going to call Sun I'm going to come down to the sunlight and set its transformation to zero zero zero and I'm going to create another new point which I'm going to call Sun pivot going to make Sun pivot a 3d layer and I'm going to parent the sunlight to the Sun pivot then I'm going to move the Sun twenty thousand units out in space now when I toggle the Sun on we don't see anything actually happening to our planet so let's go back down to the Earth Day layer here at the bottom of the controls for the sphere effect we can see a group for illumination let's twirl that open and change the type from none to complex now our light is affecting the planet but we're getting way too much specular highlights over in this area once we activated complex another group of controls became available for material if we trillo pin' material we see sliders for the ambient diffuse and specular lights and the shininess let's see what happens if we turn the shininess down that's spreading out the specular highlight and making it more harsh that's not what we want so we'll go ahead and turn that back up to 100 let's just take the specular fader down now 10 looks good and I'm going to take the diffuse down to 40 that's starting to look decent I'm going to come back up to my son pivot open up its transform controls and I'm going to start rotating the Sun pivot on its y-axis rotating the Sun pivot around lets me position my son in the sky I'm also going to go ahead and create a grade layer at this point and I'm going to call my grade layer Sun flare I'm going to move the Sun flare to the bottom of the layer stack and I'm going to create a new plane make certain that's 1920 by 1080 make certain it's black and I'm going to go ahead and may miss black plane so I have black plane at the bottom of the layer stack with the Sun flare grade right above it on the Sun flare grade I'm going to put a light flares effect I'm going to open up the light flares effect and I'm going to change the hotspot position to use Sun as a layer and I'm going to set its center to 0-0 I'm also going to change the flare type to Sun glare let me come back to the transform controls for the Sun pivot and I'm going to go ahead and zero out the rotation and then spin it around on the y-axis again [Music] parenting a lens flare effect to the light source being used as the Sun just lets me quickly see where my actual Sun is and if i zoom in here it also shows how the edge of the sphere is picking up the edge of the light I'm just going to adjust my son pivot layer until I have my light hitting my planet the way I like I'm going to open up the planet point and zero that back out I'm going to come to my Earth Day composite shot right click on the sphere effect copy it I'm going to go ahead and turn off Earth Day turn on Earth night go into Earth night and paste in the effect I'm going to drag earth night above Earth Day turn Earth Day back on and change the blend mode of Earth night from normal to add and now that I've set the blend of the earth night layer to add I want to come back into the sphere effect and I want to go ahead and turn off illumination now when I rotate the planet point the night side of our earth is showing lights from the ground but we can see you here on the coast of South America that the daylight sections of the earth are also showing the nighttime map so what can we do to keep the night map where we want it but eliminate it from the day side well we're going to create a new white plane and we want it to be 3000 by 1500 and we're going to call this white plane 3000 1500s when I create planes I just tend to call them black plain white plane and if they're a size that's different from my project size I'll add in the layer dimensions the reason for this is planes like any other piece of media can reuse from the media bin and I will just reuse planes over and over in a composition rather than creating a new plane every time I need one since I've already got the sphere effect from the Earth Day layer in my clipboard I can just come over to the white plane click paste and it will have the same sphere effect this white sphere is being lit by the same light that's lighting everything else the black areas correspond to where the earth is falling in the shadow I want to go ahead and open up the illumination controls for this and come into the material settings and adjust the specular and highlight settings again in this case I'm willing to let the specular highlight to bleed out warm I'm going to be using this sphere to generate a mat so you can see I've adjusted that to be a much stronger white highlight a smaller penumbra area and a harsher shadow I'm going to rename this matte sphere and I'm going to move it underneath black plane speaking of black plane I'm going to duplicate black plane and put a copy of that underneath mat sphere I'm going to come up and create a new grade layer and I'm going to call this mat flatten I'm going to move mat flatten right above mat sphere a grade layer is a flattened copy of everything that exists below it and by having this grade layer underneath the background black plane I can use this grade layer as a set mat source to show more clearly what this is going to do I'm going to go ahead and turn off my Earth Day layer leaving us with just earth night come up to my effects panel and drag the set mat effect to earth night in the set mat effect I'm going to set the source layer to mat flatten I'm going to set the mat source to luminance and I'm going to set the blend to replace and as soon as I do that you can see the earth night map appearing only where the mat sphere is illuminated by clicking invert map now my earth night map is appearing only where my mat sphere is in shadow so if I turn my Earth Day back on come up to my planet point and start rotating again on the y-axis you can see where the lights start fading out as the planet rotates around and today there were already clouds on the earth day and earth night texture but I'd like to make those a little bit thicker so I'm going to go ahead and turn on this clouds layer I still have the sphere effect in my clipboard so if I just come up and paste the sphere effect in then my clouds now have the exact same settings and our locks to the same point as everything else if I come up and open the layer properties can change the blend mode from normal to screen and then to add a little bit of extra depth I'm going to change the radius from 500 to 505 you my zoom in closer on this edge you can see that that brings my top layer of clouds just a little bit off the surface of the planet so that they have a little bit more depth and really that's it that's the basic setup I have my planet surface map set up I have a night map set up I have a mat sphere set up generating a mat to transition between the day in the night texture maps and I have a cloud map all of these are maps to the same planet point so now I can move my planet anywhere I want in 3d space and rotate it to any angle I want I have a sunlight set up and the sunlight itself is set up on its own pivot point so I can just move the Sun around the planet where I want it to until my planet and my Sun angles are where I want them to be for my image or animation and just for a quick background let's create another composite shot call it star wrap and I'm going to go ahead and make this one 3000 by 1500 again in my media tab I'm going to drag in my existing white plane 3000 by 1500 AD the same fractal noise to it go ahead and grab star field preset and I'm going to go ahead and adjust the seat a little bit come back into my planet setup drag in my star wrap and I'm going to go ahead and delete the original black plane come up to my effects tab grab my 360 video viewer drag that to the star wrap I'm going to take the scale back down to 50 and I'll leave my X&Y on reflect and I'm going to go ahead and change the scale to about 35 I think and let's go ahead and add a glow effect set up way too high [Music] I'm going to go ahead and create another new point going to call it camera pivot and I'm going to parent my camera to camera pivot make camera pivot 3d I'm going to come up into the new camera layer go up into the layer properties and set its alignment to toward layer and then make the alignment layer the planet point now no matter where I move my camera it's automatically going to look at the center of the planet I'm going to go ahead and open the transform controls for the camera pivot and activate keyframing on the XY & z rotations going to move to the end of the composite shot and I'm just going to pick a position that I you know like now Ram preview that see how that looks so now we can fly our camera around our planet have de properly fall off in the night we have our stars properly behind the planet and we can even see the Sun there's only one thing missing and that's atmospheric glow and that's pretty easy to do as well I'm going to come down to my Earth Day composite and I'm going to duplicate that on the bottom copy of Earth Day I'm going to rename this to Earth glow open up the sphere effect open up the material settings turn my specular down to zero and turn my diffuse up to 100 and then I'm going to come up and grab a zoom blur from my effects list and add that with the sphere in the zoom blur controls I'm going to come down to the center and I'm going to set the position to the planet point then just the strength to see how much of this atmospheric glow I want come up to the layer properties maybe change that to screen should be screen actually let's make that lighten I'm adding a diffuse after the zoom blur just to soften it up a bit there's one other thing I want to do I'm going to come up to the planet point duplicate that and I'm going to rename the duplicate clouds point I'm going to parent clouds point to the parent point and then come into my clouds composite shot open up the sphere effect and change its position from the planet point to clouds point want to open up the transform controls on the cloud point set this to 0 0 0 0 so that the cloud point is now aligned to the planet point I'm going to go to the first frame enable keyframing on the clouds point move to the last frame and I'm just going to move the clouds just a few degrees we can see when I come around to the end of the shot when the Sun is behind the Earth I'm losing my atmosphere glow because there is no illumination on the earth glow sphere so I'm going to come up and create a new light I'm going to call this ambient light change the type from point to ambient and I'm going to change its intensity to 25% I'm going to come into clouds and an illumination I'm going to change the comp lights to selected lights and then select Sun I'm not going to do this for Earth night remember that Earth night is not an illuminated layer but I am going to do this for Earth Day by setting clouds to selected lights just a Sun then those two layers are not affected by the ambient light that I just added in but my earth glow layer being set to comp lights is being affected by Bo the ambient and the sunlight and in its material settings it is receiving ambient diffuse specular and shininess by 100 percent so when I come to the end of the shot I've still got some of the atmosphere glow extending around the earth I can control how much glow shows through on the dark side of the earth by adjusting the strength of the ambient light so if I take the ambience up to 100 I will always have a strong glow all the way around the planet if I take it down to something more like I think 20 actually is pretty good then I have a more subtle glow all right so our earth is looking pretty good we've got our day side our night side automatically coming in with lights you've got another cloud layer for some depth now we've got a planetary glow setup but what if we want to make our own planets from scratch we can do that too I'm going to go ahead and come down and turn off the clouds layer and rebirth night layer in fact I'm going to go ahead and delete the earth night layer because I'm not going to need it anyway I'm also going to go ahead and delete the matte flattened matte sphere and black Plains and I'm going to open up the Earth Day composite shot in the Earth Day composite shot I'm going to go ahead and turn off this planet Earth Day map come up to my media pool and grab my previously created white plane then come back up to the effect and grab fractal noise fractal noise I'm going to set the type to swirl I'm going to open up the appearance settings open up color one and color two and I'm going to change them both to blue colors [Music] that's pretty good I'm going to rename this see I'm going to duplicate see and rename the Topkapi land 0 1 I'm going to come into the fractal noise settings and the first thing I'm going to do or change the colors to kind of a yellowish green and maybe a more bluish green I'm going to change the type back from swirl to clouds and I'm just going to kind of play around with some settings change the scale change the seed and maybe play with the exposure and the offset a bit [Music] I'm going to duplicate land 1 and I'm going to name this clipping Matt lamb and on clipping Matt land I'm going to right-click on the fractal noise and I'm going to reset it I'm going to go ahead and keep this on clouds and again I'm going to play with the seed I'm going to play with scale and I'm going to play with the exposure and offset settings what I'm trying to do or create blobby areas that are more or less pure white with lots of black that's not bad I'm going to move clipping that land underneath the sea plane and I'm going to create a grade layer just like before I'm going to call that flipping mat land flatten and move that just above clipping mat on my land one plane I'm going to come up to the effect and add set mat and in the set mat I'm going to set the source layer to clipping mat land flatten I'm going to change the mat source to luminance and the blend can stay is replace clipping that land and clipping man flatten on now clipping this green texture to form the shape of continents and islands I'm going to duplicate land 1 again and rename this as land 0 2 and land 0 2 I'm going to come back into my appearance setting and I'm going to change the colors again I'm going to change this to a slightly more saturated yellow and I think I'm going to go ahead and change this to something more of an orange I'm going to change the seed only slightly maybe from 800 to 802 I'm going to change the scale from 80 point nine pixels to 75 and I'm going to go ahead and change the exposure from point three seven two point four and the offset to zero I'm going to turn off land one land two and see for a moment comes out on my clipping mat and I'm going to duplicate those again I'm going to rename this clipping that land zero two and clipping mat land flattens ero two and make sure that the grade layer is above the plane layer in clipping that land zero two I'm going to open up the effects again move back down to appearance and I'm going to change the exposure in the offset settings what I want to do is keep the same shape but I just want to keep more of those white areas in the center and let more of the black fall off turn back on see land 1 and land 2 and then in land - I'm going to change the set mat from clipping land flattens clipping mat land flatten - as you can see that's adding more texture to our land with more green closer to the ocean and as we move farther inland we have a little bit more yellow let's duplicate land zero two again and make this land zero three I'm going to come back into my appearance and I'm going to change this yellow to something more of a dark gray I'm going to change this other color to a lighter gray I'm going to change the fractal noise type on this one from clouds to swirl and I'm going to take the scale down from 75 to something a lot smaller maybe about 12 just exceed again maybe not swirl let's try wisp there we go I'm liking risked a lot more I'm going to copy the clipping Matt land flatten layers again move these back to the top rename them clipping Matt 3 going to go ahead and turn off the lands and see layers again come into the clipping Matt land 3 open up its fractal noise change the seed by 0.1 and then I'm going to come into the transform open up position and I'm going to nudge this to the right by about 5 now let's make that 10 pixels come back down to the appearance and I'm going to choke the exposure and offset a bit more turn back on my scene land layers come in to land 0 3 and change to clipping Matt to clipping that land flatten 3 and that's starting to become something I've got some nice green land closer to the oceans I've got some yellow bits representing deserts and more arid regions and then this third layer brings in some mountains so let's go ahead and create a grade layer on top of this because I think it's a little bit too saturated on the grade layer I'm going to grab the hue saturation and lightness effect drag that on open up the master channel and I think I'm going to take the saturation down 34 points could go ahead and open up the blue and I'm going to raise the saturation back up on the blues a little bit and I'm pretty happy with that since this was created and the composite shot where our Earth Map initially was I can go back to planet setup and see what we have [Music] that's not bad but there are a few more things we can do to clean this up a little bit let's go back into the Earth Day composite shot go into the media bin grab that white plane and drag that right on top of land zero three I'm going to come into the white plane take an opacity down to about 50% so I can see through it scale down a little bit more and grab my free hand mask draw a little irregular shape here and another one on the bottom want to come up to my mask controls and I want to adjust the roundness on both of these masks take the opacity of the layer back up to 100% I'm going to go ahead and add a fractal noise to this layer I'm going to change my colors to a very light blue and light gray and I want to break that up a bit so let's go ahead and add heat distortion turn the diffusion down to zero just adjust the distortion in the scale until I get something that I'm happy with and maybe any diffusion before the heat distortion go back into our planet setup I think those ice caps can be a little bit larger I'm going to go back into Earth Day grab this first mask move it down a little bit come to the 2nd mass move that up a little bit and go back to my planet set up there we go that starting to look pretty neat let me grab the planet point and spin this guy around on the y-axis for a minute so we can see a seam on our planet where the edges of our generated composite shot don't actually flow around we have a couple of ways we can deal with this first is we can come into our sphere effect come into the surface texture layer and maybe change our scale or our scale ratio by changing our scale ratio to 1 the entire map should reflect across the surface of our planet this takes care of the seam but it does leave two places on our planet where we have a completely symmetrical look maybe we don't want that it's going to come back into Earth Day and set the scale ratio back to two circle everything back around to where we can see our seam again the other way to fix this is to try and make this texture seamless to begin with so I'm going to come back into the Earth Day composite shot and I'm actually going to go ahead and select everything I've already made in here right click and make this composite shot which I'm going to call fractal land Maps now when I come back into the Earth Day composite shot all of my land masses have been compressed into this one layer which I'm going to duplicate this is a 3000 by 1500 composite shot so what I'm going to do is take this top copy of fractal and Maps and I'm going to move it 1500 on the x-axis I'm going to come down to the second copy of fractal land Maps and I'm going to move it negative 1500 at this point the outer edges wrap correctly because the outer edges correspond to the center of our original layers now that we can see what's going on with the scene we can try and figure out another way of fixing that so how I'm going to fix that is I'm going to make another duplicate of this fractal land map layer which I'm going to call patch I'm going to go ahead and move that back to zero zero and I'm going to rotate that 180 degrees I'm going to temporarily grab a huge saturation and lightness effect and drag that on the patch I'm going to open up the greens and I'm going to shift hue shift this around until it turns an ugly purple this is just so I can see what I'm doing drop the opacity and I'm going to move that until I have some of my land masses over the scene I'm going to grab a free hand mask if you pass me back up to one hundred turn off that hue effect open up the mask and I'm going to feather that you do adjust that mask a little bit and there we go the edges will still wrap around perfectly because these were the Centers of the layer then by taking another copy of the same landmass rotating it 180 degrees and masking around where the joint is I now have a seamless texture and if I move back to the planet setup layer I can now rotate this planet a full 360 degrees without seeing the scene [Music] I've already got a perfectly good clouds layer that I've imported but let's go ahead and do the same thing in the clouds composite shot I can go ahead and leave this graphic right here and I'm just going to grab the clouds effect [Music] going to add curves make that more contrasting and then I'm going to add heat distortion again turn off the diffusion turn off the animation Oh cv g'v also got to come back into fractal land Maps and turn off the noise speed on the heat distortion or else the ice cap will shimmer back to my clouds layer heat distortion and really that's it from this point on is just adjusting the cloud filters and the distortion filters the way I like them reduplicating the layers creating another patch layer just like I did with the landmasses and then I've created a grade layer and added several twirl filters of various sizes and various radii around the clouds composite shot with the twirls representing hurricanes and storms and other things once I have the clouds looking the way I want them since the planet maps are already set up I just shift back to my final composite shot and I can see how my new clouds layers look in real time the last thing I did was add a parallax effect to the Earth Day composite shot turn down the lighting settings in the parallax effect and adjust the height of the parallax effect just to give the landmasses a little bit more depth then when all of that's done you end up with something that looks like this there are other things you could do to continue this shot getting to glows grading and letterboxing but this is where this tutorial is going to end I hope you've learned a lot about using the scare effects to make light reactive planets in hitfilm express 2017 as well as generating your own planetary texture Maps procedurally and creating your own clouds I'm Mike Miller for tryam visual I'd like to thank you for sitting through this tutorial and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Hitfilm University

Views: 10,995

Keywords: Hitfilm, Express, Pro, Beginner, Tutorial, Unversity, Essential, Space, Planet, CGI, Animation, Procedural, Lab, Laboratory

Id: 29dAXIdzMhc

Length: 36min 15sec (2175 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017