How To Create A HUD Eye Effect in Adobe After Effects

hi guys Jordan with motion array and today we're gonna be showing you how to add a heads-up display to your videos in After Effects this type of effect has lots of different uses and you've probably seen it in countless different top budget productions everything from a crazy high-tech laboratory situation to Ironman suit and even Taylor Swift's music video ready for it saw this effect used for her bionic eye and believe it or not she's not the only person who has a robotic eye I do and with his power and use it as a platform to conquer the injured oh okay that that was uh unexpected um let's uh take a look at how to do that um the robot a guy thing transition alright so here we are inside of After Effects and we're gonna be recreating the eye heads-up display effect that we just saw in the opening example we're gonna be going over three basic steps of compositing this effect we're gonna be starting with the bionic eye effect and compositing that to make it look like it's actually really there then we're gonna create the grid scanning effect and then we're gonna composite the heads-up screen display in front of the eye and then throughout the whole thing we're gonna be working at adding a little bit of flare and a little bit of polish to make it look as good as possible so let's jump into it let's start by taking a look at our footage the footage that we're using is just a simple shot of an eye and it's important to make sure that if you're shooting this yourself that you keep the iris InFocus drag-and-drop your footage overtop of the new composition button and it'll create a new composition based on the parameters of your clip and then I'm just gonna clean up this clip to only include the pieces that I know I'm gonna use because this effect is gonna be working our computer pretty hard it's best to save as many frames as possible if you know that you don't need them let's quickly take a look at the graphic we're going to be placing over top of the iris it's this bionic ring here and I downloaded this from motion array comm if you want to use something else that's totally okay or you could even make your own elements dragon this over top of your existing footage and you should be able to see that this is going to take some work to actually place over the center of our eye step one is to just get it roughly in place decrease the scale and then position it over top so that it looks like it's actually a part of the iris great it's still far from complete but this is just the first step of many you can see the first problem is that it's actually not tracking along with the eye it's staying in place while the eye itself continues to move around so we need to track the eye so that we can match up the graphic to follow it we won't be going over how to track objects inside of After Effects because we already did a video on it it's this one here and the link to that you can find in the description below so with the pupil of our I tracked this is what we should have and now that your know layer has all the tracking data that we just found you can click this box here and parent your circular graphics to follow the null layer now your graphic should be sticking to the eyeball as if it's actually a part of it but you should see something right off the back here and that's the graphic is actually spilling off of the bottom of the eye and it doesn't look realistic and the same thing happens when we close the eye you can see that there's some spill over the top of the lid now so what we need to do is highlight our graphics layer and then use the pen tool to mask around the area of the eye now whatever we've selected inside of that mask is the only place where the graphic will actually show up and now when we drop down the mask option here and keyframe the mask path and then move our playhead forward in time now whenever we make changes to the mask shape it will actually keyframe and animate over time making it look like the graphic is actually being blocked when the eyelids are closed make sure to scan through your entire clip and make sure that at any point in time this effect looks believable you can also zoom in to get a closer look for some fine details and we can see here that it's a bit of a harsh cutoff so by going down to our masking settings we can increase the feather to make it look a little bit more like this is a natural roll-off within the eye and even down here at the very bottom you can see that there's this natural line that our graphic is blending into when you increase the feather it might bump it over the edge of your mask so pulling it back with the mask expansion can really help to reduce any spillover and you can start to see that this effect is really starting to take root it actually looks somewhat believable and now that we've gotten past this threshold I'm gonna start adding some effects that are a bit more for fun and for an exaggerated effect rather than for true realism we're gonna be adding a really deep blue glow to the eye to make it look like it's robotic and being illuminated by some sort of light back within the eye the base of this effect is actually just a solid color and it's a really simple effect to create so start by right-clicking and going to new solid and choose the colour of the iris that you actually want to create mine is just gonna be a light blue and this should create a blue over top of your entire screen make sure that it's below your graphical element and not above it next up we're going to use the solid to create a perfectly blue circle so go to your ellipse tool and hold ctrl and shift and click and drag to create a perfect circle roughly the size and shape of your iris place it over top and then you can use the mask controls to increase the feathering on your circle just slightly and then you can use the mask expansion to either grow or shrink your mask to fit then when you parent it to your null object to follow the motion of your eye this is what you should have it still looks pretty gross but we're far from done you can see that this blue circle is suffering from what our other graphic was before spilling over the bottom of the eye so we just need to take the pen tool and create a similar mask like we did before outlining the eye to make sure that it won't spill over the bottom but by default your mask should be set to add so this is going to include it within the whites of the eyes the solution set it to subtract and then click invert now it's acting as a boundary to make sure that only stays within the parameters of the eye now you can do some simple cleanup by adding a bit of a mask feather and making sure that throughout the duration of the clip this effect isn't broken by the closing eye a simple fix for this is just by going to opacity and keyframing it so that it only starts to show after the eye is already open now here's where we start to take the effect from just looking gross to actually looking pretty nice go over to your modes over on the left and if you can't see them you might have to toggle this switch at the bottom so once you've done that select the blending mode called overlay and now you should have the same texture of your eyes still present but it's just got a nice new coat of paint on it okay now is the part where we start to get into smaller and smaller details that make a big difference you can see here that our effect is completely covering the center pupil here but pupils are pure black and not really blue so we're gonna create a mask over top of the pupil here by holding ctrl or command + shift and clicking and dragging to create a perfect circle and then set this mask to subtract now the pupil is perfectly black and we can add a bit of a mask feather to make it feel a little bit more natural great so you can see that in under 10 minutes we've already taken this effect from looking like normal footage to looking actually kind of cool and a little bit like a robotic eye next up what I'm noticing here is that the white circular graphics are standing a little bit out too much like they're drawing attention to themselves we can blend it in by going to our blend modes and selecting overlay this helps the background texture of the iris shine through a little bit more through the graphic all right next up what I want to do is make it look even more like this I is robotic so what I'm going to be doing is taking this blue outline of the iris and making it flicker a little bit this is what it looks like right now on its own just fading into existence and remaining constant so I'm gonna go down to opacity shortcut key T and we're gonna find the point where it actually reaches 100% then we're gonna make a cut here with ctrl or command shift and D next up we're gonna take this top iris layer and we're going to get rid of all the keyframes for opacity and what you should notice is that even though these are technically now two separate Clips they act as one single unit now we're gonna hold alt and we're gonna click on opacity and we're gonna input our own simple expression wiggle open bracket six comma thirty-two close bracket and what we've told this top iris layer to do is six times every second to change the opacity up to a maximum of 32% you can get the feel for what the effect is going for but let's take a look in the context of our actual footage the effect is starting to take shape but the nice thing is that we can do this exact same thing to our circular graphics layer to really sell this effect even more just input the same expression wiggle open brackets six comma thirty-two close brackets so now both the blue iris and the circular graphics are both flickering at a similar pace but because we've created this somewhat artificial light source in the eye it's going to be really effective to create this idea that there's a bit of a glow around the eye so right-click and go to new solid and with the same kind of color selected and by rename with solid to let us know that it's the eye glow we can use the ellipse tool yet again to create this oval shape over top of the I place it so that it's centered over top of the I then I'd suggest maneuvering it so that it fits a little bit more of the curvature of the face before you get too far it might be helpful to decrease the opacity of the saw layer so you can actually see through what you're working with by making new points and fitting around the curvature of the eye socket you can actually make it look a little bit more like this glow is going to be interacting with your actual face structure next up let's go down to the masking options and we're going to increase the mask feather but the effect is still way too much so we're gonna decrease the opacity until it's just barely visible more of a subconscious hint rather than a big obtrusive glow next up we're going to be taking the opacity layer of the eye glow and making sure that at key frames in when the glow is actually supposed to take place when the retinas not lit up we want the opacity of the glow layer to be set to zero so now that it fades in we should see that there's this little ominous glow when the retina actually lights up I'm just gonna quickly rename these iris layers to actually say the fact that they're a blue iris as we start to add more and more layers it's gonna get more and more complicated to keep track over everything at a glance so keeping everything nice neat organized and named properly is essential okay so up next we're actually gonna make the glow layer flicker at the same pace as our iris layer right click on your eye glow layer and hit precompose move everything to the new composition and make sure it's named so that it still makes sense now that this layer is pre composed we can make it flicker without interrupting the fact that we faded it into existence with opacity keyframes but instead of creating the same wiggle expression that we did before we're actually going to go to this pick whip under the opacity of the eye glow and parented to the opacity of the blue iris layer that we had already flickering with the wiggle expression the result is now that they match to be exactly the same pace of flickering and let me show you by actually adding in the iris layer as well they work together almost as a single unit now these lighting effects are starting to make the effect look even better but it's missing one important thing a lens flare we're gonna be creating our own fake anamorphic lens flare by great clicking and going to new solid keeping the same color and to stay organized let's rename it to lens flare go up to your shape tool and choose the rectangle create a really long skinny rectangle and then place it over top of the center of your eye now with the pen tool selected create some extra keyframes along these points of the eye around the iris in specific and bring each of these points towards each other so that are round at this point of the eye there's actually really no blue part showing through then on the far edge here what you want to do is you want to take the top keyframe bring it down a little bit and then delete the bottom keyframe and then do the same thing for the other side you're creating this natural little fall-off where it gets skinnier towards the far edges of the frame this doesn't really look like a lens flare does it well don't worry we're not quite done yet underneath the masking options of this layer what you want to do is add a lot more mask feather it'll take a little bit of trial and error mixing between mask feather and opacity of the overall clip to try and get the right looking effect what I found works for me is by decreasing the opacity by a lot until it's almost not even visible it's less about making it look crazy and awesome and more about making it look like there's actually particles that are interacting with your effect and once you have something that you like make sure to keyframe the opacity so that your lens flare actually fades in at the same time that your eye is lighting up next up split your clip again using control or command shift + D and then take this new layer up here get rid of all the keyframes precompose it and then we're going to add the same flicker effect that we did before taking the pick whip here and parenting it to the opacity of our blue iris to layer so now we should see that this effect is actually giving a true flicker to our lens flare as well and this is what the lens flare flicker looks like on its own cool okay so now this effect is more or less complete we have the eye lighting up it has a bit of a glow around it it has a bit of a lens flare and all of those elements are flickering in unison okay next up on the list we have this effect that looks more or less like there's a grid scanning across the iris of our eye to start this off we're going to be actually creating a simple grid effect to begin with to do that right click over here on the left hand side and select new solid and it's important we want to choose a black solid and then let's rename this layer to say grid to keep things organized now over on the right hand side we need to select the grid effect select it from generate and then place it on top of your grid layer you can see that an automatic grid pops up and we need to change it from corner pin to width and height set the width and height each respectively to 30 and 30 so that now we have a bunch of tiny square grids I'm going to also decrease the border size from 5 to 3 to make each line a little bit thinner and finally I'm gonna add a bit of a glow effect onto that same layer to make the grid look like it's actually glowing the default glow effect right now is actually good enough without any changes so I'm just gonna leave it as is in order to isolate the grid to only the iris of our eye we're going to be doing like what we've been doing all day long and creating a perfect circle overtop of the eye but before we can do that we need to pre compose our layer right click select precompose and move all the attributes to the new composition now we can safely take our trusty ellipse tool and hold ctrl or command shift and click and drag to create a perfect circle over top of our eye so that the grid is only contained to this specific place next up we're going to rinse and repeat the same process we've done twice before now create two new masks one to cut out the pupil to make it completely black and then the other one to make a boundary for the eye to make sure that the grid doesn't escape past the lids of the eyes add some mask feather to make it a little bit more believable and then we're gonna pre compose this grid layer yet again moving all attributes to the new layer it's at this point that we can parent our grid layer to follow the null layer which is going to follow the motion of our eye now that the grid is actually locked on to the same placement as our iris the actual scanning effect is as simple as creating a mask and keyframing it from left to right let me show you find the place where you actually want the scanning to start and place your playhead over top of it next we're gonna create a mask using the rectangle tool make it as thick as you actually want the scan lines to appear and position it off-screen either to the left or to the right I'm just gonna stick with it to the left then underneath your masking options keyframe for the mask path move your playhead forward and then move the entire mask over to the right and you'll notice that this scanning effect actually takes place as we move from left to right now all that's left to do is just to make sure that the speed is actually what we want right now it's a little too fast so moving the keyframes apart from each other will slow it down a little bit a little bit more and this should be pretty good and that's the effect that we were going for nice now if you really want to you can actually cut out the pieces of the clip that you don't actually need because the effect is only taking place within a small region and finally we're going to be incorporating the heads-up display layer in front of our eye that you saw in the example clip so let's go back to our project manager and drag and drop in the heads-up display that I downloaded from motion array comm scale and position this to your liking overtop of your footage and what you should notice is that instead of being transparent where there's no actual elements it's black so to get rid of this we're gonna go down to our blend modes and we're going to select screen nice okay so now that the elements is actually looking like it belongs let's position it so that it's directly centered over top of the pupil it's really easy to make it centered if we take the numbers here and use that as the center mark this will make everything look a little bit more aesthetically pleasing this heads-up display also has an animation that animates in so I'm going to take this and make sure that the start of it actually starts where I want it to pop into existence you and to make sure that it moves around with the eye as normal make sure to parent it to the null layer that moves around of the eye instead of just fading this element in we're actually going to make it zoom out from the eye so go down to your transform options and bring it to the start where you actually want this effect to become first visible set a keyframe for scale and position assuming that it's going to make any left-to-right movements and then move it forward and set your new key frames for your ending position go back to your start keyframes and then scale down your elements to the very very smallest you want them to be pretty much non-existent I personally don't need my position keyframes to adjust at all so I'm just gonna get rid of them then I'm gonna go to my ending keyframe right click and go to keyframe assistant and easy ease in then I'm gonna do the same thing for the curse keyframe and easy ease out select both of these keyframes and then select the graph option where you can see your keyframes on a graph and have a little bit more precision select one of the keyframes and drag out this little line here do the same for the other side and you'll see that you're giving your keyframes a bit more of an exponential curve this will make your zoom out a little bit more realistic as it zooms in and then stops at a little bit more of a gradual pace play around with it until you get the final effect that you like now that we've got the motion down we're gonna be adding some style specifically we're going to be giving a bit of the lens bow to this heads-up display go over to the right hand side under your effects and presets and search for CC lens drag and drop this on to your layer and you should see that it adds a bit of a spherical effect to your heads-up display by bringing the convergence down to about negative 200 and then bringing the size back up to something closer to 360 you'll see that you have a bit of a natural bowing to the edges of your effect making it look like it's wrapping around the eye just a little bit next up we're going to be duplicating your heads up display layer twice ctrl or command D to duplicate it once and then do it again a second time each of these duplicated layers is gonna serve a different purpose so let's rename the top layer by going to right-click renaming and calling it HUD display do the same for the second layer except this time call it HUD glow and for the bottom layer rename it to HUD shadow you can probably guess what each of these different layers is gonna serve a different purpose for the top one is just going to be our normal display but the second layer we're going to add a glow to so in effect some presets search for glow and drag and drop it on to the HUD glow layer you can see that right off the bat the preset is actually doing a pretty good job but we're also going to give it a bit of a boost by searching for Gaussian blur and dragging and dropping that effect on as well increase the blurriness to a really high amount probably around 54 or so and you can see what a difference this makes lastly we're gonna go down to the HUD shadow layer and we're gonna solo it search in your effects for something called invert and you're gonna drag and drop that invert effect onto your HUD shadow layer this will make it almost completely white except the parts that are actually the element are gonna be turned black it's basically just inverted everything like the name suggests I'm just gonna hide the top two layers so it's easier to see what's going on we're gonna take the blend modes and we're actually gonna switch it from screen to multiply and this will get rid of the white and leave the black elements you can see where we're probably going with this we're gonna create an artificial shadow so search in your effects for a Gaussian blur and we're gonna make this bottom layer really blurry to mimic the look of a shadow increase the blurriness as much as you possibly can while making sure that you can actually still see it at some point increasing the blurriness too much can actually basically fade it out of existence to the point where you can't even see it so choose a happy medium for me it's about 29 but our shadow shouldn't be in the exact same place as our normal heads-up display elements it should be a little bit offset so I'm gonna take the end keyframe for position and shift it down a little bit so that it's a little bit smaller making it look like the shadow is actually farther away from us as an audience than the actual heads-up display it's very subtle but you can see it when I toggle it on and off here that's the benefit of actually using duplicated layers to pull off these sorts of effects the motion and all of the animations that are part of the heads-up display are actually going to translate through into the shadow so let's take a look at what our effect looks like from start to finish so far that's not too bad actually nice next up all that we have left is actually just the icing on the cake right click and go to new adjustment layer we're gonna help set the tone for this effect by dragging and dropping the Lummi tree color effect onto this adjustment layer now everything that's below this adjustment layer will take hold of whatever color and lighting changes we make so if we make the scene a little bit darker and play around with some of the curves a little bit we can see that everything takes hold of gloomy tree color changes everything from the base footage layer to the actual heads-up display elements the lens flares the glows everything one thing that I'm going to take special note in doing is by taking the hue/saturation curve here at the bottom and by increasing the saturation of the Blues in specific this will keep the rest of the seem pretty much exactly the same but will intensify the blue of the iris and the lens flare etc then conversely I can take some colors that I don't eliminate but I just want to pull back a bit and draw those down here with this same curve lastly I'll go back up to the project manager here and I'm gonna choose this dust overlay this will just give a little bit more of a moody atmosphere and yes I downloaded this too from motion or a comm I'm gonna list all of the elements that I downloaded from there in the description below so drag and drop this on top of all of your different layers including over top of your adjustment layer and set it to screen to get rid of the black elements then decrease the opacity so that this effect isn't just overpowering everything else now our effect is essentially complete we can leave it here if we really wanted to but there's two last things that I really want to do before we call it quits the first is to add a little bit of a central focusing to the effect that we have in the center right clicking go to new adjustment layer and instead of doing a color correction we're gonna actually add a bit of a gradient around the edge of our footage making the outer rim darker focusing everything more towards our effect and I'm gonna be doing this along the same Ridge line that we did the glow effect this is intended to make it look like any shadows that we create to draw people's attention to the center could be explained as being natural shadows that you would see in a moody lighting setup so once you have the mask a complete search for the Lummi tree color effect again and drag and drop it onto this new adjustment layer and make everything a little bit darker and because our mask is still set to add the inside of the mask is getting darker instead of the outside so go down to your mask properties and select invert or subtract and then increase the mask feather a lot and now if we toggle on the before-and-after you can see what a difference this actually makes it really draws your attention towards the center where the effect is taking place and it doesn't look too unnatural and lastly the final piece before we're going to call this effect quit is something that you should remember on any project you work on in After Effects by selecting enable motion blur here so that it's blue and then selecting the toggle switch down here you can turn on every single layer to have enabled motion blur this means that if there's any scaling or position movements that you've created during this project After Effects will actually calculate whatever natural motion blur will look best and so with all of that out of the way this is our true and final effect guys thanks so much for sticking with us through this longer than normal tutorial I hope you found it helpful and like it helps you understand a little bit more about how to use heads-up display elements and how to composite them into a world that actually makes sense but guys that's it for me like I said before I've listed all of the effects and templates that I downloaded for motion Raycom in the description below and if you found this tutorial helpful we've got tons of others for both After Effects and Premiere Pro as well as filmmaking in general check them out right here at motion or Raycom thank you so much for watching and I can't wait to see you in the next video [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Motion Array Tutorials

Views: 45,207

Keywords: after effects tutorial, after effects HUD, HUD eye, HUD eye effect, HUD eye after effects, heads up display, motion graphics, animation, robot eye effect, how to create a HUD eye effect, after effects tips, compositing, after effects compositing, motion array, motion array tutorial, Heads up display eye, robotic eye, bionic eye, terminator eye

Id: 2ONRC70aFtw

Length: 31min 59sec (1919 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018