How To Do Subsurface Energy Glow Effects | Adobe After Effects Tutorial

hello everyone dennis here with action vfx in this tutorial we will be taking a look at how to do this sub thermal or subsurface energy glow effects as you can see from the shot in this tutorial we will take a look at how to track a deforming object using mocha pro's power mesh and then we're also going to use ultrazap and ultra glow from boris effect's sapphire plugin suit to create the veins and the glows respectively and then we're also going to create the smoke using action vfx energy burst collection to simulate a steam coming out of the veins so without further ado let's begin okay so here we have our plate here what we want to do is we want to put the effects on the skin of his neck and the side of his face so we need to track the skin and as you can see the skin is stretching and squashing around so we cannot use normal planner or even bone chart we need to use mocha pro's power mesh feature so we can get our veins energy effects to stretch along with the skin so let's bring in our mocha pro to the footage and click the mocha symbol okay now we are in moca what we want is to search for the best frame that will be our reference frame meaning the one frame where we want to start adding our effects since i want the effects to be around his neck and face i'm going to find a frame where we can see a lot of the skin surface so i pick frame 22 then we're gonna start drawing our shape using the x spline we want the shape to be slightly a bit bigger than the area of the skin because we want to make sure that we get all the areas covered once that's done checklist the perspective and mesh and then change it to uniform and set the mesh size to 15 and then generate mesh now we have this mesh grid covering our actor this grid would basically track every minuscule movement on his skin so that way we can get information about this skin stretching and warping and then later use that information and apply it to rfx next what we're going to do is to make sure the grid is tracked to the face so let's turn it off for a second and what we want to do is to use our spline that we originally used to generate the mesh to track the plate but first let's adjust the spline to make sure all the points are on the areas that we want to track like down here i grabbed some of the shirt color to make sure my entire neck will be tracked by my spline and then let's turn the mesh back on and hit track okay so the spline and the power mesh are sticking into the plate so now what we are going to do is we are going to create a mat of the person's face and neck from our spline this mat will later be used as the roto mask for our vfx so let's disable the power mesh for a second and start adjusting our spline so here i am adjusting the spline to only around the inside of the subject thankfully because the spline already has the general movement of the track i don't have to do a bunch of keyframes to adjust the shape great so tracking is done masking is done let's save and go back to after effects okay so we're back in after effects what we are going to do now is we are going to start adding our effects so let's duplicate our plate here with the mocha inside it and then let's go to the mocha effects of the new duplicate and then go here and click render and then select stabilize on warp now here what's happening here is mocha using our reference frame as an anchor to stabilize the part that we tracked and then we're going to use this a stabilized shot as the base where we add our vfx so then when we add rvfx we don't have to worry about the position or it's moving around because it's going to stay in one place and then after that we're going to use the same method but we're going to reverse it so we're going to reverse the stabilization back into unstabilized so then our effects will be tracked into the skin so let's start making our effects first let's become this duplicated stabilized layer and basically this precomp is where we are going to add our veins and other effects so let's go inside and change the duplicated plate to guide layer that way this layer will only serve as a reference layer inside this comp and will not be rendered out outside now let's do some tests to see what we have so far let's add a solid and fractal noise and then we're gonna go back to our main comp and here we see everything is covered by our fractal noise so let's copy the mocha track from the original plate to our fx precomp and again we're going to go to module and render and then we're going to revert back from anwarp to stabilize barb and then we're going to use the spline mat that we made earlier as a mask so let's check the applied matte and then boom and then change the blend mode to classic color dodge and then feather the matte a little bit so this is what we have so far great we are getting there now let's make the effects more properly this time let's go to the pre comp and first what i personally want to do is i want to get the mat that we have in a mask form so go to the mocha and create mask and now we have a mask on the guide layer and then we don't want the mask to animate so make sure you are in the reference layer and click on the mask path stopwatch to delete all the keyframes and then we are going to copy that mask into the fractal noise so now we have this mask here inside the pre-comp and the reason i'm doing this is because i want to have more controls on the boundaries of the fractal layers so now let's change the look of the fractal noise i'm going to change it to dynamic progressive and then keep it soft linear and then invert it now we have this weird organic tissue look increase the contrast to around 2 to 8 brightness to 5 and scale it to 40. okay awesome now what we are going to do is we are going to create the veins so let's first create a solid and then we're going to add ultrazap from boris fx sapphire plugin so ultrazap is a lightning fx generator and one of the most unique thing about it is you can control the curvature of your lightning using these controller points this will be super handy for our shot so now first what we're going to do is we are going to turn this lightning into veins or blood vessels so we want these branches to be more smooth and organic and less like lightning thankfully if we go to the safe preset for ultrazap we already have something that is close to what we want here called swamp thing so let's select this preset awesome and then we want to select our spline controllers here and let's have our lightning to fit our subject now let's change the settings we do need to glow and then change the bolt amounts to 10 and width to 2 and then on both branchiness change it to 0 and then we're going to reduce the wrinkle to 0.2 to make it a bit more smooth and then we're going to play with the curvature a little bit and then we're going to zero out all the animation parameters so it's frozen in time and not moving and then i also added some mesh warp to fit the veins better to the contour of his face and then we want the vein to be occluding the fractal noise so we're going to turn the veins to black we're gonna add in a fill effect and then change it to black basically what's gonna happen is the color dodge on the main comp will take all the dark colors and basically just erase it and making it occluding the fractal so next what i'm going to do is i want to populate the skin with more veins so i'm going to duplicate the ultrazap and make different variations such as this one i'm making the veins going to his eyes and top of his head and then duplicate another one but this one only has the small branches so we have the tiny blood vessels in our effects so if we go back to the main comp see how the veins because of its black color now works as a mat when combined with the color dodge but now the effect still looks a bit flat what i want to add is an impression of bones or skull on his head so what i want to do is to do another occlusion a run where we should see some part of his skull so let's create another black mat and create a new solid and disable it for a second and then we're going to create a shape of where we want the jawbone will be and then the ear and also the cheekbone and then let's enable the layer again and we're going to feather them out so it's not too solid and then play around with the opacity of each mask to control how much occlusion we want to have on our veins the more opaque the occlusion mat the more occluded the vein is in the main comp now another thing i want to map out the back there so it's not too solid so i'm just going to add one more mat on the back of the neck awesome now let's add some gaussian blur just to make the effects not too sharp and more blending with the background and now we are going to add some glow and we are going to use another tool from boris effect sapphire ultra glow okay so here you will be met by all these settings and a circle in the middle that controls the ultra glow's with but for this project we're not going to play around much with the circles we're just going to go to the brightness and change it to 2.8 and then we're going to change the color to purple-ish color and then change the threshold to 0.3 okay so now we have our glow this subsurface glow effects on our skin the next thing we're going to do is to animate the effects to fade in so i'm going to go back to the effects pre-comp and i'm going to animate the mass expansion of the fractal layer to half the fractal reveals itself instead of just fading in and then i'm going to add some extra movements on the effects so i go to the fractal subsetting and animate the offset this is to make it seems like there's an upward movement from the energy now for the final icing on the cake i want to add a steam coming out of these veins like some energy is leaking out of the skin from the globe so i'm going to add this energy burst effect from action vfx energy burst collections and use them as the steam so let's solo them for a second and i want to find a time where the energy burst sort of dissipates and then trim the beginning and then i want to animate the opacity to make it fade in now we want steam to come out continuously but the energy only bursts once we can get around that by essentially time them to make one burst to fade in after the other that way it would make an impression that it is continuous smoke and then we are going to position and scale the energy to fit it onto the neck now let's extend our steam a little bit more by duplicating the two layers and offset them a little bit and then we are going to use hue and saturation to basically change the color to something like purple then we're gonna track this energy onto the neck so let's have our plate and in the mocha we're gonna create nulls from the power mesh now we have all these nodes that are created from our mesh grid and then we're gonna select one of them color code it just so we can see it better and delete all the other nulls except the one that we picked and then parent our energy bursts to it and then we're gonna change the energy burst to screen and now the energy bursts are tracking into the shot and the last thing before i wrap up i noticed that my fx is still not blending well with the background so i'm gonna fix that by color correcting the plate to make it match the contrast of the effects and there we go thank you so much for watching let me know in the comments if you have any questions once again you can purchase the energy burst assets from actionvfx.com actionvfx provides high quality assets for your vfx needs our library is full of vfx assets collections such as explosions fire energy and more recently crowds and many many others we also have free assets that you can get on the website again thank you for watching don't forget to like this video and subscribe so you don't miss out the next tutorial and see you next time [Music] bye

Channel: ActionVFX

Views: 25,610

Keywords: adobe after effects, tutorial, subsurface, energy, actionvfx, subsurface tutorial, iron man extremis, iron fist, effect, borisfx, sapphire, mochapro, powermesh, ultrazap, ultraglow

Id: v01g0aDSaTo

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021