New Plug-in: SABER + Tutorial! 100% Free

what's up Andrew Kramer here videocopilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're gonna be taking a look at our new After Effects plugin saber and I know I say I'm excited but I actually am excited not like those other tutorials where I just say I'm excited because that's my thing but I really am excited so let's take a look turnout is wrong video try this one all right so some pretty cool stuff happening here and you can see some energy effects and some portal effects and of course lightsaber effects now some of you know recently I had a chance to work on Star Wars The Force awakens I had an amazing time my team was responsible for the Holograms and graphics and titles but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to work on any lightsabers and it wasn't a big deal was fine at first but then I became obsessed the light the energy it's all I could think about where did he come from how does it work can it lift me from this darkness you know then I thought we should make our own plug so we did alright so you've seen what this plug-in can do let's go and take a look at how it works all right so once you download and install the plugin you can come inside of After Effects and we're going to create a new solid and we'll call this saber and we'll come over here to the effects and presets we're in a type in saber and we just drop this right onto the solid and here we have our light beam now we can move around the control points and one thing you'll notice is that has a really nice glow fall-off and if I change the intensity you can see that just really looks nice the other cool thing about this is that we built in our color vibrance technology so that it has some really nice color ization so you can see the colors really pop now we can take a look at a few settings here we've got the enable glow we've got the color intensity we've also got a nice spread and the spread and the intensity work well together to create a really wide light fall-off and then we have the glow bias this is a really important setting it helps to control the intensity of the glow the more towards the core so if we turn up the brightness here and we drop the bias you'll see that it becomes tighter and if we increase it it becomes wider so it's just a really nice way to be able to control how tight you want that glow to be so all right so we'll go and reset that all right let's go and take a look at the customize core settings so here you can choose the core type now in this case we're using a saber but we can also use masks or even text layers we have control over the start size so we could drop that down and we can even change the offset which will extend it and those same controls are available for the end size and the end offset another cool setting is the halo intensity and size this is going to control the intensity of the glow right next to the core so this is nice to be able to make it look a little bit hotter without having to change the overall brightness of the tire glow system now let's go and reset this that's the basic stuff now let's go and take a look at the fun stuff so what I'm going to do is come up here to the circle mask and I'm going to create a mask right on my lair then I'm going to come over here to the core type and set it to layer mask now I can go and hide the mask here so I can see the core a little bit better now let's come over here and let's set the size of the end down to zero and then we're going to animate the start offset so it just kind of creates a loop so here we'll just go ahead keyframe this from 100% down to 0% right alright let's go and customize it we have a huge list of presets so we can open this up and we'll pick this one Patronus and now let's go and take a look all right so now you can see we're really starting to customize it's got some nice noise nice distortion kind of looks like a hazy smoke and the cool thing is you can also go and change all of the settings still so you can really customize each and every preset but did you notice that the start and end size and also the animation didn't change just the overall look of the saver so this way you can try out the different presets without messing up your animation so we could try out to energize and that's kind of kind of a cool look and again we can totally customize it change it around and you know get completely different looks now let's take this a little bit further so let's switch this back to the Patronus that looks nice and let's set the transfer mode to screen and let's go to the mask here I'm going to double click on it I'm actually shrink it down a bit now I'm also going to duplicate my saber layer so I'm going to choose edit duplicate and it's already set to screen and what I'm going to do is go to the mask evolution and I'm just going to shift it over so I'm going to shift it over 180 degrees so now check this out so now I've got two Sabres going okay so that's pretty cool so what I'll do is I'll take the top copy and let's change this to something else let's try this arc reactor so now we've got two different Sabres interacting and we've created kind of a symphony of different effects and this is really what makes Sabre so powerful is that it's really easy to layer multiple effects together and create complex detailed animations all right so what makes this so unique is the advanced distortion noise so if we come down here to the distortion settings we can see that we have it separated between the glow and the core now this is really important because sometimes you just want to have a noisy glow and other times you want to actually take the core and make it look a little bit displaced so let's focus on the glow distortion for just a second and what I'll do actually is I'll go ahead and click default which will reset it so we can kind of see exactly what it does so we have the distortion amount just crank that up a little bit and start to see a little bit of noise next we have the distortion type so we have like a fluid looking one an energy one and then we have two modes we have distortion and we have multiplied so distortion is going to be what it's doing now actually displacing the field of light and then we also have our multiply which actually just kind of darkens it down and you can also invert it so you kind of have like a smoky look like a tendril look now next we have our wind speed so you can see it kind of moves in a certain direction so you can change this to a negative value and it will actually move down you can change the direction of the wind also the noise speed so if we set the noise speed to zero it just moves without animating we add a little bit of animation has a little bit of a smokiness to it so it's kind of cool then you have things like the noise bias which is kind of like a stylizing effect if the noise complexity which is going to add more detail so let's see here you can see that a little bit more detail versus two levels which is going to be a lot softer so let's one set this back to the Patronus and maybe what I'll do is change the color to orange and hit OK now another thing I like to do it's not necessary but I like to add an unsharp mask and this is just going to sharpen up the detail a little bit so it's just kind of a nice bit of crispness that you sometimes lose in the fractal so I think that looks pretty good so with this setting on what we can do is we could play around with the wind so let's set the wind to say - and you can see it's moving upwards now check this out there's actually motion blur for the wind so sometimes when you have a fractal it can look a little bit computer-generated but when you turn on the motion blur it can look a little bit more organic as it moves upwards alright so now let's go and take a look at the core distortion so we'll go open that up we could turn this up a bit and this is going to create a really interesting effect right around the core and all the same settings are here you have your fractal type turn the amount down and you can really start to create some nice looks now here's a really important thing I want to show you and that is the way that the Alpha Channel works with the mask now remember we added a circle mask to our layer so what I can do is so scroll down here and we see the Alpha mode now currently it's disabled but if we turn on enabled masks it'll actually show what the transparency would look like it actually crops out the outside of the mask so this can be a really cool feature because now you can kind of see what the effect looks like kind of inside of a shape and again it can be any shape we can just add additional shapes here and it's all going to animate all the masks are fully controlled simultaneously but what else can we do with this alpha mode well there's another really cool mode called mask glow and what that does is only masks the glow but leaves the core on the outside so since we've displaced our core a little bit we can actually see it extruding past the glow area and again and this really helps to create a more organic effect so to really see what's possible what you want to do is play around with the different presets and you can just see how they look how they animate check out the settings play with the settings now I will warn you that the name of the presets are worse than random in fact I think if they were randomly selected they might be more accurate and I'll try to publish a list of what all the effects are in their names now there's something else cool about the distortion when you're using the sabre instead of a mask so let's delete the masks and we'll set this back to saber and we'll scroll down and what we can do is move the saber around and notice that the distortion and the noise actually follows the saber wherever it goes I can also turn on the distortion amount and you can see that also follows it and actually goes in the direction so if I were to turn up the wind the wind will go in the direction of the saber now what if I want to turn that off well there's an option called lock noise to saber so if we turn that off now we can actually move it around freely as if we're moving it through a smoke-filled room if I could turn up the intensity and see this a bit so depending on what you're trying to do this can be a really cool way to create laser blasts or other cool effects that actually pass through space now one other setting here so let's go and switch this over to the arc reactor so kind of an electrical mode here and the way that the is looking electric is simply the distortion of the core now there's an option here called blend on top so if we turn that off it'll actually get rid of the core or you could turn it back on so it's just a way to be able to create a saber that has its base core but just has a little bit of noise on it like a particular character in a particular Star Wars movie I'm not saying who it is but I'll bet with a little bit of work and of course you could turn up the noise speed alright so those are some really useful options and again in this example you can see that this blue beam shoots down but let's say we want it to shoot into the ground well what we can do is turn up the wind speed and maybe even a little bit of motion blur now even though the effect is two-dimensional what you can do is you can duplicate it control D and rotate it just to add a little more dimension and just change the random seed of the distortion so we could just change the random seed and it looks completely different so it's always a cool trick to be able to create more dimension with these type of effects and keep in mind you can have a different speed for the core and the glow so you can create a little bit of separation between the two and just add more detail alright so here's another interesting example so I've got a mask that's animated and what I'll do is I'll come to the core settings and change the end offset to about the middle and what I can do is then take the effect and hit edit duplicate and now have an extra copy what I'll do is come down here to the render settings and change the composite to add and now I've combined both of the effects together now instead of them being the same what I'll do is change the offset back over turn the size back up and maybe move the start offset over so that there's a gap in the middle so we'll turn the start size down to kind of match it so what's cool about this is that I can change the color and the settings and both of the effects will be linked together to the same mask so and you can see here I have a couple more stacked up here that are basically doing the same thing so you could basically create a whole lot of Sabre rendering on a single mask and on a single layer so that's a little bit easier to manage a path and of course you can use expressions to link masks together and things like that so a lot of different ways to work with this effect after looking at these examples you'd think that Harry Potter was actually the thing that inspired this plugin alright let's go and take a look at a few different title examples so here's a combination of two separate layers and we can kind of see what that looks like now same thing here is I'm just animating the end offset along with the mask evolution now again it's nice because you can really try out some different looks simply by switching the presets now in this example we have some text created with element 3d and we're simply overlaying a nice edge design that's animating on with a little bit of energy so it kind of has a cool sort of backlit kind of look it also looks cool to animate the wind so it kind of looks like it's pushing away from the surface a little bit so see how that looks so it adds a really nice touch and the thing that really makes it unique is the realistic light fall-off from the glow so that's going to come from these two settings the spread and the bias and by turning the bias down you can actually create a much hotter outside edge and it looks more like it's a light source that's falling off and the spread will help you kind of spread it out you know across the entire surface so cool combination there all right now how about creating some kind of neon effect like this well what I have is some outlines into mask form it'll go ahead and take the Sabre effect drop it on to that layer and we'll switch the custom core to the layer masks perfect wait and we just need to bring the size down maybe to 1.5 and bring the intensity down I also like to bring the spread and the bias down just a bit now there is a nice preset actually called neon which does look pretty nice the thing I like to do actually with my neon effects is go down to the render settings and play around with the post color correction so you see the brightness value here now these color correction settings will actually affect the core so if we bring the brightness down it'll actually turn red or pink in this case and it'll look a little bit more like a neon light maybe we'll play around with the start end offset so this is pretty cool and just you know just a matter of playing around with the settings here now this is where you can have fun with the light setting so you might bring this in really tight and then come down here to the alpha mode and set it to enable masks and that will crop out the edges maybe we'll even turn on masks only the glow and that will keep our edges intact now here's what it looks like with another copy I'll go ahead and set this to add and turn on another copy here so that color combination looks really nice and pretty much any color combination strangely you'll just see some really just great looks just because light tends to blend together really really nicely uh let's see I have another layer here with some kind of like fiery of fact I think I just use the energy preset I don't know this is like empire steakhouse now it's great now another really fun example is this right here and this represents a really cool concept and that's because I'm actually using a text layer rather than masks so check this out my text layers right here and I can actually edit it like a live layer so I can turn it off but if I double click on it I can type in a new thing I'll turn off my stock footage there and basically with these two layers if one that has kind of my smooth edge and then one with a little bit of a fiery edge and you can go through change the font you know really really customize it quite a bit and not only that but you can also change the preset at this point and just to give you an idea on how this works basically what you do is you switch it to a text layer and you set the text layer to your editable text layer and it simply uses that just like it would any kind of a mask and then again we have the Alpha mode set to mask glow and that keeps the core on the outside so if we went into the core distortion we would see that effect on the outside that was actually kind of something I was doing and so my other examples was using the color right and turning off blend on top and turning up the distortion and animating it down to zero and that combination with the fire layer will just give it a little more of an organic kind of reveal so there you go I didn't say I was going to look good I just said it's going to be organic now speaking of organic one thing that's really important when you're doing effects like this is if you're trying to simulate fire we'll stick some actual fire footage into your comp fractal noise fire will never look as realistic as real fire but it helps sell the illusion so if we just take a couple of clips of fire stick them in their various places you can see that it really helps sell the effect and it doesn't take that much work just to make it look a little bit better now we have a stock footage pack called action essentials and it's got a lot of fire elements and things can check that out now speaking of stock footage one thing I'm tired of seeing our fake-looking Sparks like I don't know why people keep using CC particle world to create sparks but it's really just not working out so you guys find some good stock footage of spark elements there's just a huge difference when you look at real Sparks versus something that was created with you know CC particle world it just doesn't look good you know where did this idea come from let me sit here hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for the look you know alright never mind never mind doesn't matter now another cool setting to check out is the flicker control so what I'll do is let me just type something a little bit longer and if I go to the flicker settings I can turn it up and they'll so low that they'll turn up I'll turn up a lot just so you can see here in the tutorial now you notice that it flickers all together but if you turn on mask randomization it'll actually flicker them independently so now we can turn the value down here and that just gives it a really nice you know organic look now obviously it doesn't need to be that intense but just a little something to create some separation you know also just gives the fire a little bit more life here's another cool example of like a liquid nitrogen effect and it actually has a little bit of dimensionality because I made multiple copies so we could take a look at one of the copies here and just kind of a wave motion that kind of moves downward now here's the cool thing about this particular layer is that it doesn't have a core so if I hit mmm we can see the mask and that's because the expansion value has been turned down so combining that with a few other layers you can create some nice-looking results so check out this layer you can see I just drew a mask that's kind of like a smiley face because I wanted to create like a runoff of smoke just at the bottom area and that's just one example of some of the kind of tricks that you can do to sort of design the energy in the way that looks good now not to keep bringing it up but again here's another example of using a single smoke element to just give it a little bit more of an organic and natural life yet still blending in nicely with the core so just another cool example now another quick tip in order to create motion blur from masks you need to use the force motion blur effect it's not affiliated with Lucasfilm but it does work pretty well so I'll just throw it out here and it'll just give you a few more samples of motion blur and even though it's a little bit slower it definitely looks nice and works perfectly with the Sabre stack all right believe it or not but a plug-in called Sabre is actually pretty good at making lightsabers too so let's take a look at this example here so here's some footage of Sam running down with his lightsaber and what we'll do is create a solid and we'll drop the Sabre effect on there and we'll set the transfer mode to screen and hit control shift H it's good shortcut to no hides all the screen elements and we'll go ahead put the start point at the bottom end point towards the end and we'll just start animating this thing so here is the way this works what you want to do is put the Sabre core over the Sabre in the shot well turn up the size now there is a control setting for the roundness so if you want to fit that just right and we'll put this about right there now we can taper the end size a little bit and worry about this motion blur in just a sec right so that looks pretty good we'll go ahead add a keyframe for the course start and end and then you can use page up and page down to cycle through now here's the best way to do this as you move forward move the lightsaber to the forward direction of the saber so here's the forward side let's move this up until it touches next frame same thing and so forth now we can turn off the glow which will not only speed it up but make it a little easier to see we'll keep going here okay and this is kind of weird but check it out it's kind of but you can see that this motion blur is automatically calculated and it's specially designed for lightsabers so you've got to do a little bit of hand animation but it's a lot faster than having to do a crazy amount of roto now check this out see I didn't quite get it here so let me go back here and I'll extend it out here so that it makes sure to follow through and have enough of a lightsaber there we go now sometimes what happens this is just an important tip for after effects users sometimes your frame gets cached and it doesn't update based on the animated keyframes around it and it's always good policy to purge your memory from time to time if you're running into any kind of odd issues so keep forward do a couple more keyframes here you we'll take a look this so already this is looking pretty good and you know the glow looks great here's a few tips on getting to looking better first of all adding a little bit of flicker is going to be a nice touch coming down here to the post color correction saturation will help depending on the background and the compositing now here is the cool thing is the motion blur check this out so the motion blur amount is set to 1 so 0.5 would be a hundred and eighty degrees shutter so that's kind of your standard camera and that actually matches pretty well but since it's a lightsaber you know you want to have some of that extra kind of waviness just kind of makes it look cool this thing is glowing out of control here but what's nice about it is that there's a blur phase and you can actually just shift it back and forth in time so it's like a temporal thing but it makes it really easy to be able to either increase or decrease the amount of motion blur so just enough to cover the saber and then the ability to shift it forward and back along the same vector so it's very very fast and very very easy and hopefully that will save you a lot of time now I understand that there's possibly some lightsaber purists that would prefer to hand-wrote oh and if that's the case let me show you what you can do if you reset the plugin what you can do is go in there and draw your hand-made roto okay hit em go to your mask go forward and you know knock yourself out okay and what you can do then is go to the core set it to layer mask now you can see that it's hollow it's actually got hole in it but then go down to the composite settings and switch it to add and as long as your layer is white it'll actually just create a white core and now we could bring the size of the core down just so that it stays close to your roto and all the glow settings and all the nice control and the flickering and everything will all work and you have your custom control over your shape so it's win-win now there's another really cool feature and this is one of the first features that we designed and that is the ability to occlude the core if say there was a person in front of you and let's go to our Sabre layer and let's mask out this stormtrooper guy so that the lightsaber is on the other side of him so we'll take the pen tool and we'll just draw a shape here not a very good one but good enough okay so we've added our masks and I want to go ahead hit em and change the mask to subtract now let's come over here to the Alpha settings and we'll set this to enable masks alright so we've roto this out but now we have a hard edge right here and that nice halo that nice glow is getting cut off and this gets a little bit tricky so that's why you want to turn on the mask core mode what that will do is mask out only the core and actually render the glow on top of that layer so you can actually see that the results it's almost like a light wrap it's very realistic and you can you know get it glowing over the top of the edges and then of course you can still refine your mask as needed but the integration is just much more realistic and you don't have to deal with a bunch of extra layers and light rap and all that craziness that comes with this so hopefully that will save you guys a lot of time when you have multiple actors fighting in a scene and you need to be able to roto out sabers in front and behind various things I'd like to imagine that there's one guy who just finished his light saber fan film and that feature just blew his mind you know he spent the better part of two years rotoscoping out his friends and he watched that feature and he can't believe it alright well I hope this tutorials helped to show what is possible with the new plugin saber and as always be sure to combine different tutorials you know shockwave sci-fi effects there's so many different techniques that you can actually bring together and just make everything that you guys do just be that much more impressive and speaking of which if I may just take a moment a moment to reflect on Video Copilot having been around for 10 years and I was extremely busy last year on Star Wars and I didn't get a chance to formally thank everybody who has been part of this incredible community and I look back at all of the different tutorials and it's amazing to still be doing this and frankly being able to love doing it every single day I remember making each one of these tutorials you know I remember just the genuine encouragement and appreciation and I'm just truly thankful to every one of you guys I appreciate the opportunity to be able to do what I do and certainly the lightsaber tutorial was one of the tutorials that started it all so it's kind of just interesting to circle back and again I can't thank you guys enough I look forward to all the cool things that we're going to do in the future so thank you guys again I am Andrew Kramer videocopilot net and we will see you next time I wonder if this lightsaber somehow set off a chain reaction of events that so that I could one day work on a Star Wars film I don't know I do know one thing though this planet explosion tutorial didn't help anybody this is terrible I got a million people watch this I feel bad for them I'm sorry

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 3,377,374

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Id: reSXGxkyr0k

Length: 36min 52sec (2212 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/peterfrance]

Saber is amazing. My only complaint is that you can use text layers and masks, but no mattes or alpha channels.

[u/andrestorres12]

100% free? wow love it!!