Recreating Black Adam VFX for FREE | Unreal Engine 5 and HitFilm

hey everyone it's been a while since we did a visual effects tutorial and Black Adam is out now so we wanted to take another crack at creating some really cool superhero effects so how do you create Hollywood level visual effects with a three-person team in this video Tom Louisa and myself are going to take you through that process starting with pre-production be sure to stay tuned for the final shot at the end for now let's Jump Right In and get started so let's talk about how you go about recreating a visual effect shot from a movie when you're recreating anything it's really important to start by looking at the reference so the actual movie or TV show that you're trying to recreate if the movie you're recreating isn't out yet your only option is to look at trailers which is what we do a lot of the time we're constantly looking at the references to make sure that we're getting the shot as close as we possibly can to the original Source footage so in the case of Black Adam we didn't have the budget or resource to fly to Egypt or wherever it is that they're having their their tomb fight in so we knew that it was going to be green screen filming on a green screen comes with its own set of challenges but if you get it right and you think ahead you can put yourself anywhere in the world hitfilm has a lot of visual effects specifically made for green screen not just for remove moving the green itself but for making your life a lot easier when it comes to making the two plates look like they belong together I'm also paying attention to the lighting in the references so that we can match it on set what are the colors are they shining directly on the actor where are they in relation to the actor in the camera and what kind of atmosphere are they creating with these lights because the reference isn't taking place directly in the sun we're actually just going to use one softbox to light our actor and that's it luckily this also covers the green screen so we don't have to light that separately it is recommended though that your green screen is lit as evenly as possible so that you can get the best key in hitfilm this stance is actually really good on my back right okay if you've placed the softbox behind your actor and you find that their face is still a little bit too dark you can use a reflector which we did this will bounce the light onto their face but won't be as Intense or harsh as an actual light if you can avoid it don't try to add light in post use a real light onset so that you get the interaction with your actors this is an aperture MC LED light and they're very useful because you can change the colors intensity all through an app on your phone you can also then trigger flickering effects like we did on set alternatively you can also just ask a friend to wave their hands in front of a light to get that chaotic flickering motion for this shots specifically we decided to go handheld so I gave Tom the camera and said I'm the one doing the effects if anyone's gonna make this harder it's gonna be me yeah it'll be all right I'll be fine I could have shot on a tripod and added camera Shake in post but then I wouldn't get the depths and Parallax that you get when the camera actually moves through space would you be able to show it like this like can I just literally just go like this with this handheld movement adding some tracking markers onto your green screen or even just some black tape something with contrast is a very good way to keep track of how the background should be moving once you get into hitfilm once we're done on set we're ready to take all of our footage into post we of course are going to be using hitfilm our free video editor and compositor the first thing I'm going to do is select the shots that I actually want to use in the short because you don't want to have to do more work than you have to as I mentioned earlier hitfilm has several effects for keying out the green screen but for this one I'm going to use the chroma key effect because it's the most powerful and most customizable effect once I have my shot selected it's time to prep the key because you don't want to put the green screen effect directly on the footage itself you want to create what's called a matte which is a black and white representation of what should be keyed out and what shouldn't and we don't want all of the effects that we use to prep the key to affect the original footage after turning your footage into its own composite shot duplicate the clip and make that into its own comp this is going to act as the keymap in here we're going to do everything we can to get the cleanest key possible this involves increasing the saturation so raising the green level to make it pop adding contrast to make lines and edges more visible and denoising or sharpening depending on the footage with our footage prepped we can now actually begin keying out our subject again I used the chroma key effect because in terms of hitfilm's keen effects it's the most powerful one alternatively you can use either the color difference key or the Hue and RGB key effect all of these effects work in a very similar way basically you choose the color that you want to remove then dial in the settings to get the perfect key there's usually a gain or strength slider to determine how much of the green gets removed there's also usually a foreground slider to bring back your subject should they get taken out accidentally while I'm adjusting these sliders I'll also view the matte which is a black sometimes gray and white representation of what is being keyed out during this process I'm trying to get my subject mostly white because this means they won't be transparent once I do the comp but with some areas like hair or edges you want a little bit of gray in there because they are semi-transparent and then the areas surrounding the subject or the background should be black black make sure that once you're done adjusting the mat you switch the view back to the result because otherwise this will carry through into the comp and it helps you see what you're doing after that I'll use the freehand mask tool to draw a mask around my subject and remove any crew or equipment that were in the shot with your subject isolated jump back into your main composite shot and hide this layer from View I'll add the set matte effect onto my original footage and set the source layer to the key mat if you're not seeing the right result enable inverted in the settings now we've got our subject keyed out and isolated and it's time to add in the background if you're like me and you shot this handheld the first thing you need to do is track the footage so that the background matches the movement of the camera with this shot it was relatively easy so we were able to get away with a 2d Point track but depending on how much your camera moves you might have to go into mocha hit film or Foundry camera tracker to get a 3D track I think you can piece that together so that we can spend more time on the visual effects check out the card on screen for more tutorials on tracking I created the background in Unreal Engine 5. I was able to adjust the lighting and add atmospheric effects incredibly quickly all in real time I then created a cine camera actor and matched the settings to the real world camera we used on set this involved adjusting the focal length which is how zoomed in the lens is the position of the camera in the environment and the aperture to adjust how blurry the background appears to represent the lightning that we had on set I created a light and then a material that randomly flickered throughout the scene I then exported this as a PNG sequence using the movie render queue and brought it into hitfilm for compositing so I'll go ahead and bring it into the same composite shot as my footage we'll place it at the bottom of the layer Stacks that it appears behind our actor now this compositing stage or matching the two plates together depends on the footage itself but a couple of effects that I used to get these two looking in the same space are curves color balance as well as Hue saturation and lightness I'll also add a lens blur effect onto the background to account for the aperture of the camera if the lens is more zoomed in or the aperture on the camera was lowered the background should be blurrier oh my gosh why is it getting tangled okay are you good no let's move on to the fun stuff which is compositing the lightning itself the first step would be to track some of the motion so that the lightning appears stuck onto my hand we've already discussed some tracking tutorials and where to find them so at this point you should have an idea of how that works but we're just going to be using 2D motion tracking and tracking the watch that I'm wearing on my hand can you elaborate why you're tracking the watch because I wasn't smart enough to draw a tracking markets I'll track the motion and attach it to a point layer and use that for the motion of the lightning for the lightning itself I'll create a new plane layer and just add the lightning and electricity effect onto it let's add on the demolt effect this will take out the black and leave just the lightning I'll make the layer 3D and adjust the Anchor Point to be on the far left side of the layer next I'll attach the plane layer to the motion tracked point adjust the rotation values so that it's pointing towards the camera then adjust the position to be in the center of my palm then we're going to add the invert Alpha effect this will create a cutout of the lightning now a matte cleaner effect and I'll adjust the settings to increase the thickness of the lightning another invert Alpha effect to put it back to normal and if necessary a fill color effect to make it white I'll repeat some of these steps for each of the lightning bolts coming off my fingertips but I'll keep them thin so that they don't overwhelm the frame you'll need to offset the position so that they align with each fingertip and change the seed value so that they're all unique foreign once you have these Lightnings looking the way you want I'll put them all into their own composite shot this allows me to apply effects to all the lightning strands at the same time to get rid of the black right click the layer and change the blending mode to screen now we have a number of glow effects inside of hitfilm but for the best results I'm going to use super glow now super glow is going to get me the most realistic result this is because it has loads of customization options it has a much more realistic falloff to replicate how light works as well as settings for hot spots chromatic aberration grain things that can really add some Flair onto your lights to summarize super glow has a much more realistic and higher quality result if you find that your lightning is looking a bit uniform or too white all around there are a couple things you can do to add in some variation I ended up adding a fractal noise effect on each of the lightning bolts on my fingers to make them look a bit more broken up and not as powerful I also used an energy Distortion and rough edges effect on the main bolt to make it look a bit more broken up then I'll add on a couple of regular glow effects to increase the radius of the light and soften it up a bit to give this lightning some color I'll use the color Vibrance effect and adjust some of the settings until it looks good to me once you have the lightning in a good spot you can start adding in extra details to bring it all together and hide some of those imperfections the first thing is a custom light flares effect in the middle of my palm here this will add different shapes and colors of light that'll make it look a lot more interesting you can of course adjust the size intensity and color to fit your scene I found that the heat Distortion effect was also useful for hiding some of those edges it also adds a more realistic touch to this shot if you were standing next to a bolt of lightning you would experience some visual distortions for the lightning flashing behind me this is a very similar process but I've parented the layers to the background behind me rather than my hand now once you have the lightning in place the final step is to throw stuff on top and bring it all together any additional lighting effects like anamorphic lens flares or lens dirt will help tie the scene together once I've done that I'll add a grade layer on top and do the final color grade this is where I bring everything together and unify the look of the entire piece this involves using those color effects we mentioned earlier so curves color balance Hue saturation and lightness to add contrast to make the highlights pop and give it that final cinematic look we've kept you waiting long enough and we've shown you the process from start to finish so let's take a look at the final result foreign hope you guys enjoyed this look at how we create cinematic visual effects and that you learn something new be sure to subscribe for more filmmaking and visual effects tutorials and we'll see you next time

Channel: FXhome

Views: 45,917

Keywords: hitfilm express, hitfilm express tutorial, how to, hitfilm, Fxhome, artlist, filmmaking, tutorial, adobe, film school, shazam, zachary levi, shazam movie, film, effect, shazam effect, transformation, shazam transformation, visual effects, lightning, teleport, behind the scenes, thor, love and thunder, ragnarok, light, electric, electricity, thor effects, hammer, lightning vfx, ae, after effects, tut, Black Adam, The Rock, review, movie, hollywood at home, scene recreation, unreal engine, ue5

Id: XvFE3UaVu2I

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022