Solar Atmosphere Tutorial

Hank what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to take a look at recreating this solar star effect inside of After Effects in fact we're going to only be using the built in tools of After Effects so no third-party plugins however I will be talking about our heat distortion plugin as an option or alternative but not required and what the heck it's our plugin so you know we're going to plug it all right let's go and take a look at the final shot alright so pretty cool you can see a lot of nice detail and let's be honest if you're anything like me this is probably the most Sun you've got in a long time and you know that's okay we're learning stuff those guys might be at the beach having a good time getting some Sun hanging out but we're learning stuff we get the knowledge what do they get skin cancer alright so let's go and create a new composition my vitamin D deficient followers and let's create it let's see and let's set it to 1280 by 640 so that'll be a two-to-one aspect ratio and we'll make it 24 frames per second and ten seconds long looks good we'll hit okay alright so here are the elements we need to create the first thing is the star surface and this is what we're going to be creating and it's got a lot of detail and we're also going to be creating this torch element which is sort of like an animated 2d effect but I'll be showing you how it all comes together right now let's go and create a new solid and it was call this background and we want it to be black so that looks good and then we're going to create another solid so I'll do layer new solid and this time I want to make it much larger so we're going to do something like 4096 by 2048 so this is a 4k comp I'm gonna call this star map and you can see it's 2-1 and we'll hit okay so if I pull out here you can see this layer is actually quite large and what I want to do is pre compose it into a separate comp so choose err pre-compose might be right off the screen and we're going to leave all of the attributes in the Sun so just call this star map and hit okay so now I'm going to go inside of that comp so we'll double click and now I want to add a fractal noise so we'll come over here type in fractal and we'll take the fractal noise effect drop it on there and this is kind of where we can start experimenting now in the final project it's made up of three separate fractal noise elements so we have this one it's kind of twirly got another one kind of looks like energy and then we have another one that's just some very small detail now it doesn't have to be exactly like this but let's go and play around with some of the settings so let's change this to dynamic and let's go down to the sub settings and let's see if we can play with the rotation here so as we rotate this we're going to start getting a little twisting effect so let's bring the brightness down and twist that a little bit more and you can kind of see how this is looking so it's kind of similar to our other project and let's go in just play with the rotation a little bit more something like that I think that looks pretty good maybe a little bit brighter looks good and then we're going to duplicate the layer so ctrl D and for this one we're gonna go to the transform and scale up the fractal noise so scale it up here add more detail so complexity turn that up like 15 and then I'll just add a lot more that fine detail scale it up even more and let's go to the sub settings again and just play with some of these settings till we want this to really look like energy as we saw from that that other examples as we turn up the sub scaling here you can see it creates a much more interesting pattern so then we'll take it and we'll screen it back on top so we'll hit f4 change the transfer mode to screen and believe me fractal noise just one of those effects you just play with there's no really right way to do it you just get in there play around with the settings and you'll never ever be able to recreate what you created before like I'm amazed that this is even close so definitely have some fun let's do a little more contrast on this bring the detail down let's see brightness down cool alright so let's create one more this is going to be our high frequency noise and we'll just you know just duplicate this one more time and we'll solo it so we can check it out let's bring the scale down very low so what we want to do is turn the contrast up in the brightness down so we want to create a lot of small very bright detail so maybe we'll set this to clip and let's see okay so this is looking pretty good maybe just scale it up a bit and turn it off so this is our final texture that we're going to be using and maybe we'll even add a little bit more contrast so we can bring the detail out on this it looks cool now some of you may remember that we did some work on the movie star trek into darkness and we actually used some similar techniques and you can actually take a look at this online but we use some various fractal noise effects that were combined to create some of this effect and although we used element 3d some of the techniques are actually quite similar but anyway check that out obviously we encourage people to use element 3d but there's still a lot you can do inside of After Effects so that's why we're showing you that here today so here is the basic star map so let's gonna close that and here we have the layer for that star map so coming back to where we were now there's an effect called CC sphere and does a really cool effect and so now we have a nice sphere so I'm going to go into the shading and let's set the diffuse all these values down to zero and we're gonna set the ambient up to 100 and that way there's no shading it's just full bright and if we go up to the rotation here you can actually see we've got a nice rotating planet now we do have some polar issues which I could get into solving but since we're only going to be using half of this element I think it would just be better to just to move on and act like we didn't even see it now actually I do want to show you one cool trick and that is to get this to behave somewhat three dimensionally so the one nice thing about element 3d is that you actually get a real 3d sphere that reacts to lighting and the camera and all that kind of stuff now Cece sphere can do that with a little bit of work so here's what we're going to be doing first of all let's make this layer three okay now then I'm going to create a camera and we'll do thirty five-millimeter hit okay so if I move around you can kind of see that it's a 3d layer not quite 3d the way that we want alright so what we want to do is get this to rotate as the camera moves around so there's some expressions are going to help us do that now if you don't like expressions that's okay you can just copy and paste it that's exactly what I'm going to do so I'm going to hold down alt click on the stopwatch and then I can type it in down here so we'll take all this delete it and ctrl V to paste it and then we'll make some more room here now we can copy the other two the only variation is it goes 0 1 2 so what I'll do is I'll alt click paste and change that 0 to a 1 click on the z-rotation paste change that 0 to a 2 basically what this expression is saying is to rotate towards the active camera alright so my layer is a 3d layer I've got a camera now watch what happens when I take the orbit tool and fly around here uh-oh something weird happens not quite what we want so there's one more step and that is to right-click on the layer and choose transform Auto Orient and change it to orient towards camera so now for the most part we'll be able to rotate around this like a 3d object now it's not perfect there are some expressions that I get you there but this is the easiest way to achieve what we need to achieve now to optimize our quality what I want to do is scale the layer down a bit and turn up the radius of the sphere so we'll just scale this up and that way when we get close to it we're going to keep as much of that detail as possible so what I'll do move it about right here and to get rid of this polar cap let's just rotate it forward and there we go alright so now we've got our base star alright so now we want to create the glow around our what we're going to do is create a new white solid so we're going to make it square so we'll do like a thousand twenty-four by a thousand twenty four and we'll make it white and this will be our below and we'll hit OK and what I'm going to do is double click on the ellipse tool and that's going to add a perfect circle to our layer so you can kind of see if we scale this down perfect circle so what I'll do is I'll make it a 3d layer turn that switch on and then I'm going to put it below our star layer and then if I right click on it and choose transform Auto Orient set it to orient towards camera then all we have to do is scale it down hit s scale it down scale it down until it perfectly aligns perfectly I said okay alright so for this particular glow what we'll do is add a blur effect and crank it up a bit we can duplicate the layer add another glow crank that up a bit and maybe you just lower the opacity of these at T you know might play around with this a little bit later but the reason we're doing it this way rather than adding a glow effect is that it will stay on our layer and stay the right size no matter where the camera is the other thing we need to do is create an inner glow so if we take the glow layer duplicate it let's put it above and then delete the fast glow then we'll hit em and what I like to do here is duplicate the mask so we'll do edit duplicate set the second copy to subtract then go down to the mask settings for the mask feather and crank that up so you can kind of see adding a little bit of glow around the edge now let's go to full res just to make sure we get this edge perfect so let's see go to mask one and maybe just change the expansion a bit open it up that'll work and then we'll go back to half res now in order to make this a little bit more realistic we'll hit ctrl D and then let's go to that feathering on the mask and just crank it down a little bit so just kind of a really tight halo around the star there so this is the basic setup for our glow and I think that looks pretty good all right so now we need to create one more comp that represents our torch elements all right let's go and create another salt so I'll do layer new solid call this torch and we'll set it to 1280 by 640 and hit OK and we're actually going to pre-compose this layer as well so layer pre-compose and we'll call this torch leave all the attributes so if we double click and come over here to our blank layer and we're going to add another fractal noise so take that drop it on here and let's play with it so let's do dynamic progressive and go to these sub settings play with the rotation here until it kind of looks more like energy like that and let's tweak the settings let's go full so the influence is going to be kind of way to add some various detail those two settings are cool and let's turn up the complexity as well then we'll scale up the transform so transform scale bring the brightness down and that looks pretty good so one of the things that we haven't done yet is add animation to our fractal noise and there's a couple different ways to do that one of the ways to do that is to animate the evolution so that's just this value here it kind of creates some cool movement and the quickest way to do that is to alt click and type in something like time times I don't know 150 and what that will do is use the current time multiplied times 150 and basically just create a constant continuous animation that's a really good way to do it I might even crank that out maybe even like 200 now the other thing we want to do is because the fire is burning away from the Sun we want to animate this fractal to move up so if we go to the transform that's actually a way to do that using this offset so check this out as I animate this it kind of moves it up now we could actually just keyframe this so if we click on the stopwatch move forward to the end we can just animate this up and that might be fine way to do it there are some expressions you can use as well I think this looks pretty good and the other thing I did is add a turbulent displace and I want to shout out Ryan Connolly for making that a household name we appreciate that so turbulent displace we drop that on to our layer and again we're going to animate the evolution so that it moves around so we'll alt click time times 100 and so now we've got a lot of animation so let's just look at this we'll set a range at 0 you use the time controls up here just to playback now if we want to slow this down to things we can do 1 we can lower the evolution settings so we could do 175 we could also go to that keyframe so if you hit you it'll show the keyframes and we could take this value and we can lower it and that way it doesn't move as fast but the nice thing is we'll actually be able to adjust that as we go all right so this is looking pretty good maybe a little more contrast and maybe a little secret weapon I like to use we do affect sharpen unsharp mask and it's actually pretty cool going here cranked up the amount of sharpness and it helps to really and maybe the threshold just a slight bit and it just kind of helps to give it more of a fiery look you know it's kind of subtle ok so let's go back to our Sun comp and now we have our torch layer so the one thing we need to do is add a circle mask or an ellipse mask to this so we just add that hit F feather it and maybe hit mm and bring the feathering in basically we want to create an edge list element just like that and we might even take the bottom and strain it out a bit like that so cool and then we'll hit f4 change it to screen so that it blends over the background so you can kind of see that and then we might get a 3d layer switch between that too many times and so right now it's at the exact position as our Sun so we'll hit s scale it down a bit and maybe we'll put it below all of our elements and one of the things actually is because it's not set to face the camera it may render on top so what we can do is we can separate that by doing new adjustment layer and what this will do so if we keep this as a 2d layer so we don't turn that on and if we put it between those layers it'll actually break up the order so we'll just call this divider and that way we're just getting the look we want so now if we move the torch element up and start seeing how that's going to look okay so the next thing I want to do is take these glow elements actually and change them from normal to screen so let's select them and change it to the screen and then way they'll blend with our background a little bit nicer now one thing you might notice is that I'm working in 32 bits per channel and that's basically the color range now you don't have to work in 32 bits but there's some specific things I want to show you that we can take advantage of now because we're working in 32 bits there's one thing we have to do and that is go to the fractal noise layers and make sure our overflow is set to clip and that won't change much but it'll just make it so that our values don't create negative values so let's go to the starmap and I think we did that already so let's set it's a clip and set it to clip so now if we come back to our design let's go and work on the colorization so we'll create a new adjustment layer and we're going to add a curves adjustment so here's what we'll do I'll go to the red channel crank this up a bit go to the blue Channel bring this down that's looking good and then go to the green Channel and just kind of create a little contrast so so this is looking good we can actually go to the star map or our star layer and maybe darken it so let's do curves adjustment bring it down the darkness and the other thing I want to do is make our inner glow a little bit more intense so let's take one of these layers and maybe ctrl D and hit F and let's bring that feather value up more so I really want this to feel very three-dimensional so I think that looks pretty good now the other thing we need to do is add some animation to the fractal noise on our star as well so if we jump over to the star map or we can just double click on the star map we can add just a little bit of animation so if we go to each one of these fractal noises and we have the evolution lets alt click on it type time times 90 I'll give it a little bit of movement and then on the next one we'll do maybe something just slightly different time times 140 and then the final one again something slightly different so I'll click time star 175 and the different speed will hopefully give this a little bit more of an organic look so let's let's see here all right so this is looking pretty good now I think our fire element could use a little bit of work but we can definitely kind of see where this is going the other thing I want to do is make our glow a little bit more prominent that's in the background so what I can do is take this tighter glow and duplicate it so ctrl D and maybe lower the blur amount so that just looks a little bit more gradual you can kind of see how that looks now you don't have to use 32 bits per channel and to switch you can just alt click and cycle through 8 16 and 32-bit so probably not going to be much of a difference right now between 32-bit and 16-bit but if you are using 32 bits per channel I like to set the glows or any of our transfer modes instead of using screen I like to use ad now one thing you'll notice is that it looks a little bit more blown out and that's just because the transfer mode but what we can do is we can do a really cool thing called highlight compression so if we come over here we could take this highlight compression utility and put it before our curves adjustment and what that will do is compress the highlight values so that they don't blow out as much and that way we can kind of get that nice look without having to work on you know recomposing all these elements all right so I think that'll be good for now so let's take our 1 torch element let's change it to green so we can see the different copies now I'm going to hit F and bring that feathering down and we just want to make sure that we don't cut the edge of this off and the other thing I'm noticing is we don't want to be too contrasted so let's bring the contrast to about there all right so now here's the fun part what we need to do is start duplicating copies of this torch element so ctrl D and we'll move a copy over here rotate it maybe scale it down and offset the time so if we say go to exactly 2 seconds let's offset the time so that the tenderly fire effect looks a bit different and we can also scale it differently so we just want to randomly mix it up so duplicate another layer stick one over here you can even push some of these kind of further in z space to kind of mix it up a bit and then we can duplicate it again and scale it down and put it really close to the edge here and we can even say stretch it out just a bit and for this we want to make sure that we offset the time as well so let's offset the time stretch it out a bit and we can also add a curves adjustment to these smaller copies and this will just give it an opportunity to create you know just a little bit more contrast so that they pop out a little bit more see something like that it's always about having multiple levels of detail and even to the point of you know duplicating the layers flipping it over scaling it down and just filling in all these sort of gaps ok so this is looking pretty good let's do a couple more copies here and scale this one up a bit offset the time I've got to make sure to randomize the time here it's large one duplicate that push it back in z space even scale it up some more offset the time and we can even lower the opacity of some of these elements too so you really just want to mix it up so you can really see that we're just layering these in to get them to look right and so now if we say move the camera around just a bit we can start to see what this is going to look like so let's do a simple animation of the camera so hit P and shift and a bring up the point of interest set a keyframe slide those over and then maybe you know three seconds in let's just push the camera in so right click you can use these tools here and maybe just drag it forward you know we want that foreground planet to feel like it's parallaxing a bit like we can actually see there is volume and let's see how that looks all right so this is looking really good let's take that Sun and let me show you a few kind of finishing effects let's put it into a new comp and we'll rename this Sun output and this is we're going to do just a couple of final effects now if we want to add a little bit of kind of heat distortion we could use a basic effect called turbulent displace and if we're careful we could bring the size let's see really small and animate just a little bit of amount and then just kind of animate the evolution here so let's just take this move forward three seconds and just kind of animate the evolution so that's a pretty good way to just add a little bit of that kind of heatwave now there are some other more complicated ways to create heat distortion and because of that we actually created an entire heat distortion plugin so it's only 25 bucks but it really adds a very nice heat distortion effect so let me show you that and it's the first time it's available by itself so if we come over here and type in heat distortion drop that on here what it does is it not only adds displacement and and noise so you can kind of see here how this looks it also adds these kind of like heat haze effect and I think it's really nice especially for times when you want to add a little bit of an organic punch so you can really kind of see this kind of organic feel to it there's some different types of noise so like incendiary which creates you know a more fiery type of noise now the basic way it works is that you have the distortion amount and that's the actual displacement and then you have the heat amount which controls the blur or the haze effect and then there's one other control the heat bias that blends between those two values and these three values alone will really make a big difference and then you have the noise scale so noise scale will help you focus you know how large you want it to be and then there's some cool things like wind and even some different noise patterns depending on the look you're going for so a pretty cool and pretty powerful some you know advanced options alright so this is our heat distortion plugin now the other thing that we you're probably want to do is fade this effect in so you can really see that details I think that's part of what makes this effect cool and the way to do it is to go to the color correction and add a exposure effect and we want to put the exposure effect before all of the effects and so what this will allow us to do so exposure and gamma correction so hit you bring these two keyframes over and bring the exposure down bring the gamma down and just keep lowering this until it's fading out and let's bring that exposure down really low and maybe spread this out alright so now what this is going to do is fade this end nicely so we can really start to see that halo as the entire effect fades in so I think that's part of what makes this effect fun is that really subtle fade in so let's right click on these keyframes and set it to easy ease maybe even move them over a bit and then just make sure that any of your offset layers are long enough for the effect fade on all the way alright so this is looking pretty cool so if you're doing like a title or maybe like a superhero effect maybe you've got a superhero who I don't know somehow gets his power from the Sun and has like super strength and you know laser vision uh you know this effect is perfect alright well anyways I hope you guys liked the tutorial if you like the sound design that was on the main video that was actually created with our new product motion pulse which coming out in a couple of weeks so keep an eye on that it's basically sound effects for motion design here's a little bit of idea what that looks like so basically it's like sound design tools specifically for motion graphics and you know bringing that kind of stuff to life so please check that out always helps to support the website and all the tutorials anyway my name is Andrew Kramer thank you for watching follow us on Twitter check out the blog a lot of cool things happening and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 605,368

Keywords: video copilot, Andrew kramer, Adobe After Effects (Software)

Id: Ff0rdzVROeA

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 23 2014