Zombie VFX Compositing Tutorial!

Download HD pre-keyed zombie VFX assets here

Continuing from a recent post showcasing our zombie effects, it’s time to put them into action with a quick tutorial!

For the readers who have just joined us, welcome! FootageCrate has a bundle of truly extraordinary stock footage of green-screened and pre-keyed HD zombie effects. This means that you won’t need any fancy make-up artists and actors for your own zombie movies, instead, you can easily composite them into your videos with a few clicks for an unbelievably realistic effect and low budget!

I’ll be showing you an example of how you can add these zombie apocalypse visual effects to your footage to make them look like they are truly part of the scene in After Effects.

If you want to follow along, I’ve taken a stock image from Pexels.com which you can download here.

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

As for our zombie VFX assets, you can find them all on our category page here. Many of these are free to download if you want to try it out with no cost at all, and Pro members can download the entire collection of pre-keyed 4K assets. Let’s get started!

The easy part is to drop your zombie VFX characters into your footage. I used a feathered mask to cut out the lower portions of their legs so that it appeared they were standing in the middle of the tall grass and fog.

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

If we take a closer look, you will notice that these zombies look rather “flat”. Perhaps as if they’re paper cutouts stuck onto an image. Luckily for us, we have the solution!

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

Recently we released the truly-incredible Light Wrap generator. You won’t believe how important this After Effects script is for creating stunningly realistic compositions. It creates a feathered halo glow around the inner edge of our foreground, giving it the appearance that the light is interacting with our zombie VFX foreground. And it’s free for all users! (Thank you, Nate!)

Pre-compose all of our zombies together, and run the Light Wrap generator script. Select the zombie composition as the foreground, and the photograph as the background. Suddenly, once you change a few of the settings in the controls, you’ll have a stunning result. I find that the radius and brightness controls play the most important part in finding the right look for your scene.

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

And without any trouble, we have an insanely realistic looking zombie in our shot! Apply some final colour corrections, and you can proudly admire the work you’ve created.

Composite zombie VFX with a Light Wrap

If you want to have a go at some more compositing, take a look at our Nuclear Explosion tutorial!

Easy Light-Wrap Script for After Effects!

Compositing can be exhausting. We composite on a daily basis, and always want to improve our workflow. Light-wrapping in After Effects isn’t too difficult, but it can be a long process. Speed things up for yourself and Download the Free Light Wrap Script

Oh, and it’s Free for everybody!

Light-wrapping is an essential technique to make your composites look more realistic. If a composited element sits in-front of a bright background then light should be ‘wrapping’ around it. This script lets you do just that with with a few clicks, and customize to your heart’s desire.

Install the script in your After Effects > Scripts folder. Launch it by opening AE and going to File > Scripts and selecting Light Wrap Script

For the Foreground Layer select the subject you are compositing onto your scene. For your background layer select the Background that is generating the light. Blur, Brightness and Tint can all be adjusted now or later. Tint will desaturate the colors of your light wrap. Blur will increase the blur and wrap amount, and Brightness will adjust the brightness input from your background. When you’re done, just hit Create

Your layers will be instantly precomposed. There will be a new Null object generated. Select that. There you will see tons of options to further customize your light-wrap effect. There are no rules here, mess with it and figure out what works best for your scene.

Check out some of these examples below. All of the Backgrounds and Footage used can be found on GraphicsCrate and FootageCrate

See all our Scripts & Plugins Here!

download this free light wrap script for after effects!

download this free light wrap script for after effects!

download this free light wrap script for after effects!

after effects free script lightwrap example

after effects free script lightwrap example

after effects free script lightwrap example

 

Zombie VFX Extras

With Halloween approaching, it’s time to make your videos extra spooky!

ProductionCrate has now made it possible to create your own zombie apocalypse movie with a near-zero budget. You don’t need hundreds of extra actors, in fact, you don’t need any at all. Instead, we have a huge collection of 4K pre-keyed (and green-screen) zombie character effects.

Download HD Zombie Effects Free

We recorded several different actors performing hundreds of different actions that you would expect to see from the typical walking-dead. Standing, stumbling, reaching, and even attacking. To help make your heroic protagonist interact with these characters, we’ve included reaction-actions, such as getting hit by a bullet. This will give your project a life-like appearance without any trouble!

Duplicate, scale and spread your zombies around across your scene to create an entire horde of them. The fantastic Adrian Jensen goes into the steps on how you can do this in this tutorial using After Effects and Trapcode Particular.

Zombie VFX Extras are available for download here.

 

HD Blood VFX Collection

Download HD blood impact VFX assets here

Halloween is approaching, which is the perfect time to think about the spooky areas of VFX, like blood! It has always been very close to our hearts when working in special effects. Producers tend to want to keep their actors alive, and so studios must find ways to recreate these gore-filled sequences using safer methods.

You’ve probably heard of the classic squib! These are miniaturised air cannons which can be remotely set off, forcing blood-coloured fluid effects into the air. This creates the illusion of a bullet impact! However, these can be expensive, timely to set up and will ruin whatever you’re wearing. This is why the industry has been shifting more towards compositing these blood effects digitally using VFX.

Blood Squib FX

This shot featured in our “Put a gun through a hand” tutorial did exactly this. We used blood explosion assets which are all available to download on FootageCrate. We even have free blood impacts as well, so there’s nothing to stop you from turning your movie into a gruesomely realistic action adventure!

Our HD pre-keyed blood explosions are easy to composite, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping the effect into your video using any compositing software. Popular ones to try are Adobe After Effects, Hitfilm, and Premiere Pro which are all accessible to learn from our countless tutorials.

After hosting this content for more than 8 years, we’re proud of our blood splatter VFX, and we hope you have great fun using these in your video.

 

Nuclear Bomb VFX Tutorial

A few days ago we covered creating a missile launch VFX shot. But now it’s time to take a look at the receiving end of the attack and build out one stunning looking explosion!

If you’re new around here, welcome! ProductionCrate is your friendly-neighbourhood source for creative assets, ranging from VFX, sound, music and motion graphics. We have thousands of professionally made effects ready for you to download today, and one of them is our much-loved nuclear bomb explosion which you can download here. We have plenty to choose from, many of them are free to download, so pick your favourite and we’ll jump into the tutorial.

From past experience where I’ve tried to composite nuclear bombs and other large explosions into my video, one of the most difficult steps is correctly creating the lighting. Usually, this is done by masking out dozens or even hundreds of different surfaces which will reflect your explosion. This can easily take up hours of your time just perfecting it, especially if you have movement involved.

So I offer my secret solution to the perfect lighting; shoot during sunset!

 

This will create the lighting you need in no time, casting a fiery glow across the sky. I’ll grab my scene from here, which looks perfect with the skyline being silhouetted by the brightness of the sun. You can use this too unless you have your own!

I’ll be using Adobe After Effects (should have used Nuke!), but the same processes can be applied to any compositing software, even Premiere Pro or Hitfilm.

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

If you downloaded the sample image, you might notice I’ve made a few changes (mostly because I didn’t want that gigantic building in the way of the explosion). Feel free to Photoshop it around a little to best fit your artistic needs. We’ll first need to quickly create a foreground mask, but thankfully we can use a luma-key or the Extract tool to only keep the dark areas of the shot, which are the buildings.

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

Download our nuclear explosion VFX asset (available for free users too), and drop it into your scene roughly where the sun is.

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

If you’re thinking that this doesn’t look natural at all, then you’re perfectly right. We need to match our smoke to the colours of the sky and what better way to do it than with our favourite tint effect. Use the colour pickers to select the horizons colours, preferably where the object you are selecting is black in reality, but obscured by the atmospheres glow. This should perfectly blend it to match the ground.

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

To bring back the flames, duplicate the layer and clear the effects. We then need to use a simple extract/luma key to remove the smoke. Set the layer’s blending mode to Screen, and our blast will already looking great!

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

And as always, bombard our flames with a bundle of wonderful glow effects!

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

The next step is optional, but I love the extra intensity it gives the brightness of the explosion. Duplicate the foreground layer of the buildings, and apply a Light Burst effect to it, centring the origin to the explosions centre. It will cast these immense volumetric shadows through the atmosphere and looks fantastic!

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

It’s up to you know to stylize the scene as much as you would like, but in the end, we should have a magnificently epic explosion!

Create a VFX Nuclear Explosion Tutorial

 

 

Backgrounds

One easy and quick way you can make your presented videos more exciting is to have a great background!

We’ve built out one of the largest libraries of HD backgrounds you can find, all ready for you to download from our motion-graphics category today, with some of them even being completely free!

Use them in your green-screened presentation videos to give it a more dynamic look. Our low-poly backgrounds are perfect for these, as they keep your video fresh without distracting your viewers.

Low Poly Background Preview

One of our low-poly backgrounds

We have plenty of themes, styles and variations to fit any look you’re going for, even backgrounds fit for holiday seasons such as Christmas, Halloween and Valentines day! 

Using these backgrounds has been massively helpful in our videos on our YouTube channel, especially for our title sequences. Here we used the “That’s All Folks” from the Toon and Anime category for our Saturday Morning Tutorial shows!

Saturday Morning Tutorials

Missile VFX Tutorial!

While most special effects created practically do look incredible, not every studio has the budget to launch an inter-continental ballistic missile. But fear not! Your perfect shot of the nuclear apocalypse kicking into action can be created harmlessly using our missile VFX assets that you can download for free!

This tutorial will work in pretty much any compositing software, whether that’s Nuke, Premiere Pro, Hitfilm or After Effects (which I will be using).

First we will somewhere to launch our missiles from. I’ve found this stock image which you can download for free here at Pexels. After you have found your perfect spot, go ahead and download some of our missile launch VFX assets, some of which are free! 

Dread it, run from it, rotoscoping still arrives. This unavoidable step won’t be too troublesome since we’re using a static image though. Yay!

Now we have the chance to throw in as many of our missile launches as we want. I’ve gone for the “all hell has broken loose” style, similar to what we saw in X-Men: Apocalypse. I’ve also masked out a few of the smoke-trails where the missile passes through the cloud, increasing the feathering to make it appear more as though the missile is inside the scene.

For some extra-special stylised touches, I also split some of the smoke plumes into two segments. One where the light hits the smoke, and the other where the landscape casts a shadow over it, giving the highlighted areas an orange tint and a screen blending mode. This isn’t necessary in all shots, but works here since we’re in the sunlight.

And it’s as simple as that! Apply your final touches, grade it a little and you have just created an awesome realistic missile launch shot using our ProductionCrate VFX assets!

Missile VFX to Download

There’s plenty more to learn and discover on our website, so why not learn about our less dramatic puddle maps? 

 

 

 

Disintegration Tutorial

Find the disintegration effects here

Adrian and Chris teach you how to recreate this amazing effect in Adobe After Effects!

Adding Magic VFX to your Film

Magic and wizardry is some of the most enjoyable forms of VFX for an artist, and are often the first thing new users are eager to try out when learning. Conjuring these effects into your videos do not require any dark magic, just a ProductionCrate account and willpower!

We have an entire catalogue of spectacular content that you can apply to your videos with ease. Lightning powers, energy beams and even Doctor Strange’s personal favorite spark portal. The overwhelming number of choices give you more power than you will ever need.

VFX Magic Cinemagraph

Our downloadable magic VFX in action!

We have already covered a plethora of ways in how you can edit these effects into your video on our YouTube channel, all of which offer a great insight into the workflow a VFX artist can expect working in the magic realm. If you want to check some of these out, take a pick from:

If you want to read more on adding these magic VFX to your video, learn about how you can become like Scarlet Witch here!

 

 

Monthly Crate Update & October 2018 Contest

What’s new with the Crates? Find out all the latests and Cratest in the Monthly Crate Update!

Birds and Bees VFX

Smoke Plume VFX

Chromatic Aberrator Script

Space Tutorial

Download FREE USS Space Crate 3D Model

FootageCrate Space Travel Assets

Enter the 10 Second VFX Contest