Download the HD/4K Debris VFX Elements here.

Destruction is one of the cornerstones of action VFX. While destroying things in real life may be fun, the movie-making industry has been shifting towards the CGI approach. We’re here to help you do exactly that.

ProductionCrate has just released a collection of professional-quality 4K debris explosion assets. These action effects are packed full of detail, ensuring you’ll be able to create the finest VFX instantly!

These destruction assets all include an alpha channel and built-in shadows, meaning that no green-screen keying is required to achieve transparency. This allows you to drag and drop the effects onto your project and have it blend in for unbeatable results.

They also all stay completely within frame. This means you can scale, position and rotate these debris VFX assets anywhere in the scene without any visible borders, an issue which is often seen from other stock footage sources.

Compositing destruction and explosion effects digitally allowed us to do things that practical effects cannot, such as being able to precisely control the final look even after we’ve shot our footage!

So how do you create and use the debris VFX? In a mini tutorial, let’s take a look at an example of how you can use these to achieve Hollywood level special effects instantly:

Our background (from Pexels.com) is an example of what scenes work best with these assets. We recommend a concrete surface as the ground, but you can easily use other surfaces such as brick, sand or dirt.

You’ll then want to pick your debris VFX assets from our effect library. Try to select ones that best match the lighting and perspective of your scene. For example, the one we are going to use will match the sunlight coming from the side in our background image.

If you know you need even more content in your scene, feel free to also explore the wide range of content we provide that will also help you composite your VFX. We have over 10,000 to choose from, ranging from fire, smoke, explosions and more… (A lot of them are also free to download!).

In your preferred editing software, such as Adobe After Effects, Hitfilm or Premiere Pro, position your downloaded content onto your background. I recommend you also flip the assets horizontally if needed to precisely match the shadows of the scene.

Incredibly, the only step left to do is to colour correct the asset! This is important as it will allow the chunks of rock in the debris asset to look like they come from the ground being obliterated.

A powerful tool is to use a curves effect. Cycle through each of the RGB channels, carefully adjusting the controls until the colours match perfectly.

Did you notice how easy that was? This should prove just how effective our high-quality debris assets will be in your VFX editing workflow.

From here, you can further make enhancements such as masking out the foreground to fully integrate the effect into your scene.

We are really excited to see what you create with these! If you’re interested in more compositing tutorials, check out our helicopter VFX assets.