After Effects Archives - Page 3 of 7

HUD Generator Extension for After Effects + Premiere

in After Effects, Featured, Scripts and Plugins/by Chris Kelly

We’re happy to release our latest extension, the HUD Generator from ProductionCrate! Make sure to log in to your Pro Account to download this tool.

4-13-20201
Our HUD Extension has received an important update! This includes UI improvements, an option to reset where your HUD elements are located, 20 new HUD Assets, and a plethora of bug fixes that will make your experience smoother than ever! If you have already installed this extension, simply run the installer file again to overwrite the previous version (.exe on Windows, .dmg on Mac). To include the new HUD Assets, simply merge the “HUD Graphics” folder with your currently used one.

Check out this video to learn how to quickly and easily install and use the HUD tool in After Effects and Adobe Premiere.

Updates 4-13-2021

New 4K Dust Overlays

in After Effects, Featured, Premiere, Visual FX/by Chris Kelly

Our new Dust Overlays are impressively versatile. We’ve worked hard to bring you the best assets for the job. Choose from Gusts and Looping options to add dust, snow, ash or pollen to your scene! We currently have 15 for you to choose from, with 4 free for anyone to use.

Here is a quick tutorial using the Dust Overlays in Premiere Pro, but all of these techniques can be replicated easily in any major editing software (After Effects, Hitfilm, Final Cut, DaVinci)

Ground Atmosphere Effects

in After Effects, Visual FX/by Chris Kelly

We have 8 new 4K atmosphere effects available for our Pro Users!

These atmosphere effects are CG, enabling us to create atmosphere effects that would be difficult, or even impossible, in real life. The ability to have the atmosphere generate from the ground plane makes them perfect for compositing as mist, smoke or snow. See a few ways you can use these below.

How to Create Hollywood Explosion VFX – After Effects Tutorial

in After Effects, Featured/by David Blaker

Download 4K Explosion Stock Footage VFX here.

Explosion stock footage is the highlight of every artist’s asset collection. That’s why we have released our latest collection of exclusive professional 4K explosion effects for you to add to your video.

Over the 10 years that ProductionCrate has been helping visual creators, we’ve been figuring out what qualities make an explosion effect valuable for our users. We’re confident enough to say that this latest bundle blows our past explosion assets out of the water.

For those who are new here, ProductionCrate is a library of over 10,000+ assets for you to use in your creative projects. Our mission is to give artists the tools needed to realize their full potential. Pro members of the ProductionCrate community can access all of the 4K explosion VFX assets, while free users can access a wide selection of our content for free.

Adrian and Chris are here to give you the finest explosion compositing tutorial in ProductionCrate history.

We provide all of our explosion VFX in several formats.

Quicktime PNG – Lossless, includes an alpha channel
ProRes – Widely compatible, includes an alpha channel
MP4 – Includes a green screen that can be keyed in many editing software
PNG sequence – Each frame is stored as an individual image

This wide selection of options guarantees compatibility with most editing software, including After Effects, Premiere Pro, Hitfilm and many others. Simply drag and drop the explosion stock footage over the background video in your timeline.

These explosion assets have been designed to be as accessible as possible, so no matter if you are new to editing or a Hollywood professional, these are the right video effects for you. This has been achieved through careful consideration in how smoke and flames blend in with a background image. You’ll notice the power of this immediately when you test it in your projects.

Still to this day, it isn’t surprising when an explosion effect takes several hours to add to your project. You may run into issues such as clipping in the flames, inconsistent framerates, unrealistic appearances and lighting. We’ve eliminated all of these issues and more, so you can focus on making your explosion VFX as epic as possible, while also saving valuable time.

Ground illumination and shading is an essential part of creating an explosion effect. Interaction between the explosion and the ground is what makes VFX work. We’ve created a special ground blending add-on to compliment each new explosion effect.

To use them, simply overlay them over the effect. We recommend that two copies of the layer. One of them set to screen transfer mode, to act as the illumination from the fire. The second set to a multiply transfer mode to create the ambient shadow from the smoke. Adjusting the opacity of these gives you unlimited creative freedom in the look of your explosion.

You’ll be able to download these add-on effects by opening the asset preview and clicking the title on the top of the preview box, and finally clicking the download link.

We’re excited to see the action-packed videos you create with these explosion VFX assets. If you’re interested in more of our content, check out our grenade VFX.

How to make Fire Text Animations in After Effects – Typekit Download

in After Effects, Featured, Scripts and Plugins, Visual FX, Written Tutorials/by David Blaker

Download the fire font typography kit here.

Introducing your new favorite font, the Inferno Typekit! This tool is designed to help you create your own intense flaming title animations without any specialist editing knowledge required.

The characters from A-Z are free to download for all users. Pro members of the ProductionCrate community can access the full bundle of numbers, symbols and lowercase letters.

Each character is a separate video file, allowing you to combine them in any arrangement to create the fire text. This allows you to individually manage each letter, giving limitless animation potential.

The most impressive part is that these are all loopable fire video effects. So if your video is a 10-second commercial or an hour-long broadcast, this fire text can be repeated infinitely with perfect seamless transitions. All you need to do is duplicate the fire text and place it directly after the first, transforming them into one consistent animation.

Fire Text Tutorial

For this, we will be using Adobe After Effects. However, the process is incredibly simple and can easily be replicated in your own editing software, whether that’s Hitfilm, Premiere Pro or Sony Vegas. You’ll also need to download our Inferno Typekit here.

One advantage of using Adobe After Effects is that you can download and install our Typekit Script for Pro users. This tool automatically writes the correct text into your composition, however, you can easily drag and position each layer manually. You can run this script by navigating to File -> Scripts -> Run Script File -> TypeCrate.jsx.

Hit the ProductionCrate logo at the top to open your preferences. Here you can press “choose” to navigate to the folder where you have installed your fire Typekit.

You’re now free to type in the text you want to be generated, here I’ll type “Inferno” and press Generate.

It’s as easy as that!

From here we can stylise the effect. I’ll be adding some of our new ember VFX assets which are easily composited with a screen blend mode.

Another effective bundle of assets are the new mini smoke plume video effects which I will once again use a screen blend for. I’ll make a circular mask and feather it so that it appears that the flames are illuminating the smoke.

Adding plenty of glow effects before applying our final colour corrections to the contrast will complete the look of the shot. I used Crate’s Heat Radiation to create the final grading of the flames, as well as some sharpening to enhance the details in the flames.

ProductionCrate’s mission is to help you create the impossible. Join our growing community today to check out over 10,000+ exclusive VFX, sound effects, music, 3D models and tools.

If you’re interested in our other typekits, check them out here!

How to create Alien Invasion VFX – Tutorial

in After Effects, Featured, Visual FX, Written Tutorials/by David Blaker

To prove the power of ProductionCrate assets, we put them to the test by creating a large-scale city destruction VFX shot.

ProductionCrate is a library of over 10,000+ professional video effects, stock footage, sound effects and 3D models. You’ll be happy to hear that a lot of these assets are free to download, while Pro users can access the entire library, including 4K assets.

We’re constantly updating our library with new and exciting creative content, such as our most recent bundle of 4K dust and smoke accents.

These have been built in with alpha-mattes using a Quicktime PNG codec so that you simply need to drag and drop this into your project. This, with the different file formats available for you to download, means our VFX assets are compatible with After Effects, Hitfilm, Premiere Pro and more.

Another brand new asset that we used in the shot is our 3D alien spaceship model. This is provided in OBJ format, the most widely supported file type, compatible with Blender, 3ds Max, Cinema4D, Element3D and more.

GraphicsCrate provided a huge level of control for the look of the environment. While video assets are good for explosions and lasers, static graphics can give us the power to add cracks, scorch marks and rubble to our scene.

Here’s the full list of assets we used in this video:

FootageCrate

SoundsCrate

RenderCrate

Spaceship and Drone 3D Models

GraphicsCrate

You can learn exactly how we built this shot by watching our latest tutorial, which covers several valuable compositing techniques that will improve your skills. Enjoy!

If you’re interested in some fantastic new sound effects for your cinematic trailers, take a look at them here.

Crate’s Heat Radiation After Effects Plugin – Free Download

in After Effects, Featured, Scripts and Plugins/by David Blaker

Download the free Heat Radiation plugin for After Effects here.

ProductionCrate is releasing a free plugin for Adobe After Effects – Heat Radiation.

We’ve lost count of the number of times that we have added any fire-based effect to our VFX. Maintaining realistic colours is always a challenge for artists, as different fire VFX assets often have different styles that are inconsistent with each other. This is where our After Effects plugin comes in!

This tool is a powerful colouring plugin to help you composite your fire, explosions, lava, stars and anything else that glows hot.

It creates consistent colours which accurately follow the rules of black-body radiation, which defines the properties of light emitted from hot objects.

The results created from plus plugin can then overlay the background footage using a screen or add blending mode.

Here’s how it works:

Create the input layer. The brightness of the pixels will represent the temperature you believe it should be (for example, a fire input will be brighter than its surroundings).
In most cases, using a solid-composite effect to avoid the background emitting any light will create desirable results.
Apply Crate’s Heat Radiation effect! The default values should instantly provide stylish results.
From here you can further adjust the parameters until you’re happy.

We wanted to design this plugin accurately represent the real world, and so the temperature-based parameters are in Kelvin. This means that you can input measured values and be given colours that you will expect to see.

We’ve extended the limits far enough to reach the surprising phase where the light emitted from a hot object turns blue. This can be useful for plasma, stars, jet-exhausts and more.

Here’s a breakdown of the most useful parameters you will come across in this After Effects plugin:

Max Temperature

This controls the temperature that a white pixel in your input will represent. The minimum temperature will also perform the same, but for the black pixels. You should aim to use temperatures that you expect the scene to have in the real world.

Temperature Offset

This shifts the entire minimum and maximum temperature output by a specified value. It can be useful if you want to increase the overall temperature of a scene.

Gamma

Creates additional contrast and intensity in the result.

Yellow Influence

We recognise that not all black-body emitting objects are perfect, and have included this to allow you to adjust the intensity of the yellow in the output. This is especially useful in flames and explosions.

Black Falloff

The value of the black falloff will define the temperature of a pixel that is at 100% brightness. Anything between this and the Black Point will be linearly interpolated towards 0% brightness.

A useful tip for using this plugin is to apply a curves adjustment before the Heat Radiation effect. This will allow you to precisely control the intensity and contrast of the inputs for quick manipulation of the final output.

Windows Installation

To install the plugin, simply navigate to your Adobe After Effects folder (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Support Files\Plug-ins) and insert “HeatRadiation.aex”.

Mac Installation

To install the plugin to a Mac device, locate your Adobe After Effects folder (/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore/ProductionCrate) and insert “HeatRadiation.bundle”.

We hope you enjoy creating even more spectacular projects with this free After Effects plugin. If you’re interested in more content, check out all of our scripts and plugins for Adobe After Effects here.

Download Debris and Destruction VFX Assets

in After Effects, Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

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.

Download Free After Effects Glow Script – Crate’s Glow

in After Effects, Featured, Scripts and Plugins, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download the Free After Effects Glow Script here

Believe it or not, there’s a lot that goes into a good glow effect! I’m overly passionate about this particular topic, and would happily spend hours fine-tuning each little pixel of my glow to make sure it makes my VFX absolutely perfect – and ProductionCrate wants to help you do the same.

Except it won’t take you hours… Instead, just a few seconds!

We have built out a powerful glow extension for After Effects, capable of producing the most stunning optical effects for your compositing projects with a single click. We’ve tested this tool to its limits, and are insanely proud of what this can do for VFX artists like you. Additionally, we’ve made this free to download for everyone!

So why did we make something that After Effects can already do? Those who have already used After Effects built-in glow effect already know the answer – it’s pretty ugly.

That leads us to our next question; what makes Crate’s Glow any better? Our script has been carefully designed to follow the natural physical properties of light, allowing the final result to imitate the realistic gradient-based falloff that we see in the real world. This eliminates the artificial look that After Effect’s built-in glow generates and instead gives us an incredibly aesthetic result.

Each parameter has been fine-tuned to create the best result with one click. You can easily make further adjustments with user-friendly parameters. These can be changed even after the glow has been created by using the sliders in the “Glow Controls” null layer.

Threshold – Minimum brightness for an area of the image to begin to glow

Intensity – Brightness of the glow

Spread – How far out the glow reaches

Flicker Intensity – Increase this to have the intensity shift over time

Flickers Per Second – How often the flicker fluctuates in a second

Tint Strength – When increased, the glow will match the chosen color more

Tint Colour – The color used for the tint

Vibrance – If you’re losing color in your glow, you can use this to boost the saturation

Usually, the glow effect will work without any extra squabble, but I’ll quickly go through how you can take full advantage of the features available.

Here’s an example of an explosion VFX shot that needs an exciting glow effect to give the fire some further intensity.

Since we’re organised (most of the time), we have the robot-explosion VFX layer separated from the background. Using keying tools, we can isolate the orange flames in a new layer.

Selecting this layer, and clicking “Generate” on our glow script will have the glow effect only applied to these flames, adding an extraordinarily epic glow to our fire VFX.

And it’s as simple as that!

To download and install the script, open up After Effects and navigate through File -> Scripts -> Run Script File. Find a folder you wish to keep the script stored, and extract “Crate’s Glow.jsx” to the new location. Double click the .jsx file and the script window will open.

If you’re looking for even more scripts to add to your workflow, check out our incredible Hologram extension!

How to Install Scripts to After Effects (Windows and Mac)

in After Effects, Featured, Scripts and Plugins, Written Tutorials/by David Blaker

After Effects scripts are a powerful way to automate and accomplish tasks that would have otherwise taken far longer.

For example, many popular scripts automate the way that you animate, automatically adjusting keyframes in an instant to save you valuable time and get better results.

If you haven’t tried any out yet, you can browse our library of exclusive scripts and plugins. Many of them are free to download, while Pro members of the ProductionCrate community can access the entire collection, as well as over 10,000 other creative assets.

Thankfully, installing these scripts is an incredibly easy process, and works the same on both Windows and Mac. We also ensure that our tools are compatible with the most recent versions of After Effects (CC 2018, CC 2019).

Our example today will be walking through the installation of our free Hologram generator script which has just launched!

1 – Extract the script to “/Adobe After Effects CC 2019/Support Files/Scripts”

If you don’t have any .zip file tools, you can use WinRaR.

Using this software to open the .zip file that you download will allow you to then drag the files to a new location. Make sure that you extract all of the content from the zip file.

Our destination is usually found in the Program Files folder. In most cases the full directory is:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\Support Files\Scripts

But if you are using any other Adobe CC version, feel free to place it there instead.

2 – Create your After Effects composition

Most of our tools won’t work if there’s no footage for it to work on!

3 – Click File -> Scripts -> Run Script File

From here you can then navigate to the place you extracted the files to. Clicking on the “.jsx” file will then launch your chosen script.

Fixing Errors

There’ll always be the chance that something goes wrong. We’ve compiled a list of steps you can take to troubleshoot these issues

Double-Check

Take a moment to quickly look back in the zip folder, and check if all of the contents are also in the After Effects script folder. If it isn’t, simply drag it all over again!

Settings

Go through Edit -> Preferences -> General. A window will open with a bunch of checkboxes, where you can enable “Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network”.

Call for backup

If all else fails, you can ask on the forums, the comments below or contact us at Support@ProductionCrate.com, we’ll happily try our best to help out!

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