After Effects Archives - Page 5 of 7

How To Make Bouncy Text in After Effects!

in After Effects, Featured, Motion Graphics, Written Tutorials/by Chris Kelly

Ever wanted to know how to make bouncy text in After Effects, per-Character, as quickly as possible? It’s really easy! The Text Animator in After Effects is actually quite easy to customize, with tons of hidden features. This is a great introduction if it is your first time using it.

First off, type in your text you want to bounce with the Text Tool (Ctrl + T)

Toggle down the arrow to the left of your text (Box 1 Below) so you can see the Animate button.

Toggle the Animate Button (Box 2 Below)

Select the Position Parameter from the Drop Down (see left)

Note all the other different parameters you can animate here!Opacity, scale, skew, rotation can all be animated independently or all together. For us, we will just use the Position parameter for this tutorial.

After selecting ‘Position’ you will see the Animation Controls (see below image). There you will see ‘Add’ with an arrow similar to the ‘Animate’ arrow. Click that. ‘Property’ and ‘Selector’ will appear, scroll over and click selector and choose ‘Wiggly’. If you are familiar with the Wiggle Expression this is a similar tool specifically for Text Animation.

For now, just select Wiggly, let’s get that text bouncing.

This is another great place to explore around if this is your first time trying the Animator tool for text! Notice the Expression option? There is a lot of powerful uses there, we will return to it in another tutorial.

Notice the Wiggly Selector (1 Box Below) You will see the familiar Position parameter and stopwatch. Next to that you will see the X and Y coordinates. We want this text to bounce up and down on the Y Axis. Let’s Increase that number to something low. 18 Works for our purposes.

If you hit the spacebar and preview you will notice that your text is already bouncing! If you want to customize further, that’s easy. Notice the Range Selector (Box 2, see right image) You can control the End or Start of the bounce on your text.

Use the stopwatch to create keyframes. You can have your text bounce Left to Right or Right to Left easily.

Drop down your Wiggly Selector (see below) for even more parameters you can customize. Change the speed of your bounce by increasing or decreasing your Wiggles/Second. Change your correlation if you want less, more or all characters to bounce together or completely independently. There are many settings here, the best way to learn is to do, find the right animation for your project!

Kick down a door with VFX!

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

Whether you’re making a dramatic entrance, or you just don’t like doors, kicking down doors with VFX can be an awesome addition to your movie.

We featured a shot in our Captain Marvel VFX tutorial that included just this, and now we’re showing you how we did it!

You can apply these steps to almost any software, so whether you have Blender, 3Ds Max, Maya or Cinema4D, you’ll be able to follow along. Likewise, most compositing software (After Effects, Premiere Pro) will be powerful enough for you to use these techniques.

Watch our quick tutorial on how you can create your own door-kick VFX!

Want to learn even more compositing tricks? Check out our UFO invasion tutorial!

Spaceship UFO VFX – Tutorial

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

Download HD UFO VFX Assets Here

Whether they’re friendly or not (usually the latter), no Sci-Fi movie is complete without alien spaceships flying over a city. They’re some of the coolest VFX shots out there.

We’re super happy to be introducing these new HD UFO effects, all available for you to download! We even have a free option, so this tutorial is for all of you.

Inspired by Independence day, District 9 and Arrival, we want to show you how you can create your own blockbuster CGI alien spaceship. So let’s get started with the tutorial!

You can use almost any compositing software for this tutorial, whether that’s Nuke, Hitfilm, or Premiere Pro. I’ll be using After Effects!

We’ll first need the city that our outer-worldly visitors will be hanging out over. I’ve gone for the popular choice, New York City! You can download the same image here from Pexels.

You can apply the same VFX techniques to a video if you would rather use that! If you haven’t yet downloaded the UFO assets, download the effects here.

We can drop our first spaceship into our shot! You’ll find that it’s already looking incredibly realistic without any work needed to be done. FootageCrate elements are all designed to make your workflow as easy as possible!

The first adjustment we want to make is ensuring that the lighting is in the correct direction. You’ll see that the sunlight is coming from the left side of the screen, so if the UFO asset doesn’t match, simply flip it horizontally. This makes the scene seem consistent.

The next small adjustment we can perform is adding a tint effect. Make both colors match the sky, so that the UFO appears to be distant in the sky. Typically, you’ll increase the tint if the spaceship is larger or further away to give a sense of scale.

Feel free to go crazy and add even more of our spaceship assets! Once again you can change the tint levels so that the closer spaceships have less of it applied (which you can see in the top right asset).

If you have buildings that are supposed to obstruct the view of some of these VFX assets like I have here, you can either rotoscope the foreground, or use a simple color key with the sky as the target! We can then use this duplicated layer above our UFO effects to put the buildings in front.

And it’s as easy as that! In no time we have our VFX UFO invasion underway. Add any final corrections you would like to your scene. I’ve even used our Auto-Cinemabar plugin to quickly create the cinema aspect ratios in a single click!

We’ll love to see what you create with these UFO VFX assets! If you’re tempted to create your own UFO animations, Pro Users can download our model here.

If you’re interested in more compositing tutorials, check out our Helicopter tutorial.

Super Slow Motion Tutorial

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

We have always loved the super-slow motion scenes of Quicksilver in the X-Men films. A lot of creators have attempted to create their own version of the effect, we thought it was past due for us to try the same. Check out our results and the tutorial below!

We used a variety of practical effects, like moving hand-held lights on the subject (2:58) and an office chair to make it appear as though he was actually running on the walls (5:07) but the VFX are where things really came together!

The debris effects were done in Element3D inside of After Effects. We cloned many of these and randomized the rotation to really add in the destructive feel.

Download the debris effects here

The explosion effect used some of our awesome fireball effects

If you want to see how we built out the fireball in more detail Pro Users can download that Project File Here

Overall we thought it came out great! What do you think?

Want to learn more? Check out this great tutorial for compositing Helicopters

How to add realistic camera shake in After Effects – Crate’s Camera Shake

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

Download Crate’s Camera Shake script here (Available for Pro Members)

There’s something unnatural about the well-known wiggle expression. It’s fair to say that this sort of shake is too perfect.

If you watch over a hand-held video recording, you’ll be quick to notice the immense differences between handheld footage and the go-to wiggle expression.

While the wiggle expression does create a shake, it’s mathematical, where it smoothly interpolates randomly generated keyframes between intervals of time. In the real world, camera shake has a huge range of factors that can influence it: footsteps, wind, and weight of the camera are just a few!

This is why we have created our After Effects script, Crate’s Camera Shake!

The toolkit can create a fully-realistic camera shake with only the click of a button.

It’s fast, fully customisable, and is packed with features. So how does it work?

We’ve tracked and analyzed several different pieces of footage, all recorded in different scenarios. Earthquakes, running, handheld and more are all part of the bundle to choose from. Once you browse the built-in library of shake presets, you can then apply it directly to your footage. It’s that simple!

If you’re seeking more control, we’ve also included a variety of customisable options to perfect your shake.

Amplitude – The strength of the shake.

Frequency – The speed of the shake.

Skip Keys – Reduce the density of keyframes (a value of 2 will place a keyframe every 3 frames instead of 1).

Random Seed – Add more unique randomness to your shake.

Motion Blur – Have the script automatically set up motion blur to the shake.

Auto Scale – The script will calculate the perfect size for your footage so that the shake does not have it drift out of frame.

We’ve also implemented a Jolt for you to choreograph your perfect set of shakes. The Jolt will be applied wherever your timeline scrubber is on your timeline. You can generate a null with the shake or apply directly to your layer.

These can be applied directly into the shake animation wherever you need, and give an impact to your footage. Jolts are perfect for explosions, impactful footsteps, or something rushing past the camera.

Crate’s Camera Shake After Effects Script is exclusive for our Pro Users. The Pro Content continues to grow rapidly, sign up today!

We’ll be using this script in nearly every video we create and know you’ll find it as useful as we do.

Want to check out our other scripts? See them here

How to add Snow to your videos – VFX Tutorial

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

Download HD snow effects for your videos here

With only a few days to go until Christmas takes over, it’s time to go over one of the most fundamental uses of VFX compositing – snow!

Whether you’re shooting a Christmas comedy or a reflective and chilling scene for your film, snow can always help add value to your project. But not everyone has access to weather manipulating machines or industrially sized snow cannons, and so in these cases, we must rely on VFX to composite the snow into our footage.

FootageCrate has a huge library of snowfall effects, ranging from realistic to cartoon styled. Similar to all of our content, these snow effects are pre-keyed, meaning that transparency is preserved when you drop the snow footage on top of your shot without any further hassle! You can take a look at our collection of snow effects here.

Let’s get started with the tutorial! You can use almost any software for this, including After Effects, Hitfilm, Nuke and Premiere Pro!

I’ve taken this stock image from Pexels.com, so if you want to follow along, be my guest and download the image.

One step I’ve often seen people skipping is that they don’t add depth to their snow effect. What I mean by this is that it’s quite clearly visible that there’s just a snow effect simply being placed on the footage, giving it a “flat” feel. We’re going to give the snow volume by first creating a solid that matches the colour of the lighter clouds, and making it so that the further away the footage is, the higher the opacity. This can be done through masking or opacity painting.

Already we’ve given a nice volumetric feel to the scene. This will look like snow that is too distant to be seen by the camera individually, and so appears like a cloud.

We can now mask out or rotoscope the foreground so that it doesn’t sit behind this fog.

It’s now time to drop the snow effect into our video. I’ve taken two different effects from the FootageCrate website, which is the “snow background” and the “slow snow falling”. I’ll have the first placed behind the foreground, and the second in front of it. This makes it appear as if the subject is sandwiched between the two snow assets so that they feel part of the scene!

Apply these snow effects with an add/lighten/screen transfer mode so that the dark halos around the snowflakes are invisible, and admire your now far more chilling scene! You can add further colour corrections to then cool the image with bluish tints.

Thanks for reading this tutorial! If you’d like to learn more VFX, take a look at our helicopter compositing tutorial!

Helicopter VFX Tutorial

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

Download HD Helicopter VFX assets here

Our brand new helicopter assets have landed in the FootageCrate library, giving you the power to create your own stunning action movie VFX!

Over 30 exciting elements are available for you, with some of them being free to download. We’ve made sure the selection covers all of the intense helicopter sequences you’ll need to build the perfect narrative for your project.

The collection includes take-offs, flybys, static graphics and even a spectacular helicopter crash.

It’s time to get started with the tutorial, so you can learn how to add these helicopter VFX into your own videos! We’ll be going over the general workflow which covers the steps you need to take to composite all of our helicopter assets. I’ll also be using After Effects today, but you can replicate the steps in almost any compositing software such as Hitfilm and Nuke.

We’ll first need a background, which today will be this beautiful aerial mountain scenery from Pexels, but feel free to use your own!

Once you’ve created a composition featuring your background, find a helicopter asset that best suits your shot. There’s many to choose from, so you’ll have no trouble finding one that you want. I recommend that you also consider the lighting when deciding which effect you want for your VFX. Here I’ll be using a looping shot from the side:

Drop the effect into a new layer of your composition, and position it where you need it. Since the background and the helicopter don’t have matching sources of light, I flipped the landscape horizontally in order to have the light coming from the same direction. This goes a long way when it comes to making sure your effect fits naturally into your scene!

The shot is already looking pretty good, but we’ll perform some colour correction to make it perfect. I used a curves effect to lightly decrease the red as well as increase the blue, which matched the chilling tone of the environment.

No action scene is complete without some background motion blur, which also gives the illusion that the helicopter is moving at great speeds. It also helps highlight the main feature of our shot, so that it stands out from the rest.

This is the third tutorial in a row which has made use of our ProductionCrate Lightwrap generator, so if you haven’t checked it out already download it here! This tool is an absolute game-changer when it comes to compositing inside After Effects. It takes the colour of the environment and blends it into the edges of the asset, making it seem as though light from the scene is bouncing off our helicopter and into the camera. The default settings will do for most scenes, so hitting “Generate” should do the trick, but feel free to adjust the settings if needed.

You’ve made it to the end! We now have a photorealistic helicopter VFX effect in almost no time at all thanks to ProductionCrate’s helicopter library. It’s time to add our final colour corrections to give it the cinema-quality tone we want to see (here I had increased the contrast and saturation).

If you want to learn even more compositing tricks, take a look at our Nuclear Bomb VFX tutorial:

Energy Charge-Up Tutorial in After Effects

in After Effects, Featured/by Chris Kelly

Find the Blue Gas Flare here

We used a lot of the Alien Planet assets from Here

Lens Flares

Check out this Saturday Morning Tutorial where we teach you how to recreate this awesome effect we spotted in the Captain Marvel movie trailer in Adobe After Effects!

Blink Portal Tutorial in After Effects

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

Learn to create the amazing Blink Portal Effect in Adobe After Effects! Check out our latest Saturday Morning Tutorial Now!

Download the portal OBJ sequence here

Blink Portal Assets (Pro and Free)

FREE Light Wrap Script

You may also be interested in Falling through a Wormhole

Zombie VFX Compositing Tutorial!

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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