apocalypse Archives - Video Production News

Hazmat Suit VFX

in 3D, Featured, Visual FX/by Chris Kelly

Let’s hope this doesn’t become the standard dress code for 2021. We’ve added a new, 3D Character to RenderCrate. The Hazmat Suit Character works perfect for your apocalyptic short films, horror movies, Sci-Fi fun and daily renders.

We’ve also created 30 Hazmat Animations, pre-rendered and ready to drag and drop into any editing software. We’ve made variations of lighting and hazmat suit colors for you to choose from.

A lot of users have been requesting high-resolution images for thumbnails, ads and campaigns, so now on GraphicsCrate you can also find these Hazmat Characters. We have 10 different images in various poses, all of these are PNGs as well. Basic Users can download any of these images free at 720p, Pro Users can access them at 8K resolution.

If you’re hoping to make an apocalyptic scene, make sure to check out these fantastic Apocalypse Assets!

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 Apocalypse Matte Painting VFX

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download Apocalypse VFX matte painting assets here

ProductionCrate has just released a huge new bundle of apocalyptic assets!

Transforming an entire scene into a wasteland is one of the most enjoyable VFX projects you can take on. You can bring destruction to buildings, roadways, cars, plants, and just about anything that you like, taking inspiration from the Walking Dead, the Umbrella Academy or 28 Days Later. Though often this can involve many hours of tedious work to create each individual feature of the scene.

Thankfully, we’re here to help. We’ve created over 50 set extension assets to help you construct your post-apocalyptic VFX shots. Let’s take a look at some!

This apocalyptic city is perfect for distant set extensions. All our assets have been pre-keyed and are ready for you to import into almost any compositing software, whether that is After Effects, Hitfilm, Fusion or Premiere Pro. We even have several different lighting variations, so that you can choose the one that best matches the environment of your shot.

We also have over 25 damaged car assets for you to download and composite onto your empty roads. There are two different car types, all with a huge range of angles, lighting conditions and shadow mattes – so you can be sure that these will blend into your shot without any trouble. For even more variation, you can even change the hue and saturation of the car paint! Download these destroyed car set extension effects here.

We’ve also added some awesome large-scale smoke plume graphics! These PNG effects are perfect for distant smoke and are incredibly easy to use with their transparent backgrounds. We also have several HD animated smoke plumes if you want to include motion in these effects which you can download here. Use these to help create an atmosphere in your scene that no other practical effect can!

Time for an in-depth look at how you can composite these into your scene! Chris and Adrian cover all the techniques you will need in this especially awesome Saturday Morning tutorial:

We’ll love to see what you can create with these stunning effects! If you want to learn how you can composite a nuclear blast into this post-apocalyptic landscape, check out this tutorial here.

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.

Lava and Volcano VFX Assets

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download HD Lava and Volcano VFX assets here

Volcanoes are some of the most incredible spectacles of the natural world. Our only issue is that lava is very hot, and isn’t readily available on most movie sets.

That is what has led us to create this brand new bundle of volcano themed VFX assets, all ready to drop into your video. These range from 1080p all the way to 4K, and have been pre-keyed to streamline your editing workflow.

Create an apocalyptic landscape using one of our several magma-bursts, giving the appearance that the ground is breaking up into absolute chaos! You can even check out our fire and ember VFX assets to further add detail into your compositions.

Our full range of content includes lava bursts, and lava falls, which is the perfect combination to get started!

Are you an After Effects User? Download our Lava Project file Here

You can learn how to create your own Lava FX in this After Effects Tutorial

There’s no doubt we’ll be adding more of these in the future, so keep updated by registering to ProductionCrate today, and access one of the worlds greatest libraries for visual effects, sound effects and music.

If you’re hungry for more VFX content, check out our Nuclear Bomb tutorial.

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!

Nuclear Bomb VFX Tutorial

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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!

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!

Missile VFX Tutorial!

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

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!

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

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Tag Archive for: apocalypse

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