We’re taking you on a quick journey to explore how we created this awesome car-crush VFX shot!
We’ll cover plenty of techniques in this mini-tutorial that will help you build your very own VFX shot from start to finish.
We used 3ds Max and After Effects for this, however, we’ve ensured that you will be able to follow along and use the same workflow in almost any other 3D software like Blender.
This is our first Davesplanation episode, so let us know if you want to see more!
The Sound Effects used are all available on SoundsCrate
https://cdn.staticcrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/crushvfx.jpg8251500David Blakerhttps://news.productioncrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Production-Crate-Logo.pngDavid Blaker2019-03-23 09:20:592019-03-23 09:20:59Crush a Car with VFX!
If you too find yourself entranced by the peaceful and fluid motion of wispy smoke, you’re in luck! We’ve just released a fantastic bundle of 10 production-ready fog effects, all ready for you to download right away.
Each asset has been pre-keyed, so you can drop these into your composition and make use of the built-in transparent background without any extra preparation.
The 4K resolution also means you will be able to flexibly scale these effects without any noticeable loss in quality.
Create an eerie atmosphere by adding these to your shots. We’ve angled these effects so that they will fit onto the ground of your scene and match the perspective perfectly.
We even have several variations in style, such as slow-motion and turbulent!
You can even get creative with the unique appearance of these mist effects, and build an awesome sci-fi portal effect!
Want to see how these were made? Check out our first ever episode of VFXperiments, where we take you behind the scenes and show you how we made some of these insanely cool assets.
We’re excited to see what you create with these effects! If you’re interested to see more of ProductionCrate’s content, check out our UFO effects!
https://cdn.staticcrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/footagecrate-4k-real-ground-mist-slow-3-0-00-00-00.jpg10801920David Blakerhttps://news.productioncrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Production-Crate-Logo.pngDavid Blaker2019-03-12 06:13:372019-03-21 12:40:17Download 4K Ground Fog Effects
Planets, nebula, galaxies, stars, black holes and thousands of other interstellar features can be built together into a spectacular colorful mess.
In cinema, there are no rules to what our galactic scenery can look like. We can experience the dark and dangerous feel of Interstellar, or the vivid and lively action packed sets from Guardians of the Galaxy.
If you’re new here, ProductionCrate is a library of thousands of visual effects, sound effects, graphics and other creative resources – all available for you to download to save time and money! Here you can access a whole bundle of space related effects to build your incredible VFX projects.
One of our favorite collections is the huge array of nebula assets. These come as high resolution (4000×4000) graphics that you can composite into your space backgrounds. This can be done in most compositing software, such as After Effects, Hitfilm or Nuke. You may even drop several of them into your 3D software to create 3D nebulae instantly!
If you need to get started, check out our basic star texture background. This will be the perfect canvas for you to start building out your scene.
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!
https://cdn.staticcrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Thumb2-0-00-00-00.jpg8251500David Blakerhttps://news.productioncrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Production-Crate-Logo.pngDavid Blaker2019-02-05 10:00:122019-04-29 01:48:20Kick down a door with VFX!
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!
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 Helictoper tutorial.
Our hugely requested and highly anticipated tank effects have rolled in!
We love seeing tanks and huge military battles in movies. This is why we’re now giving you control of over 30 unique and exciting elements to bring mayhem to your action film without the huge price tag!
Aiming, rolling, turning and even firing are all included in this huge collection, meaning you can combine these in your timeline to create an entire army of these tanks.
Our effects are all pre-keyed with an alpha channel, meaning you can easily insert these into a shot instantly without any extra hassle.
We’ve also created different lighting variations, so whether your shot is sunny or overcast, our assets will have you covered.
For those who want to go to war with these effects, we’ve created impactful tank firing shots from several different angles.
You can order these different effects so that you can create a realistic narrative, such as having a tank rolling up to the camera, aiming, and then firing… The possibilities are limitless!
We hope you enjoy using these tank effects in your projects. If you’d like to expand your arsenal, check out our action-packed helicopter VFX assets.
https://cdn.staticcrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Thumb.jpg8251500David Blakerhttps://news.productioncrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Production-Crate-Logo.pngDavid Blaker2019-01-22 06:22:072019-01-22 06:22:07Download Tank VFX Assets
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.
https://cdn.staticcrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/thumbn-1.jpg8251500David Blakerhttps://news.productioncrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Production-Crate-Logo.pngDavid Blaker2018-12-20 06:51:412020-04-09 23:27:25How to add Snow to your videos - VFX Tutorial
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).
Video transitions are one of the critical aspects of editing, connecting two different shots together. Since the dawn of digital editing, we have seen creators begin to take transitions even more seriously than before, especially in the vlog format.
Whip-pans, spins, fades and light leaks have all become a popular choice for Premiere Pro editors, but one other is a particular favourite of ours. Fluid transitions!
Otherwise known as ink bleeds, these can be some of the most stylish and beautiful effects, and add a whole new dynamic to your video.
To make your own, you’ll need three things. Your clips, an editing platform, and one of our fluid ink transition effects (which you can download here).
It’s then as simple as setting your clips alpha to match the brightness) of our transition effect. This can be done by placing the effect above your second clip and adding a “Track Matte Key” to the clip you’re fading into. You then select the ink-effect in the “Matte” option.
The “composite using” is what this effect uses to calculate the alpha value of the second clip, and since our ink effect is black and white, we’ll be using the luma value as our source.
Have fun with these awesome 4K ink fluid effects. If you want to hear about more ways you can use our range of effects, take a look at our blog!
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.
