effect Archives - Video Production News

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 Make an 8-Bit Effect

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

8-Bit is back! You’ve probably noticed the growing popularity of this retro style. We’ve seen it in titles and openers, logo animations, indie games, VFX Shorts and many more. Let’s take a look at how to achieve this style. We’ll be using After Effects but if you’re a Hitfilm User you can find an awesome tutorial here.

We’ll show you how to make this 8-Bit style in AE, but you can also download the preset here

For our effect we chose this aerial explosion from the popular Anime and Toon Category to give it that 8-Bit look.

Import your clip or effect into After Effects.

A popular technique in AE for achieving the 8-Bit look is by using the Mosaic Effect, but we find it far too difficult to achieve the perfect squares and pixelation needed to pull this effect off. Instead, we’re going to use CC Block Load.

Drag CC Block Load onto your footage. Set the Completion to 0. We set our Scans to 3. For the number of scans, use to your discretion. Uncheck the Start Cleared selection.

Classic 8-Bit games were limited in what colors were available. While our explosion doesn’t appear to have too many colors, we can still limit the variation and add some color degradation with the Posterize Effect.

Add the Posterize Effect to your layer. You will instantly notice some color degradation. Play with the level. Depending on your footage you can find the right look for you. We suggest adding these effects to individual layers but staying consistent with the CC Block Load scan number for pixel consistency.

One additional item you can change is your composition’s framerate. We are going to change our comp’s from 29.97fps to 15fps. To do this you can go to Composition>Settings or just hit Control K (Command K for Mac) and change your framerate there.

For the final step we want to get rid of those semi-transparent pixels. This can be done quickly with the Levels effect. Drop the levels effect onto your layer, and select the Alpha option from the drop-down.

Select the Alpha Input White number (32768) and type /2 for (32768/2) and deselect. Now your number will read half of that, or 16384. Copy that number and paste it into your Input Black. Now you have crunched out those semi-transparent pixels!

Now you have your 8-Bit style. Mess around with the Anime FX and see what works best for you.

Want to keep learning? Check out this Bouncey Text Tutorial in After Effects

Download 4K Ground Fog Effects

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download 4K ground fog and mist effects here.

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!

Download Tank VFX Assets

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download HD Tank VFX Assets Here

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.

Fluid Ink Transition Effects

in Premiere, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download 4K HD ink fluid effects here.

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!

Tag Archive for: effect

Download Debris and Destruction VFX Assets