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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!

Adding Magic VFX to your Film

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Magic and wizardry is some of the most enjoyable forms of VFX for an artist, and are often the first thing new users are eager to try out when learning. Conjuring these effects into your videos do not require any dark magic, just a ProductionCrate account and willpower!

We have an entire catalogue of spectacular content that you can apply to your videos with ease. Lightning powers, energy beams and even Doctor Strange’s personal favorite spark portal. The overwhelming number of choices give you more power than you will ever need.

Our downloadable magic VFX in action!

We have already covered a plethora of ways in how you can edit these effects into your video on our YouTube channel, all of which offer a great insight into the workflow a VFX artist can expect working in the magic realm. If you want to check some of these out, take a pick from:

If you want to read more on adding these magic VFX to your video, learn about how you can become like Scarlet Witch here!

Dust and Smoke VFX Collection

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download your HD Smoke and Dust VFX here

One thing that completes any VFX shot is dust and smoke. They bring a truly gritty atmosphere to any action sequence, and shall forever be a must-have for any serious film producer!

There are two ways you can become a pyrotechnic expert and blast your shot into the next level. The first is to do these effects practically, whether that is setting off fog machines on set, or even using a smoke-grenade. While this may sound like the fun option, it is not always the most practical due to cost, time to set-up, and making sure you operate this equipment safely.

The second option is cheap, quick, easy and only a click away! We have a gigantic collection of dust and smoke VFX assets for your video, all ready to be deployed into your film-production workflow to make your scene look stunning.

Our smoke plumes in action!

So what do we have?

Our bundle includes atmospheric smoke, fog, gigantic plumes, volcanic ash clouds, bursts and dozens of other variations! All of these effects are ready to download, after which you can composite them into your video through software such as After Effects, Hitfilm, Nuke and any other with multi-layer features. We have pre-keyed all of our footage to make it as simple as possible for you to drop them into your composition.

We recommend that you apply a subtle tint effect to your smoke effects so that they match the color of the lighting around them. Another useful tip is to once again tint the overall color to very lightly lean towards the colour of the sky, with a greater tint for further away smoke.

Download HD Smoke and Dust VFX here

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your VFX quickly, read our article on adding rubble to your video.

Using our Puddle Maps!

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

If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’ve stumbled upon our puddle map collection and wondered, “What on Earth are these for?”. You’re not alone!

If you’ve had some experience with 3D design, you may be familiar with “glossy maps” or “reflection maps”. These are textures which can tell rendering software how “shiny” an object is. Think of a white texture being for a mirror (very shiny), and a dark gray texture used for concrete (very dull and matted). We discovered we can use these in After Effects to create utterly-realistic reflections to help composite VFX into your scene, or just make it visually incredible. You may have seen Andrew Kramer’s Video Copilot tutorial which involved a similar process.

We have dropped one of our fire VFX assets (found here) into our street, but anyone can see it is looking pretty dull at the moment! Our mission is to make this look both realistic and more visually interesting!

We will then need one of our puddle maps. There are different varieties (such as asphalt, tiles, road surfaces and more), so choose which one best fits your shot. Drop it into your scene, make it 3D, and align it with your ground:

Here is where you might see where this is going! Duplicate any of the layers you want to reflect in the puddle. In this case, the fire and the backdrop. We’ll name them the same but with “Reflection” at the end. Pre-compose the puddle map as well.

For each of the “Reflection” layers, flip it vertically and position it in a place where it would approximately match what it would look like if the floor was a gigantic mirror. Here’s my attempt (with the walls roughly masked out):

(Same process with the fire)

You then want to pre-compose these newly reflecting layers, all into the same composition. We’ll now be looking at something like this in our layer panel:

Now for the magic moment! Apply the “Compound Blur” effect to our reflection layer. The compound blur effect is similar to a traditional blur, except it blurs an image with its blur strength dependant on another texture (so brighter areas are blurred more than darker ones). Set our blur layer to our Puddle Map, and turn up the Maximum Blur parameter. You’ll quickly see everything fitting into shape!

It may take a little bit of experimentation since no project is the same. For example, setting this layer to an Alpha Inverted Matte might fix some issues you may have to your scene. You can even try using different puddle maps from the range in our collection.

You can then mask out any areas you don’t want a blur to appear on, such as these posts which are trying to make our life difficult.

Lastly, as we have a fire in our scene, it’s mandatory to add a glow effect (we can go deeper into this in another tutorial!).

Hopefully, this clears up any questions regarding these puddle maps! These things are powerful tools for any compositor in VFX or design, and will always give your scene an extra breath of photorealism. We hope you enjoy using them!

Did you enjoy this guide? You might also like to read about our bullet hole collection!

New Bullet Hole Assets!

in Featured, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download HD bullet hole impact VFX assets here!

Too often do we overlook one of the must-have features of a gunfight in our VFX. Bullet holes!

I’ve seen a lot of fight scenes involving a shootout simply focus on the muzzle flashes, but seemingly jumping over the fact that for every bullet shot, there is some form of damage inflicted on the scene (unless they’re shooting into the air, perhaps at some unlucky ducks). We wanted to change this, by making it more accessible for VFX artists like you to create these effects quickly and easily.

Our collection of bullet hole graphics have been made specifically to fit any compositors needs, in a superbly large resolution. The pre-keyed alpha matte means it is already ready to be blended into whatever surface it is being applied to, whether that is metal, concrete, or even glass!

Our smashed glass collection is essential for any fight scene. These are the easiest to apply, just drop it over your glass, apply a screen blending mode to it, and voila!

We hope these HD bullet hole assets are a perfect addition to your VFX workflow. Download them all today!

Thinking of how you can make your scene even more explosive? Let us introduce you to our rubble collection.

New Debris and Water Blast FX

in Featured, Visual FX/by Chris Kelly

Using a mortar and compressed air we were able to shoot a variety of debris and water up into the sky!

We had a 12×20 green backdrop for the dust elements to key and keep the shadow. For the water burst elements we backlit the bursts and used a 20×20 black backdrop to pull the key.

These were all shot at 4K resolution, slowed from 120fps to 29.97fps

Find the Dust/Debris Blast VFX Here

Find the Water Blast Effects Here