Tag Archive for: zombie

Zombie VFX Compositing Tutorial!

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.

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

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.

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

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!

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

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.

Download and composite zombie VFX to your video

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.

Composite zombie VFX with a Light Wrap

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

Zombie VFX Extras

With Halloween approaching, it’s time to make your videos extra spooky!

ProductionCrate has now made it possible to create your own zombie apocalypse movie with a near-zero budget. You don’t need hundreds of extra actors, in fact, you don’t need any at all. Instead, we have a huge collection of 4K pre-keyed (and green-screen) zombie character effects.

Download HD Zombie Effects Free

We recorded several different actors performing hundreds of different actions that you would expect to see from the typical walking-dead. Standing, stumbling, reaching, and even attacking. To help make your heroic protagonist interact with these characters, we’ve included reaction-actions, such as getting hit by a bullet. This will give your project a life-like appearance without any trouble!

Duplicate, scale and spread your zombies around across your scene to create an entire horde of them. The fantastic Adrian Jensen goes into the steps on how you can do this in this tutorial using After Effects and Trapcode Particular.

Zombie VFX Extras are available for download here.