VFX 101 - Add realistic destruction elements to your bullet hit effects
March 30th, 2012
Visual bullet hits are great fun to create – as are any other type of destructive effects. All of these effects are most realistic when they visible cause some damage, as would in real life.
However, I did not talk much about how to create great destruction effects. This video applies not only to bullet hits but should prove useful for any sort of damage effect you are trying to create
The basic principle of destructive visual effects
I like the psychology of this effect as it kind of works in reverse
Rather than adding a visual effect to make an object appear broken, we shoot the scene with the object already broken and then use visual effects to cover up the damage until it is destroyed.
The great thing about this is that you can interact with the broken element properly!
Imagine a scene where a wall is hit by a mortar, leaving a massive hole in it and then one of your actors crawls through that hole. For the effect, you simply cover up the hole using VFX and reveal it in a wake of rubble and dust when the mortar strikes
Step 1: Film your footage
Shoot your scene with the already destroyed element in it. For my tutorial clip, I pre-tore up a paper target and filmed the scene of me pretending to shoot at it with my fingers.
Step 2: Prepare material to cover up the damage
When you use VFX to cover up the damage, you will need something to cover up the damage with.
In my case I filmed a few small clips of me standing in the same position holding up an intact paper target.
You can then use your additional footage to cut out the element you need to cover up your broken element. In my case, I masked out a mint condition version of the paper target
Overlay the materials to cover up the damage
This can be a little tedious as you will have to align your overlay with the original footage up to the point where the element is destroyed. I used a corner pin effect and keyframing to align my paper target overlay with the broken target until I throw it into the air.
However, at the moment where I lift the target up into the air to shoot at it with my fingers, I could no longer use my overlay due to the position of the paper. During the last second before I shoot at the target, the three holes were visible from the front as well as the back.
To solve this, I created smaller overlays from parts of the intact target footage to cover up the holes individually.
I had to add some animated colorisation effects to them so the patches would blend in with the shadows on the paper
Once you have the damage covered up, you want to disable all of the VFX when the element is destroyed. For me, I remove all paper overlays when I pretend to shoot at the paper target.
Add action VFX during the transition
To make this effect less obvious, add some explosion, dust, rubble, particle or other destruction effect at the moment of impact/destruction This will make your effect more interesting as well as distract from the cover up VFX elements disapperaing.
Gun effect destruction complete
Each situation will be slightly different and you may need to prepare different cover up VFX material, apply different effects to your overlay elements and add a variety of destruction effects to make it look convincing.
However, the principle is always the same:
Film with destroyed element
Cover up element with VFX to point of destruction
Add destruction effects and remove cover up effects
In last week’s tutorial I talked about how to create convincing looking muzzle flash (gun fire) effects. This week I decided to cover the second half of the equation and talk about how to make your bullet hit effects looks awesome
I hope you enjoy this tutorial
The Preparation – The Overlay Layer
One of the most frustrating things about creating visual effects for bullet hits is to ensure all the blood/debris/sparks appear behind your actors or objects in the scene. Imagine masking them out frame by frame and then you decide to move them or replace them with different footage. You end up having to go through the whole frame by frame masking nightmare again
To avoid this, I have decided to go another way and it has worked out pretty well so far
Instead of masking out the elements to sit behind my actors or objects, I rotoscope out the actors or objects and create an overlay layer. I then place all blood/spark/debris effects on top of my base footage layer without masking and then place the overlay layer on top of that. Instantly, all bullet hit effects appear to be sitting behind the elements in the overlay layer
And the best thing about this solution: it’s flexible! I can move or replace all bullet hit elements without any extra work required.
Starting with the base footage, we first rotoscope out our actor for the duration of the bullet hit to create the overlay layer. In After Effects CS5 and up, I highly recommend using the rotobrush tool to help you with this task as it can be a little tedious. The rotobrush tool is not perfect, but it does make your job a lot easier
Be sure to enable the ‘refine matte’ option on the rotobrush effect, it will make the edges of your overlay look cleaner.
Because the rotobrush effect is really slow to render, we render out our overlay layer. To maintain the transparency of the video, I usually export as AVI and set the output channels to RGB+Alpha.
Once we’ve done that, we can reimport the clip into your scene and place it on top of your base footage. Don’t forget to disable the rotobrush effect on your base footage as we no longer need it. I usually don’t like to delete it just in case I need to make adjustments and re-export the overlay
The Bullet Hit
Now that we have the overlay layer created, we can add some blood splatters for the bullet hit onto the wall behind the actor. Simply take a blood splatter elment and place it above the base footage but under the overlay layer. Without any extra work the blood appears to be sitting behind our actor
Next, take an image of a bullet hole or a damaged plaster wall and place it over the blood effect layer. Scale it and position it right over the centre of the blood. You may have to add a curves adjustment to ensure the lighting is correct and the bullet hole fits into the scene. Again, notice that no masking is required.
One important thing for the bullet hit is the blood mist cloud. When a bullet hits a person, the impact usually creates a small explosive cloud of blood mist due to the force of the impact. To simulate this effect, we add a smoke or dust element on top of the overlay layer. We then colour the layer red.
In After Effects, you can do this by applying the Colorama effect. Leave the input as ‘Intensity’ and select ‘Red Ramp’ for the output. If your effect appears to be almost solid red, it is because Colorama is overwriting the alpha channel. To fix this, expand the ‘Modify’ tab and untick the ‘Modify Alpha’ checkbox.
I usually like to make the blood a bit darker so it looks a bit more realistic, but feel free to tweak it as you like. Make sure the blood mist cloud shoots out at the moment of bullet impact and fades out after about 1-2 seconds.
Lastly, we can add some debris from the wall to complete the bullet hit. If a bullet was to pierce the shoulder of our actor and hit the wall behind, it would likely cause some plaster fragments to fly around. You can either create a particle effect for this or simply use some wall debris stock footage
I prefer to opt for the latter if possible simply because it saves time and with a bit of curves adjustment you can make it sit nicely in the scene!
Since the bullet hit is a very fast effect and some of the fragments would fly over our actor, I prefer to place the fragments on top of the scene.
Finally, you can add some curves and saturation effects to the bullet his scene a nice ‘film look’
Note that the layers you need for a great looking bullet hit effect will depend on what (or who) your bullets are colliding with. But I higly recommend using an overlay layer as outlined above – it will save you a hell of a lot of time, render faster and allow you to experiment around more easily until you are satisfied with your bullet hit
Realistic Looking Gun Muzzle Flashes in 6 Easy Steps
March 4th, 2012
I see way too many badly done muzzle flash effects on YouTube to not want to do this basic Visual Effects 101 tutorial.
It is really not hard to add a few layers onto your scene to create great looking gun fire. And this video will show you how
Compositing the layers for a realistic muzzle flash
To create this effect, you will have to composite a number of layers. Of course, these are not hard set rules so experiment if something doesn’t seem to fit right – to me, that is always the most fun part anyways
The first thing I add is the actual muzzle flash effect. I really love the Action Esssentials 2 package from VideoCopilot and for $99 for the 720p version, I highly recommend it. It’s filled with pre keyed stock footage and I use it almost daily. However, you can also find free action stock footage just by searching on google
Here’s a useful link to free stock footage from detonation films.
Anyways, take and position a muzzle flash element on top of your base footage.
Next, add another solid colour layer to simulate the light emitting from the muzzle flash. Set it to a colour that is very similar to the muzzle flash and change the blend mode to additive. I usually set the opacity to around 20.
Just putting a solid layer over everything does look pretty crappy. If there was a real muzzle flash in the scene, only the elements facing the front of the gun would be lit. We can simulate this by applying some masks and cutting out only the areas that would directly be hit by the light.
Once you’re done, your shot should look something like this:
It’s not bad, but I personally find that using a simple overlay layer to simulate the muzzle flash light sits very unnaturally on top of our footage rather than in the scene. We can make this look a lot more natural with a technique I described in my After Effects – Natural Lighting VFX Using Mattes tutorial: by creating a matte layer.
You can do this in most compositing software packages, but I will talk here in terms of After Effects to keep things simple.
Duplicate the base footage layer and drag it above the light layer. Add a saturation effect and bring the saturation down to 0 so you end up with black and white footage. Then, add a brightness/contrast adjustment and increase the contrast. The idea is that the bright areas of this matte layer will essentially define the opacity of our light layer. Where the matte is brighter, the light layer will be more opaque, where the matte is darker, the light layer is more transparent.
Finally, add a blur effect to soften the matte a little bit.
Now go to the ‘track matte’ option for your light layer and set it to ‘luma’. This tells After Effects that the opacity for this layer is defined by the brightness of the layer directly above, which is our matte layer. And voila, the light from the muzzle flash sits a lot more natural in the scene.
I know, I know, it’s not ‘realistic’, but the whole point of the matte is simply to glue the light and the footage together and make the light be dependent on what’s in the scene. By doing this, you tie the layers together and it won’t look like you simply stuck one layer on top of the other
Finally, you can add some curves adjustments to the entire footage, colorise it, filter it, whatever you like to give your muzzle flash shot that nice ‘film look’
Following these 6 simple steps will usually result in great looking muzzle flash effects, but sometimes the situation might call for something different. Never, ever be afraid to deviate from the ‘fixed rules’ and experiment
Managing the post production stages for your videos
December 30th, 2011
Lately, the visual effects in my videos have been getting more and more complicated and my upcoming YouTube video project is taking me a lot longer than expected simply because there is so much post production work to be done.
During post production, you can quickly become lost in footage, project and effect render files or even in the layers of a single effect!
Fairly quickly, you will need to make some sort of post production plan.
No, don’t run away! You don’t need to go to write documents, work to a schedule or – god forbid – talk to people, but you should think about the effects you want to create, what is required to achieve those effects and how you can break up your post production into individual steps.
For me, those steps usually include:
Clean and edit footage
Create basic effect
Rotoscope and render required overlay elements
Add overlays, finalize effect
Colorisation and VFX lighting
Let’s have a look at how those steps apply to achieve this fairly simple bullet hit effect:
Post Production Step 1: Clean and edit footage
As a first step into post production, you want to delete any footage files you do not need and create an initial rough edit. Here you want to start thinking about where and how your effects will fit – however do not add them at this stage!
You want to add visual effects only to the final edit of your footage. There is nothing more frustrating than to spend hours on a visual effect only to realize that the footage you used does not fit into your final video project.
For my bullet hit effect I have a (final edit of a) scene of me sitting on the couch, pretending to be hit by a bullet.
Post Production Step 2: Create basic effect
At this stage I want to setup a rough version of the effect so I can easily alter it without spending much time on it.
I add the blood splatter effect, turn it into a 3D layer and position it in the scene to sit on the wall directly behind my head, in line with the bullet’s trajectory. At this stage I don’t care that the effect it’s sitting over my arm and head.
I used stock footage from the Videocopilot Action Essentials 2 collection.
And no, I’m not sponsored by them (I wish!), but think the package is very worth the money
Post Production Step 3: Rotoscope and render required overlay elements
Many effects will require you to place an effect behind an element in your scene. Since your footage is just a series of flat 2D images you will have to cut out or mask out those elements in post production so that you can place them on top of the effect.
For this you have two options:
Using masks
Rotoscoping
Masks are usually sufficient for short and simple elements, but if you have a person moving in front of your explosion or, as in this case, blood splatter, you will most likely require to use rotoscoping.
Rotoscoping is the process of outlining a certain element in your scene frame-by-frame. The outline is then used to cut out the element so it can be placed over other objects.
Remember to always rotoscope in full resolution or your rotoscoping mask may look totally different when you do your final export.
In After Effects, one trick you can do to speed up the rotoscoping process is to first apply a mask to your footage to cut out the area you’re interested in. This reduces calculation time as only your masked area will be considered when you step through your frames one at a time.
I draw a mask around the area containing my head and my arm:
Once the mask is applied most of the image will be discarded:
I then step through the footage for those frames where I need the blood effect to be hidden behind my arm and head and rotoscope them. After Effects will display the outline of the rotoscoped element in pink.
Rotoscoped footage (especially in 1080p) is really slow to preview in After Effects. What you want to do once you’re done rotoscoping is to export only the cut out element in a separate video. You can then import that video and use it instead of your original footage with the rotoscoping effect applied.
This is a very important task as it will speed up the rest of your post production by a big factor!
Here is a frame from the rotoscoped video I exported:
Post Production Step 4: Add overlays, finalise effect
Now I can place the video of my arm and head on top of the blood effect to make it look like the blood sits behind me on the wall. I added the white outline so you can see where the rotoscoped footage sits in the final scene. Notice how the blood is now hidden behind those elements.
Without the outline it looks as we expect
At this stage in the post production, I usually also do some tweaking like making sure the effect fits nicely into the scene in terms of colour and size as well as add a few more details. Because I know the effect is almost complete I am happy to spend some time here to make it look convincing
Post Production Step 5: Colorisation and VFX lighting
Movie footage never looks like it was shot on an averagely cloudy day in your living room Instead, it usually has a certain colourised and stylised look.
In the final stages of your post production process, you want to apply full frame effects like colour curves, saturation and contrast changes as well as artificial lighting effects to your video
I want my footage to look like it has been shot at night so I reduce saturation and contrast, add colour curves and darken the entire video. I then increase the blue channel and remove a bit of red and green to give it that dark night blue.
The last thing I want to do as part of the colourisation is to simulate a TV flickering just off to the right of the frame. I have a detailed tutorial in my post on creating visual effect lighting using mattes.
Here is what my final video looks like:
Now I talked way too much (as usual), but the main thing to really keep in mind is to just take a moment to think about your post production process before you get started.
Break it up into small steps and it all be be a lot easier in the end
How to create natural looking visual effect lighting
December 16th, 2011
Welcome to my first After Effects tutorial!
When you create your videos, many different situations might require you to add visual lighting effects in post production for things like gun muzzle flashes, lightning strikes, explosions, artificial light sources and more. However, many YouTube videos I’ve seen use a rather unsightly technique of placing a masked orange or white circle over the footage and setting the blending mode to additive… not a very elegant or convincing effect.
Fortunately, you do not need to put in much additional work to make your visual lighting effect look a lot more convincing. By using a simple matte layer, you can make your effect look more organic and blend much better into your footage
In After Effects, I have set up 2 layers: one for the base footage called ‘Footatge Comp’ and one for the fire element called ‘Fire Comp’, placed on top and positioned and scaled so that the flame sits nicely on my thumb. The fire element is a stock footage element from the Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 collection.
Now that we have the basic footage set up, let’s add an organic lighting effect to the fire element
Create a new solid layer, name it something like ‘FireShine’ and give it an orange-yellow colour to match the colour of the flame. Using the masking tool, draw a circle on the FireShine layer and position it so that the centre of the circle is exactly over the fire. Add a fairly large amount of feathering to the mask to have the light fade off gradually.
The lighting of the candle is way too strong, so reduce the transparency of the FireShine layer down to around 35%. Change the blending mode to ‘additive’. Voila, you are done!
Ok ok… just kidding While this visual lighting effect might not look all bad, let’s make a small modifications to our fire shine to make it sit much more naturally in the scene rather than on top of it
Creating A Matte For The Fire
The biggest problem with the above approach is that the shine of the light does not interact in any way with our base footage and thus appears to be stuck on top of it. One way to improve this would be to create many small masks on the FireShine layer to light up highlighted areas like face, arms, fingers, table and other elements that would be affected in real life by a light source at that position. However, there is a much simpler way: using a matte layer for the light.
A matte is a layer that is used to define the transparency of the layer directly below it. By creating a matte based on our footage and applying it to the shine of the fire, we can tie the lighting effect and the footage together organically
Duplicate the ‘Footage Comp’ layer and place the copy above our FireShine layer. Rename the layer to ‘Light Matte’.
Notice that the new layer will hide the FireShine layer, but that is ok – we just want to be able to see the Light Matte while we make adjustments. Once we are happy with our matte, we will hide it and apply it to the FireShine layer.
We want to use the brightness of the footage to define how strongly the light shine will affect it. Bright areas will receive a lot of shine, dark areas will receive very little. Now I know that this is not how it works in reality, but we just want to blend the FireShine layer more organically into our footage. Additionally, keeping the dark areas dark will retain shadows and thus enhance the feeling of a real light source being present in the scene.
Now let’s get to adjusting our matte so we can use it
Apply a hue/saturation effect to the Light Matte and fully desaturate the image. Now, add a brightness/contrast effect and increase brightness and contrast to bring out the bright and dark areas of the footage. Since the footage is a little grainy and fire glow is usually fairly soft, I have also added a fast blur effect to the matte to smoothen it all out a little bit. These are the effects on the Light Matte layer:
Your Light Matte (with the FireComp layer still visible on top of it) should now look so something like this:
Now all that is left to do is to apply our Light Matte to the FireShine layer!
To do this, turn off the visibility of the Light Matte layer. Select your FireShine layer and set the track matte from None to Luma. ‘Luma’ means brightness and indicates that the alpha for our FireShine layer will be taken from the brightness of the layer directly above it, which is our Light Matte layer.
So wherever our Light Matte layer is black, the transparency of the FireShine layer will be 0%. Wherever the Light Matte is white, the FireShine layer will be fully opaque. Gray levels specify different levels of semi-transparency
You can quickly check how our FireShine layer looks now by settings its blending mode back to ‘Normal’. I also turned off the FireComp layer to show only the FireShine affected by the Light Matte:
Now, this more sophisticated FireShine layer can be applied to our scene by setting its blending mode to ‘additive’! The final scene looks like this:
Voila, the candle light suddenly sits a lot more organically on your footage as the affected areas are literally defined by the footage While this may not be the most realistic way, it is fast and easy to do and does look a whole lot better than simply ‘adding’ a light layer over your shot!
I am getting more and more addicted to creating more elaborate visual effects
One thing I have always wanted to do since watching Freddie W’s Fire Hands video is to make my own video of me creating fire with my hands.
Now I didn’t just want to copy their idea and to be honest, I almost get the feeling the fire in Freddie’s video is real rather than a VFX, and so I came up with my own little video idea.
What do you do when the lights go out but you have no matches to light your candle? Use your hands!
VFX – Making Fire With Your Hands
I am planning on putting up a small video tutorial for this fire effect as well
Or at least cover how to make proper fire/candle/gun lighting effects and composite them more onto your footage – I seem to find too many videos where the ‘lighting’ is just a mask stuck over the footage using additive lighting.
