Roof Destruction VFX with After Effects and Cinema 4D – Part 1

Adding Dust & Debris

As always, I will use stock footage from Action Essentials 2 by Video Copilot here, but you can get free stock footage elements from detonationfilms to follow along with this tutorial. Here is a dirt burst element from Action Essentials 2:

Roof Crash Destruction 33- Dirt Charge

Because I can see a little bit of the ground in the stock footage, I first applied a simple mask to the bottom part of the dirt element.

Roof Crash Destruction 34 - Dirt Charge Mask

I then set the Mask Mode to ‘Subtract’ and increased the Feather property a little bit so the mask does not have a hard edge.

Roof Crash Destruction 35 - Dirt Charge Mask

It pays to spend some time and ensure that the mask at the bottom of the debris element will match the shape of the hole that we cut into the roof. Once we removed the ground from the stock footage element, we are ready to place it in our scene!

Roof Crash Destruction 36 - Masked Dirt Charge

Place the stock footage element over the hole in the roof and time the layer so that it matches up with the video of the Giant crashing through the roof.

Roof Crash Destruction 37 - Debris

Then rinse and repeat. I added a couple more debris and dirt elements into my scene to make the roof crash effect look a little bit more interesting and destructive. You may have to perform small cleanups here and there as you place your stock footage elements in the scene to make sure they fit together nicely.

Roof Crash Destruction 38 - Dirt and Debris

Once you’ve added all the destruction stock footage layers, you should have a pretty cool roof crash destruction effect!

Roof Crash Destruction 39 - Dirt and Debris

That concludes the first part of this tutorial. In the next part we will look at creating some cool roof debris with realistic physics in Cinema 4D and compositing them back into our scene using After Effects and 3D VFX integration techniques!

Share this post

Other Posts You Might Like

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *