Holograms - how long have we been promised these!
OK, quick recap - about 18 months ago, I published this tutorial, which shows how to use approximately
1.6 million CC Radial Blurs to create hologram beams.
But to be honest, that technique always bugged me.
It’s render-heavy and the beams never quite make it to the source.
Still - it was the only option I could think of and it worked well enough.
Pah!
Redditer “biggety” came up with using Corner Pin and shared that on the After Effects
subreddit.
Their approach inspired me to revisit this to see if I could build everything needed
into a single preset.
If you get stuck or don’t want to learn how to do this and just use the preset, then
the FFX file is linked in the description below.
In my comp, I’ve got my hologram footage and I’ll turn it into a precomp, by right-clicking
on it and choosing Pre-Compose.
In the pre-comp, go to Layer…
New…
Adjustment Layer And then in Effects and Presets, search for
“Bad TV” After Effects comes with 3 bad tv presets
- pick the one that’s right for your shot.
And for the Star Wars look, I went to Effects…
Color Correction…
Hue Saturation And checked the Colorize box
Twirled Hue down to 180.
And upped the saturation to 100.
Back in the main comp, go to Layer…
New…
Null Object Hit Enter and rename this to Emitter.
And position this on your hologram’s emitter.
And while we’re here, hit P to expose its position property.
Select the Hologram comp and set its transfer mode to screen.
Then holding CTRL, tap D to duplicate it (or go to Edit … Duplicate)
Rename the lower comp to hologram beams Select the top hologram comp and tap P to
expose the position keyframes.
Hold ALT and click on the stopwatch.
And in the expressions area, just add a wiggle expression, or not, that’s up to you.
Something like: Wiggle
Brackets One - so once per second
Comma 50
Close brackets So, once per second, move the layer by 50
pixels OK, so far, so standard.
Turn off the hologram comp for now and then on the Hologram Beams precomp.
Go to Effect…
Expression Controls…
Layer Control This will make it A LOT easier as a preset
to select the hologram layer.
Back to Expression Controls and add a Point Control
And back again and add a Slider Control.
And - yeah I know, but trust me - back again to add TWO angle controls.
In the Effects Controls panel Select the effects in turn, hit Enter and
rename the Layer Control to Hologram layer The Point Control to origin
The Slider Control to something like Offset And the angle controls to Skew and Rotation.
First thing I’m going to do is go to Effect…
Blur and Sharpen…
Fast Box Blur.
Make sure Repeat Edge Pixels is checked.
Set the Blur Dimensions to Horizontal And up the blur to 70
So, I’ve recreated Directional Blur, but I had to do that due to the way Corner Pin
interacts with certain blurs.
Fast Box Blur worked, so I’m not questioning it.
Next go to Effect…
Transition…
CC Scale Wipe.
Set the direction to minus 90 and the amount to 10.
So we get this cool blurred stretching over half the screen.
But we need it across the whole screen.
So go to Effect…
Distort…
Mirror.
And set the Reflection Centre to be in the middle of the comp.
Actually for both CC Scale Wipe and the Mirror effects I added this expression to force their
centres to be in the middle so I wouldn’t have to alter the preset for 4K comps.
Now that we’d got this band, lets go to Effect…
Distort…
Corner Pin.
And double-click on one of the properties to expose it in the timeline.
Use the stopwatch’s pickwhip to link to the Origin’s point property.
Later, we’ll link this to our null’s position, but this way as a preset, all the controls
will be at the top.
For Lower Left, hold ALT and click on the stopwatch.
And type: X equals
and use the pickwhip to link to Upper Left’s X value
Semi-colon Y equals
And pickwhip to Upper Left’s Y value Plus 1
Semi-colon Square brackets
X Comma
Y Close square brackets
I found in testing that the Corner Pin really didn’t like Upper Left and Lower Left being
in the same spot, but one pixel difference made…
well, all the difference.
OK, now for Upper Right’s expression.
X equals And use the pickwhip to link to Hologram Layer’s
value.
Dot transform Dot position
Square brackets Zero
Close square brackets plus
And pickwhip Offset’s slider value.
Semi-colon Y equals
And pickwhip the hologram layer again Dot transform
Dot position Minus
And pickwhip the Hologram layer again Dot height
Divided by 2 Semi-colon
Square brackets X
Comma Y
Close square brackets This expression is saying that for X, use
the Layer’s X position, but add in any value from the Offset slider.
And for Y, use the position of the hologram comp, but set it to be at the top of the comp,
which is half the height.
So the top of the beam will track the wiggling hologram, but we can cheat it a little with
the offset, if we need to.
Expressions are also in the Description.
Ahem - right-click to the like and subscribe buttons.
Copy the expression for Lower Right, but change the Y’s minus to a plus.
That’s the hard part done.
Well done for sticking with it.
Next go to Effect…
Stylise…
Glow Just to punch up the brightness of the beams
And then, go to Effect…
Distort…
Transform Use Anchor’s pickwhip to link it to the
Origin point.
And use Position’s pickwhip to link it to Anchor.
Which means that when we link Skew to our Skew angle control and Rotation to our Rotation
angle control, we can do some funky, 80’s lasers!
And fudge any alignment issues we might get Finally - yes, really.
Well not quite… but still Go to Effect…
Noise & Grain…
Turbulent Noise.
We’ll create some smokiness in the air.
Set the type to Dynamic Scale it down to about 30
Hold ALT on the Offset stopwatch and type: Square brackets
Zero comma Time times minus twenty
Close square brackets Which gives us some rising smoke
Then on the Evolution stopwatch, alt-click and time times 100.
So we get some movement in the smoke.
Drop the effect’s opacity to 50% And change the blending mode to multiply.
Turn the hologram back on, and you’re there.
To save as an effects preset.
In the Effects Controls panel, hold CTRL and tap A to select all the effects, then go to
Animation…
Save Animation Preset.
When you add it to a new comp, onto a duplicate of your hologram, then all you need to do
is select the hologram layer for the position and pickwhip the origin point or manually
position it.
I like to use a Null layer, because you can also link a lens flare.
And the Skew, Rotation and Offset controls let me tidy up the beams so they always look
right.
And there’s nothing stopping you duplicating the layer to add additional beams when you
have a wide comp and you need coverage.
And that’s it - it gets into the weeds around the expressions admittedly, but that’s the
beauty of a preset, you only have to do it once - and if you like making your own presets,
check out this tutorial, which barely uses expressions to create a cool, curvy arrow.