I think that's in focus hey guys welcome back to another VFX tutorial today we're
gonna be taking a look at how to create magic energy ball VFX inside a HitFilm
now you can do this inside of HitFilm Express but we're going to be
using the particle simulator so you'll need the 3d particles add-on if you want
to follow along so here's the set up for the final shoot I've got the camera here
in the kitchen and then about maybe 10 15 feet away is this other equipment so
I've got the fan to get some atmosphere going I've got a reflector to bounce
light onto my face which is coming from the window left a
green screen which has a green light on it and this orange one provides sort of
a side light here and that's pretty much it and it's pretty cramped in here but I
think it'll do so we're not going to go over how I did the green screen because
we've done that in tutorials before and the background was created using stock
images and Unreal Engine 4 the focus of this tutorial will just be the energy
ball VFX but if you have any questions about the other techniques I use - feel
free to leave them in the comments below let's open up HitFilm and get started
the energy ball that you see in the final VFX shot is made of basically
three different parts let's create the first one now what I'll do is come up to
new composite shot and I'll call this energy ball core and the final project
was in 4k but I'll go ahead and make it 1080p
then I'll make the height 1920 so that it's a square and hit OK let's go ahead
and bring in the particle simulator and you can see if I hit play that we've got
a spawn of particles in the middle come over here to the controls panel on the
left and under emitters change the shape to circle basically what this means is
that the particles will come from a circle shape instead of a single point
you can increase the size of that circle if you want under trajectory I'll change
it from random to explode so that the particles go outwards and then I'll go
into the particle systems under movement and set the speed to something much
higher around 2000 this is going to cause the particles to fly off-screen to
create that sort of back and forth motion between the particles I use a
force so let's go ahead and add that using the plus icon here
under the force settings change the type to attraction because the force has a
center of zero zero zero that means it's at the center of the screen so the
particles will first explode outwards and then be attracted to this force
which is in the center which will cause the back-and-forth waving motion the
particles are dying a bit soon they're kind of reaching the edge but then
they're popping off screen so let's go ahead and go into the system and
increase the life to maybe something like three or four there we go so now we
have a back and forth motion to the particles they are still popping in and
off screen which I want to prevent select the particle system then come
over to the lifetime panel come down to alpha and then change the type to
gradient this gradient represents the transparency of the particles over their
lifetime so right now it's white the whole time which means it's going to
have a solid opacity throughout the entire lifespan if I come in here and
click to add a point at the beginning and end this will make the particles
fade in and out as they're born and as they die which makes for a smoother
transition now for the texture I'll come into the appearance section and change
the texture source to built-in for the texture I'll use fire ferocity one now
let's introduce some variation in the particles by coming down to the
appearance variation section I'll increase the texture angle per second
this will make them spin over time and then I'll set the texture angle to one
this means that the particles can be rotated in any degree from zero to 360
then I'll come down to movement variation and maybe adjust the life and
the scale a little bit and maybe the speed as well these settings are up to
you but they introduce variation in the movement of your particles I'll go ahead
under general and add a few more particles per second so that we have
some more on screen and then in the transform properties I'll just lower the
scale of the whole system so that it stays within the box I'll increase the
scale of it under movement and fine-tune the particles per second to match cool
so that's pretty much set now if you want to introduce more variation what
you can do is duplicate this particle system since you
ready have it set up and then come down into general and change the seed this
will make a different simulation and then you can change the texture you can
change basically whatever you want and it will have a lot of the settings that
we've already set up so maybe I'll choose a more subtle texture like
shockwave and maybe I'll increase the life so that they last a bit longer you
can add as many of these particle systems as you want to introduce
variation now what I'll do is add a distortion so you have four that you can
choose from energy fluid heat and smoke I'm going to use heat in this case but
you can use whichever looks best to you and then I'll play with the settings a
bit to distort the particles so that they're not as uniform throughout I
might also add a diffuse as well to soften them up and don't forget to turn
on motion blur down here because the particles are moving so they should be
quite blurry and that's pretty much it for this first section of the particle
system now we can move on to the next one which is creating the light rays
that come off of it so I'll come back into the media panel and select new
again and I'll name this one energy ball starfish because that's what it looks
like so for this what I'll do is create a new plane layer and onto this I'll
drag the light flares effect in the controls panel I'll drop down the
hotspot position and set it to zero zero so it's perfectly centered then I'll
change the flare type down to micro particle streak and you can see we get a
lot of extra bits on the side here in this case I don't want those to appear
so I can turn them off by going into other elements and setting the
brightness to zero this will leave us with just the rays next I'll drop down
the hotspot and decrease the brightness almost all the way but then increase the
brightness of the rays themselves all the way up so that we're left with less
of a hotspot and more of just the light rays
now I'll drop a hue saturation and lightness effect and drop the saturation
all the way down to zero so the shape is there but it's a little
bit sharp if i zoom in here you can see that the texture itself is very sharp so
I'm going to decrease that a bit with a radial blur effect and since that
happens in the center that's where it will take place you can increase this as
much as you want to soften the effect maybe I'll also add a another diffuse as
well to make this flare spin over time what I'll do is come down into the ray
section again and keyframe the rotation so I'll activate keyframes at the start
skip to the end and then set this to one times over now to introduce variations
similar to the particles what I'll do is duplicate the flare and then offset the
rotation by something a little bit more random and then I'll increase or
decrease the quantity scale basically you just want to make it look different
from the first flare so that when you play them together they appear to move
as two different pieces you can play with the length scale and the width as
well if you want to get a different look I might duplicate it once more and make
some smaller flares
all right now I'm gonna go ahead and add a light rays effect onto the same plane
and change the blend to screen increase the radius until you start to see the
light rays and then adjust the intensity to fit your scene when we set
this to screen in the composite not a lot of it will disappear because not a
lot of the screen is black right now so what I'll do is add a quick curves
effect and increase the contrast quite a bit you can come back and adjust this
later if it doesn't work now some extra things you can add to make it look a bit
more unique are the heat distortion options so I'll go ahead and do that as
well as maybe a twirl this one you want to keep quite subtle cuz otherwise it's
pretty obvious and I'll just go ahead and decrease the scale a bit on all of
these so that they don't reach the edge as much for the last piece of the energy
ball we're going to use a free stock video from rocket stock this is a
collection of paint overlays that they've released for free and which you
can find in the description because this is a stop video we have to do a bit of
work to make it look seamless so let's go ahead and do that now what
I'll do is create a new comp and I'll make this the regular 1920 by 1080 and
I'll bring the paint into that right click transform and fit to frame width
just so that we can see all of it and basically the end result that I want to
get is to add a polar warp and have the paint sort of moving either inwards or
outwards depending on what you're going for you can see that there are two
problems the first is the scene down here on the bottom because it's not a
perfect texture and you can see that both the inner and outer edges aren't
feathered which makes for a bit of a rougher effect so we want to be able to
feather those and we want the transition to be seamless so I'll go ahead and take
off the polar work effect and basically what we need to do is
create a texture that is seamless out of this video so what I'll do is come over
to the transform properties and adjust the position so that the crosshair here
is on the exact left side of the screen and in this case that's negative 960
which is half of 1920 which is the width of our company then what I'll do is
duplicate it and move that X position to positive 960 so basically what we've
done is we've taken our video and we've scooted it over to the left but we've
had the other side of the video come in on the right now what we can do is
duplicate the footage once more and reset its position to 0 and then draw a
mask in the center here so I'm holding down the Alt key to draw from the center
and I'll just position it over the senior then under shape feather it to
make the blend a bit smoother so it might not be easy to tell but what we
have here is a seamless texture so if I select all of these and make them into
their own comp I'll call this paint seam fix
then if I go back into this comp and add the polar work effect you can see that
there is now no seam anywhere inside of the circle now to feather the edges what
I'll do is come up and select the rectangular mask tool and draw a shape
right here in the center this will cut a hole out of the center and also around
the edges and if I come in and feather that shape you can see it affects both
the inner and outer sides of the polar warp effect you can adjust which part of
the polar warp is cut out by moving the mask here so if I move it down you can
see that only the outer edges will be feathered if I move it all the way up
only the inner part will and if I keep it in the center here we'll get sort of
a doughnut shape that is feathered on both sides if you haven't already you
can also make the composite a square as well to keep things neat so now we have
the three parts for our energy ball and we can actually start building it so to
keep things moving smoothly I'm going to use a picture of the background instead
of a video because it is quite an intensive comp to render so let's go
ahead and bring in our core outline and starfish comps and what I'll do to make
this easier to control is create a new point layer and we'll call this energy
ball position because that's what it's going to represent then I'll select all
three of these comps and parent them to the point so now if I move the point all
of the energy ball comps will move along with it so this is how you would animate
it to follow an actor's hand or to move around the screen you would keyframe the
position at this point let's go one by one here so I'll start with the core and
you can see that it is already transparent which is good but I'll go
ahead and set it to screen you can also set it to add depending on how you want
it to blend with your scene so to color this what I'm going to do is add a
curves effect and I'll go ahead and add that directly to the core layer then in
the controls panel come down to the red channel and bring that down quite a bit
come down to the green channel and bring that down as well if you want you can
also add a little bit of green in the highlights totally up to you
and now we have our color so let's make it glow by adding a couple of these
effects onto it if you lower the threshold more of the energy will be
affected but basically you tweak these settings as you need them so I'll
increase the radius to make it a bit softer adjust the intensity maybe I'll
go back and change the color a bit to fix it make it a bit more blue so that's
a good starting point let's go ahead and move on to the other ones and we'll come
back and fix it if needed let's turn on the starfish comp and I'll set the blend
for that to screen again and I'll make it a bit bigger so that the light rays
are visible on the outside I'll make the point a bit smaller so that the energy
ball is a bit more like it was in the actual scene and I'll show you another
way to add color is the color vibrance effect so I'll add that directly to the
starfish and you can see it takes effect right away but I'll go ahead and select
a similar blue color the vibrance is sort of the saturation that it is maybe
I'll add another radial blur effect just to smooth it out a bit more
let's go ahead and turn on the outline composite and you can see that already
has a green tinge to it so I'll go ahead and add a hue saturation and lightness
and drop that down to zero to give us a good starting point then once again I'll
set the blend to screen and increase the size as I see fit it's a bit sharp so
maybe I'll add a blur and or a diffuse and to color this one I'll use another
curves effect
for this outline I also lowered the opacity so that it's not as visible it's
more of a hint that it's there and that's how you can create an energy ball
in three steps obviously I did a lot of tweaking for the sort of light rays and
the color and trying to make it match a bit better I would recommend adding a
lens flare on top you can also add lens dirt or more stock footage elements to
help blend it a bit better and again if you want to move the energy ball around
you can use this single point layer yeah that's about it for this video if you
guys have any questions feel free to leave them down below and don't forget
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tutorials thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next video