oh God
hey guys welcome back to another HitFilm tutorial we love Sci-Fi movies both watching them and
creating them here in the studio and we know you guys do too so today we're taking a look
at how to create some really cool Blaster effects inside of HitFilm if you're unfamiliar
with HitFilm it's our free video editing and visual effects software which you can download
right now in the description to follow along with this tutorial we're also giving you a
couple of free pre-made Shockwave assets and a green screen plate to play around with and
to demo all the things that we're going to be teaching you today we've created a really
cool sketch but we're saving it until the end so be sure to stick around we've put a
lot of work into it and we hope you guys like it so for now let's get into the tutorial
for the mid shot directing am I right let's kick things off by learning how to create
the Shockwave effect inside of hitfilm now this step is slightly more advanced because
it requires the particle simulator effect if you're not interested in that or you're
just using the free version of hitfilm skip ahead to the time code shown on screen to
focus on the compositing side of things to make the Shockwave I'll create a new composite
shot inside of HitFilm and add the particle simulator effect in the controls panel change
the shape to Circle and position it over the opening of The Gun Barrel depending on the
shot I'm working on I'll either set the trajectory to explode which means the particles will
go outwards or cone which means they'll go in a specific Direction next because this
is a very quick shock wave we need to adjust the speed of the particles as a result we'll
also need to lower the life so that they don't last as long in the appearance section set
the texture source to built in and then choose one of the fire ferocity textures or whichever
pits you're seeing check mark aligns to motion so that they all Point towards their target
once you're happy with your texture adjust the scale as needed now select your particle
system and go into the alpha section of the lifetime panel add a black point at the beginning
and end of the gradient this means the particles will fade instead of popping in and out of
existence to make these particles look more fluid I'll add the atomic particles effect
directly onto the particle simulator coming to the fractal settings and adjust the display
strength and wavelength these two make quite a big difference in the way the particles
look you might need to adjust the size under appearance to get the particles to show up
a bit more once you're happy with the amount and movement of the particles you'll want
to keyframe the particles per second property to go from that starting amount down to zero
over a couple frames this will result in a burst of particles instead of them lasting
for the entire shot hey be sure to like And subscribe to the channel if you're not already
or I'll come blast you now that we've got the base of the Shockwave set we can move
on to the compositing stage which means overlaying it onto the actual footage here's a tip to
make your compositing easier if you're planning on using a bunch of assets motion track the
movement of the Gun Barrel using hitfilm's 2D point tracker and attach that data onto
a point layer this comes in handy because instead of animating the same motion for all
of these assets I can just tie them all to one point layer and be done with it the particle
simulator or the assets we gave you the next step is to line up the shock wave to appear
at the correct time and position on screen this will obviously be as your actor starts
to fire a shot and the gun moves backwards here's a random acting tip for your performer
if you have more than one person on set you can show them how the gun should move when
they fire it by banging on the end of it that's such a good tip right click the layer and
set the blend to either add or screen let's use either the Hue colorize or the color Vibrance
effect to give it the shade that we want then a glow or super glow effect to really make
it pop if your actor isn't shooting directly down the barrel of the camera you might need
to make the shock wave look a bit more 3D to do that come over and select this icon
here then use the rotation controls in the controls panel to position it correctly on
screen now the shock wave is only one piece of the Sci-Fi muzzle flashes I layered up
a bunch of different elements to make it look a lot more explosive the lightning and electricity
effect is a good way to add more details into your muzzle flash I'll start by turning off
the globe because we'll add this back in later I'll position the start point to be in the
gun barrel and the endpoint to be off screen you can increase the trunks control to have
more beams in your lightning effect the wave scale controls how far off center these beams
can get and the twitch scale controls the distortion both the start and end points have
this growth property which means you can animate it to make the lightning look like it's moving
for this shot specifically I ended up using two lightning effects one for the core beam
and another for all the thinner branches of lightning then I'll add super glow on top
I can colorize this in the style drop down finally a heat Distortion to make it look
less clean in CG [Music] I also used a lot of lens flares positioned directly in the
barrel of the gun the custom light flares effect specifically comes with a load of different
presets for a bunch of different results if you're feeling really crazy and have a lot
of time try using a different flare for each muzzle flash your audience won't have any
idea what's coming next I'll keyframe the intensity of the flare to go up and down to
zero for a quick flash speaking of lighting and lens flares we didn't actually use too
many lights on set for the actual firing of the muzzle flashes this is because we wanted
to keep the color flexible in post and kind of just use whatever ended up looking good
but for the rest of the scene we did know what the background was going to look like
because we built it in Unreal Engine beforehand we had this when we were filming on set and
we colored the lights depending on which way Tom was going to be facing this helps integrate
him into the scene better so if you can decide what colors you want to use before you get
on set that will inform your decisions and will make the compositing a lot easier I also
use the particle simulator to create Sparks with each gunshot the technique for this is
similar to creating the shock wave but you'll want to increase the particles per second
so that you have a lot more Sparks on screen then set the texture source to something like
Ember variation or even the default Circle just remember to turn on motion blur if the
motion of the particles is looking a bit too uniform you can at force and change the type
to turbulence this means the particles will still move in the direction you specified
but they'll be a bit more chaotic and have some Randomness in their motions remember
that with each of these elements you should experiment with the color texture and intensity
of the light you can get a lot of different results just by playing around with some of
these settings so now that you know how all these elements work together let's take a
look at what happens when you really have some fun with it
[Music]
yes I told you I'm doing it
so yeah that is what happens when you combine all of the elements that we've learned about
today the lens dirt lightning shock waves everything that adds up into one big spectacle
you can see how some of those little details like shock waves and Sparks really build that
cinematic sci-fi world don't forget to download both HitFilm and those free assets the link
for them are in the description if you want to know how we created those cinematic environments
be sure to check out our Black Adam tutorial we'll wrap this up for now so hopefully you
guys enjoyed leave a like And subscribe and we'll see you all in the next video