hello everyone and welcome to another after effects tutorial my name is Tyler Bradley and
this is Creativid Studios. Today, we're gonna be doing crack
effects in After Effects and
we're gonna be doing it using a displacement map that we generated completely in After Effects using an
effect called cell pattern. Let's just jump into it. So first things first, make a new composition.
We'll call it "map," so obviously this is gonna be the displacement map. Make it the size that you
want your final footage to be. I'll just have HD and then hit "okay." Next, we'll make a solid (command + Y)
-if you're on Windows, whenever I say "command," it just means ctrl. We'll make it the comp size
and it doesn't matter what color it is hit "OK." Now the majority of this effect is based off of an effect- uh... I
guess an effect called cell pattern, like I said earlier. So if we just put it on, the default is
the "bubbles" preset I guess and it doesn't look good. Well, I mean it looks fine, but that's not
at all what we want. We want to use "plates" and right now even it doesn't look all that good, so
we're gonna have to adjust some settings. First thing, let's bump up the size to a size that you
think the middle of the crack should be... so 140. That's like a good crack size, I guess. Disperse
we just crank that up all the way, just so it's a little more random. So that's actually as high as
it goes though (1.5). And then turn up sharpness a ton, actually probably even more than this.
I'll just do a thousand. That's a hundred. Okay, that's actually all you have to do for this
this effect in here. And now so we want the glass to be shattered more in like one part and then
have like larger pieces radiate from that. To do that we're going to use "optics compensation."
And this is usually used for like compensating for lens distortions in like GoPro footage for
example or like anything with like a "fish-eye" or wide-angle lens. Which is weird because when you crank
this up it, has the- it's going in the opposite direction and actually makes it more fisheye.
But so we crank it up and then we want to have it in the opposite direction right there ish. And
now let's get our center point to where we want our main crack to originate. Maybe something over
here. And so yeah you can see it's a little fuzzy here, so we'll go back into this cell pattern and
just maybe crank this to 3,000. Originally it says like 600 is the limit but as you can see
you can clearly boost that even higher so we'll leave it like that and that is exactly what we
want for the optics compensation. What's cool about making your own displacement maps is that they're
customizable to what you want so you can reduce the size and then like have it expand more stuff.
There are some issues with this because any time you scale or distort something you're distorting
the pixels. So I'm just going to reset those. Um we'll go back into our project panel and pull
our map into a new composition. So I just dragged it into this little box here. Now we do "command K"
and we're just going to rename it "final composite." Okay I'm gonna pull in my footage that I want to
make the camera cracked over. Temporarily, I'm just gonna shut off this map. My footage is of this like
hallway scene it was just a free image - it's just an image, so I'm going to animate the background.
Okay so I'm back. Now that we have that, we need to create an adjustment layer "command +
alt + Y" or "ctrl alt Y" obviously. We're gonna add the displacement effect to this adjustment layer, but
if we were to add it directly to our background layer, it would move with the camera movement we
could get around that by pre composing that layer and then adding it but let's not do that because
there's no need. So we have the adjustment layer let's add a displacement map to that and let's
change both settings to luminance or you could do lightness it does absolutely the same thing;
I don't know why it's two separate things. If you guys know the difference between them, just let
me know; I'm curious. So obviously, right now it's using the layers below the adjustment layer, so
this layer as the map, so we got to change that to our map. And we want to leave it on source, so it's
looking at the original map because we're gonna add some more effects to this map layer just to
make those edges pop a little more. So to do that we'll add "find edges." And it's gonna look at the
areas of contrast, in our map - so here's without it, here's with it. We want the edges to be white and
the rest to be black, so we'll just invert that. And we want these edges to stand out on our footage so
we could right now just switch this to an additive sort of blend mode. It'd be like that and we could
adjust the opacity and everything, but I don't want to do that. I want to keep it on "normal" because
I want to have only the lines be opaque I want this black to not even exist and just be alpha (transparency).
So I can color correct these lines to do that I'm gonna use a preset called, "Unmult." "Unmult" is
like a third-party plugin, I believe, so this is a workaround that just comes with After Effects.
It's two effects: "Shift channels" and "remove color matting" and it has the same effect as Unmult. And
when you use this, anything that was black turned to alpha. Under that we're gonna add a gradient, so
we can have some color back in here. I'm just gonna mess around with these colors until I get a color
combination that I think looks pretty cool. Right now, I'm going to swap the blend mode for either
"add" or "screen." And we're just gonna adjust the opacity quite a bit -maybe like 30. Let's take a
look at what we got I think this is pretty much it for the effect. It's pretty cool how you can
customize the effect. So now you can do cracks in After Effects. Pretty cool. Thank you everyone for
watching this tutorial. My name is Tyler Bradway, this is Creativid Studios. To stay updated on
more tutorials please subscribe. If you like this video, if it was helpful, hit that like
button. It'll help me get more views. And thank you, I appreciate all you guys. Have fun animating. Bye!