Hey guys, Yannick here for Cinecom.net
and welcome back to Copycat Friday.
And today's video will be especially for Jordy.
As you all know, Jordy is a major World of Warcraft nerd.
Major.
And when he's not working, he's playing World of Warcraft on this beautiful LG Gram laptop.
With it he can play everywhere due to its long battery life
and perfect portability.
Now, I think he was 16 when he started playing
and he even made a World of Warcraft short movie around that time.
Check that out.
So we can say for sure that he is a World of Warcraft veteran.
And you can already guess what we are doing today,
a World of Warcraft magic spell.
To be more precise, we are doing a fireball attack from a fire mage.
And I'm going to be honest,
it's not going to be the most easy tutorial,
but it's going to be super awesome.
Now, what do we need?
Well, a shot of an actor throwing a fake fireball at his victim.
The victim can, of course, react to the impact of the magic spell
at the right timing.
What we also did was using a movable light.
We mounted the light on a light stand and then moved the light from one side
to the other, at the same pace we want to animate our fireball.
And this movement can be quite fast.
Okay, I think we are ready for the post-production of the fireball effect.
And though yet,
we have something extra for you guys on the end of the tutorial.
So stick with me and then let's open After Effects.
First we, of course, are going to make the ball itself.
Let's start by making a solid,
the color doesn't really matter.
Now add the fractal noise effect and change some settings until you have something like this here.
We are going to use the fractal noise as a texture for the fireball,
so you can choose which look you want for it.
But what you do need to do is animate the sub rotation and the evolution.
This will give some random movement in your fireball.
We are going to do this with a simple expression.
Just alt click on the evolution stopwatch and type time asterisk 30.
The number will be the speed of the evolution,
so the higher the number, the faster the animation will be.
Now do exactly the same for the sub rotation
but here use 10 instead of 30.
The next effect we are going to add is the motion tile.
With this effect we are going to create an endless loop where the fractal noise moves from right to left.
Just enable the mirror edges option and then animate the tile center.
Again do this with the time expression like before,
but this time the expression looks a little bit different.
First, open a square bracket
then type time asterisk 200,
then a comma, 0 and close the bracket again.
Voilà.
Now the motion tile is animated.
On to the next effect, CC sphere.
Well, this effect is pretty obvious, it transforms your clip into a sphere.
With the radius you can now choose the size of the sphere
and with the offset you can move it around.
Super simple.
However, you do need to change the light intensity to 300 and the light height to 100.
Look at that, we already have a rotating ball.
Now let's add some colors.
First, take the tint effect and drag that to the ball.
Here, change the map white to option to light orange,
then add a new effect, a simple glow.
Again play around the settings until you have something you like.
Boom!
Your ball is done.
No. No, sorry.
Not in the long shot.
Next up is some extra glow.
Duplicate the ball layer and add the fast box blur to the duplicates and increase the blur radius a bunch.
Next up, we are going to use stock clips to finish up the effect.
The first stock video is this dancing particles clip from our own action elements pack,
but you can use whatever particles clip you want.
Now copy the effects from our first ball,
except for the fractal noise and paste that to our particle stock clip.
Now adjust some settings of the pasted effects.
Within the motion tile effect, disable the mirror edges option.
In the tint we are going to change the map white to option
to a darker orange, and that's it.
And of course, we need the tint effect because our particles are white
and not orange.
And yeah, of course also position it with the other ball.
Now the last stock clip can be some fire.
Here just add the CC Bend it effect and set the bend property to minus 250.
Again position it correctly.
Okay, the last step for the fireball is going to be some extra glow
and extra roughness on the edges.
Super simple.
Just create a new solid layer and add the free saber plugin from Video Copilot.
Here set the preset to fire and change the settings to your likings,
we mostly increase the core distortion amount.
Now draw a circle mask on the saber layer
and position the mask on the contours of your fireball.
Then with the customized core property
you can set the core type to layer masks,
which will set the saber effect in the shape of the mask.
The last thing you need to do is set every clip's blending mode to add.
Look at that!
Our cool fireball is ready.
And now is a perfect timing to tell you about our sponsor Storyblocks Video.
With their huge library of stock clips, they are perfect for every filmmaker.
Like the fire stock clip we used before, we found it on Storyblocks.
But they have a lot more than that.
They also have plenty of particle clips, like the one we used.
Or if you want some drone shots,
well, they have it.
They even have some cool macro shots of insects.
And let's not forget the super awesome After Effects templates they have.
Super easy to customize and ready to be your next logo animation.
Now to get Storyblocks Video
you only need to pay one single price per year.
And then you can download as much as you want.
Unlimited downloads.
So stop wasting time and go to the first link in the description below
and start downloading.
Let's continue,
we still need to make the fire trail behind the fireball.
Start inside a new composition, and we are again going to do the same thing as before.
Create a solid layer, add the fractal noise effect to it
and change the settings to your likings.
Here the most important setting is the width scaling, which can be rather big.
This way you will have a horizontal stretch fractal noise layer.
Oh yeah,
also animate the evolution and the sub offset with those time expressions from before.
Next you can pre-comp the fractal noise layer and use a tint effect to make it orange.
Then we will start with particle world.
Create a new solid and add CC particle world to it.
Now It's time to change some settings.
First, increase the birth rate and lower the longevity.
Then for the physics we are going to lower the velocity,
the inherit velocity and the gravity,
but you can also increase the resistance.
For the particle options, we are going to set the particle type to darken and faded sphere.
Increase the birth size and the size variation,
then lower the death size and the max opacity.
With the opacity map
we are going to create a slope, starting high ending low.
This will make the particles fade out towards the end.
Then last, set the birth and death color to white.
Okay, now you will have something like this here.
Not fiery at all.
So let's continue with the next effect,
the roughen edges.
Also, add this to the particle clip.
Set the edge type to spiky and play around with the settings until you have something you like.
Now for the last effect on this clip,
CC vector blur,
you can set the type to direction fading and lower the amount a bunch.
Okay, our particles are done.
Now we can use this particle clip as a track matte for the fractal noise clip.
So for the track matte option of the fractal noise, you can choose alpha matte.
Now we see the fractal noise in the shape of our particles.
However, it's missing some movement.
Create a null object and we're going to link our emitter to that null,
so we can easily animate the particles.
To do this,
you sadly need some difficult expressions,
but we made it easy for you and you can just copy them from our website.
You'll find a link in the description below.
So first make your null object 3d, then open up the particle world properties
and under producer you have three position properties.
Alt click on all three of them and paste the right expression in the expression box.
And that's it.
Now your emitter is linked to the null and you can move it around as much as you want.
Next up is adding some more depth to the flames.
So select both particle and the fractal clip and duplicate them.
In the top particle clip you can now make your producer smaller
and also decrease the birth rate and size of the top particle clip.
Last, adjust the blending mode of the top fractal noise clip to screen.
Also, make it a little bit more bright or orange,
creating that depth in the flames.
The thing is now that you probably have this weird looking blop on your screen.
This looks nothing like fire.
Well, that's because we need to animate it.
Take your null object and animate it from left to right.
If you do this, you will see a very cool flame trail.
Now take the shadow of the actor and the fireball
and place that in our composition with the flame trail.
Then the last thing you need to do is position everything you want,
animate the fireball so that it comes in and moves from left to right,
and probably match the animation of the fire trail to the ball.
Then last you can also add another layer with the fire saber effect on it
for some extra glow.
But that's not mandatory if you don't want to.
And that's it for the effect.
Jordy.
Can you come help me move the lights?
They are quite heavy.
Yeah, I'm coming.
Just a minute.
Hey, Jordy.
Yeah.
Can you come help me with these walls?
Can't you do that alone?
They're quite heavy.
I'm coming.
Just a minute.
Jordy.
I know you are in the bathroom.
What?
I can't find the greenscreen, Jordy.
I'm coming.
What, Gilles? What?
I can't find the greenscreen.
Come on, man. I'm trying to do important work here.
Just leave me alone.
Wow!
I can shoot fireballs!
I'm going to Azeroth.
Now, like you see, we did some extra fire spells to summon the fireball,
But sadly we couldn't make this without trapcode particular.
However, we do have a little surprise for you guys.
We know we went really fast over the details of the effects,
and that's why we decided to give our project file of the fireball for free to you guys.
This way you can look at our settings in your own time.
Just go to the description below and find a link for the download.
Time for Yannick's Fun Fact Fountain!
A short World of Warcraft fact.
The Blizzard team needed five and a half million lines of code to give us World of Warcraft.
That's about 99 thousand pages of text.
And to put it in perspective, it took a team of 51 programmers,
five years to write all that code.
And this all so that Jordy can play as a little known mage
called Bilbo.
Yeah.
And that was it for today guys.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you learned something new.
Thank you Storyblocks Video for the support.
And like always...
Stay creative!
𝅘𝅥𝅮 Particles do whatever a particle does 𝅘𝅥𝅮