So last week I asked you guys whether I should cut my hair or not.
I was actually hoping I could cut my hair as it's starting to get irritating,
but since most if you like my long hair
and wild hair,
I'll keep it.
Anyways, this weekend I did a live stream for the MSI Creator Awards,
which was super fun.
We had two cameras, a presentation, sound effects and music.
And we all brought that into OBS where Lorenzo could do a video mix.
This was really cool, actually,
I talked about the history of Cinecom, gave a workshop and reviewed some submissions.
So yeah, that was my weekend. How was yours?
Let me know when it comments below.
What did you guys do this weekend?
Alright, I've been thinking about visual effects and the most common mistakes that people make.
Usually, these are extra details that sell the effects a lot more.
So here are five super simple tricks that take your VFX to the next level.
Say that you have some kind of energy effect or a fire overlay,
anything that generates heat,
and what you can't forget about it with such an effect are heat waves,
or a distortion around the fire.
And here's how to do that.
First duplicate your fire clip.
Underneath that I'm going to place an adjustment layer.
And from the track matte column, I'm going to select alpha matte,
and this way we're using the shape of the fire as a mask on the adjustment layer.
When we now apply a simple turbulent displace effect on the adjustment layer
and disable the output of the duplicate fire,
you'll see that the distortion takes of the shape of that fire.
So this is a good start.
You can enable the very top fire back and we're going to change the mask
or the matte a little bit, and we can do that by adding the Gaussian blur effect to it.
This will already create a more distorted edge around the fire,
but we can also increase this scale a little bit
so that the distortion takes up more around the fire.
Finally, you can tweak the look of the distortion more within the turbulent displace effect
and animate the evolution
to have it move around a little bit more.
But that's pretty much it.
Next up is a great tip if you're working with overlay smoke.
We have some colored lights in the studio
so the smoke shouldn't be plain white,
it should reflect the colors of the light and here is a very simple trick to do that.
Locate the four-color gradient effect
and apply that to the smoke clip.
For starters, I'm going to change the blending mode within that effect
to soft light,
so that it's only applied to the smoke.
Next up you can change the position of the points
of where the studio lights are at
and then, of course, change the colors of those points.
Furthermore, you can tweak the opacity if you need more or less color reflection
and change to blend,
which will blend the different color points more or less together.
And here's how that end result looks like.
Next up, greenscreens.
Here we've got a simple shot of Gilles standing in front of a greenscreen
and to make him blend better with the background,
we're going to create a light wrap.
Now mostly we use a keying plug-in from Red Giant, which has a built-in light wrap tool,
but if you don't have that and working with Keylight,
then here's a great trick that I got from After Effects Tutorials with Mikey.
Basically you duplicate your background and place it on top.
We're going to call it light wrap.
Now in this duplication you add the effect called set matte.
From your layer options you select the greenscreen clip
and make sure that effects and masks is selected.
And this will simply take the green screen clip as a matte for your duplicated background.
Next add a Gaussian blur to the clip
and blur it a little bit so that you get these soft edges.
And finally add the set matte again to the clip on the bottom.
Change the layer to the greenscreen as well and make sure effects and masks is selected.
The only thing left to do is enable inverse mask on the first set matte effect.
So we basically use everything around the talent and then take everything within the talent,
so you should end up with nothing,
but because we've blurred that layer, we are left with a thin line.
And we can choose how much we want to blend this now.
We can set this to add and have it very prominent or perhaps play with the opacity.
Alright, before we continue, I'd like to mention that we put up our Action Elements pack for sale
on Cinecom.net
This pack includes eighty overlay effects like cinematic lens flares,
muzzle flashes, particles and smoke
and it's all shot on the RED digital cinema camera,
and we've exported everything to a high-quality ProRes Codec.
But if you like, for only $10 extra you can get the RED raw files
and have a lot more Flexibility in post.
You can find all the information about the pack on our website
or by clicking the first link in the description down below.
And because we're launching this new pack,
the first 100 people to use the coupon cinecom10 at check out
will get 10% discount.
But before you do that, let's first continue with lighting effects,
or lightsabers,
as that is something we all love to create,
but we cannot forget about the light it emits and the reflections it creates.
Here we have such an example of Gilles holding a lightsaber
and we're going to add some lights to his face.
And the easiest way to do that is by adding an adjustment layer on top
and then take the pen tool to draw a mask around your talent's face.
And that could be on one side.
If you then right-click on your mask and choose track mask
and from the window that pops open
you can track it so that it follows the movement of the face.
When that is done, change the blending mode to add and then disable the layer
to be an adjustment layer.
And this will add this glow around your subject which we don't need,
so I'm going to add the effect called lumetri
to the adjustment layer and from here pull back the exposure
to not have that too much on Gille's face.
Furthermore, you can use lumetri to change the color corresponding to the lightsaber,
and that's pretty much it.
You can now go ahead and animate the opacity of the adjustment layer,
so that the light reflection is more prominent when the lightsaber is close or further away.
A little bonus step guys,
if you can, try to use a real light on the set to mimic that lightsaber reflection.
This will give you a much more realistic result as you also get the shadows of the nose and all.
And that brings us to the last trick, which are object reflections.
Here, I've got an energy ball floating above the ground.
So to make it more realistic
there should be a reflection on the floor.
And here's how to do that.
Duplicate the energy ball,
then right-click on the duplicate,
go to transform and choose flip vertical.
Then move that clip down on the floor,
which already creates some kind of a reflection but it's way too hard.
So let's take the rectangle mask tool and cut a piece from it.
From the mask properties, increase the feather of the mask.
It's already starting to look a lot better, but depending on your surface
you have more or less reflection.
Now use the Gaussian blur effect on the reflection clip to diffuse that reflection.
Water will have less diffusion than concrete,
but I think that's pretty obvious.
And finally, you can play around with the opacity,
which is basically how much of your surface reflects the light back.
A wet floor will reflect more than dry floor.
Using this technique will also have the animation of the energy ball and the reflection
than if we would just blend a colored mask underneath it.
And those were my five super simple tricks to make your visual effects more realistic.
I hope that you've learned something new today. Thank you for watching.
Don't forget now to check out the Action Elements pack by clicking at first link
down below.
And as always...
Stay creative!