Today's effect is out of this world. I'm only a little bit sorry for that. Welcome to another
HitFilm tutorial, today we are looking at 2.5D and creating a space nebula and planet.
Lets begin with our Background. I have my Composite Shot already set-up, with
all the assets imported. We have a texture which we’ll be using for our planet, as
well as space image which we’ll be using for this segment.
I’ll drag this over into my Composite Shot and scale it down for the time being to see
the complete image. We’ll be using a technique usually referred to as 2.5D, this involves
taking a photograph, masking around particular areas and moving them in Z space in order
to create a sensation of depth. This is usually used for 3D scenery or Matte Paintings, for
more on this topic see to the title card onscreen now. With that out of the way, let's dive
into it. We first need to establish the sections of
our image that will stand at different depths. In this case, I’ll use this dark cloud as
the nearest element, this cosmic gorilla part shortly behind, this star cluster in the distance
and the image as a whole as the background. As I need four pieces I’ll need four images,
so I’ll select the image layer and press Control D to duplicate.
So by going into the Viewer window, let's select the freehand Mask Tool and cut around
each of the sections we want. With it being space clouds- don’t worry about these being
too neat, we can use feathering to help separate the edges. What’s important is avoiding
clear overlaps between sections. With everything divided, we can now make our camera.
Click the New Layer tab above the Timeline and select Camera.
In order to move our layers in Z Space, we must first set them to 3D. We can do this
by going to the Layer Dimension icon & if we click we’re presented with the option
for either 2D, it’s current setting or 3D. Let’s select 3D.
Open the layer properties & under transform find Position. Now that we have the layer
set to 3D we have a third option on our values, this last one is the Z axis. Let's move the
original complete image back, as this will need to be the farthest. The remainder can
be evenly spread throughout the space. We want enough distance between them to cause
a form of parallax. This is the visual displacement between positions caused by distance. However,
you can see by our camera view that the image is now smaller, so go into each layer and
scale up till it reflects what was the original image. If we quickly rotate or move the camera
position we can now see some parallax motion. If you can’t seem to see any, try adjusting
the distance between sections even further. At this stage, I wanted to adjust the grade
of my image. Creating a Grade layer from the New layer tab, and adjust the Hue & Saturation
to something a little colder. Now we have our main background lets create
an alien planet. I have this cracked earth texture that I liked
the look of, due to a particular effect we’ll be using later we’ll need to turn this into
its own composite shot. So we’ll right click and go to Make Composite shot. Rename this
Planet and hit OK. While we’re in here, let's add what will
become the planet's rotation. Open the layer properties and increase the scale, only by
20 points. Adjust the position until we reach the corner of the image & drop a keyframe.
Move forward about 15 seconds, or however long your shot may be and move the position
to the other side. You should now have a slow crawl across the image. Let’s jump back
into our main comp and we’ll drag that newly made composite shot into our timeline.
Let’s first make it a planet shape by pressing E on the keyboard, and activating the ellipse
mask tool. With square images like this, I tend to create a mask edge to edge and then
subtract the unwanted space using the mask expansion. In order to make this look more
spherical, we’ll grab a Bulge from the Distort drop down, bringing the Radius to cover the
planet and adjusting the bulge to a size you feel fits your image.
Duplicate our planet and select the one underneath. We’re going to turn this into an Atmosphere.
By pressing F2 we can quickly give this a rename. In the effects window, go into Gradients
and Fills to grab the Fill Effect. You can set this to any colour you like for your design,
but I’ll be leaving this white. Now if we go into the Mask layer and extend the expansion
and set the layer’s blend mode to Add, we'll have this little atmosphere.
We're going to need something to place in that atmosphere, so let's generate some clouds.
Go to the new layer tab and generate a Plane, giving it an appropriate name. By using the
Ellipse tool once again, create a mask that is of equal size to your planet. Let's now
apply a fractal noise from the Generate dropdown to our Plane layer. For the type of Fractal,
you could use the Cloud type for this, however, I found I got better results with Whisp. This
next part came down to personal preference of design, but I started off by changing the
seed (which is the effect generation point) till I got something similar to that you usually
see on photos of the planet. Changed the scale to 50, the influence to 35 to get a stronger
cloud shape and then keyframe a small rotation. What should be followed is adjusting the appearance,
bring the exposure down to -2.3 and offset to 0.6. Under Color correction, apply curves
and adjust to really bring down the highlights. When happy, open the layer properties and
set the overall layer to Screen. Last thing as you may have noticed is that
we're lacking a shadoing. Duplicate the Cloud layer, rename it to Shade & remove all the
effects, for now, we just want to keep the mask. For our shadows, we’ll be cheating
a little bit and using a Gradient layer, so let's grab one from the Gradients & Fill dropdown
and you may want to change the tone of your shades depending on your scene, but we’ll
adjust the start & end position to what light source matches the scene. Add curves for further
strength. Once ready, set the layer properties to Multiply.
Great. Before we fully place with into the scene, we'll first need to make a Point layer-
we’ll name this ‘Planet Control’ and parent all of the planet layers to this Point.
This will allow us to move everything as one group rather than a bunch of individuals.
Just keeps everything neat. Highlight all the planet layers and the point
layer setting them to 3D. Before we move them around I think we need
to create a little bit more depth, so go into the Cloud layer & atmosphere layer adjusting
the Z space to create a small gap in between them, you may need to also adjust the size
of your mask expansion depending. Doing this, like with our backdrop this will enhance the
depth of the scene creating a 3d illusion. We’ll now use the Point layer to move in
Z space, placing it deeper within our scene. Open the properties of your camera layer and
add a keyframe to the start and end of your scene. Though this is a 3D scene I would advise
avoiding too much rotation as you will start to reveal your images are flat.
Last little tweaks I made to this was in colour grading, to enhance a more sci-fi movie feel.
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