this video is sponsored by millernode millinode is a tool for organizing your creative projects
all right welcome back in another tutorial in today's tutorial it's gonna get really exciting
because i'm going to show you how i have created the ghost rider effect in adobe after effects
using element 3d and using ambergen to create my flames but do not worry if you don't
have ambergen i will provide you with skull flame so you can create your own ghost rider
all right so in the previous tutorial we ended up with something like this this was a day to
night transformation that we've done starting from this shot right here so what i will do is
uh for now i will leave this composition b and i will just re-import this footage into another
composition so we can concentrate on the original thing but we can have in mind that later it could
end up looking like this which is a lot cooler than this especially if you're going to add up
flames here it's going to bring up a nice contrast i have my footage right here into a composition
so the first thing that i need to do is head tracking so to do that i will select my footage
and go to my ellipse tool and just isolate my head i only want to see my head and nothing else
and then i also want to track my head so i will go over to the tracker if you don't see that window
tracker and make sure that you just choose uh face outlines we just want the outlines and then
we're going to track this forward it's just an easier process to yeah have all the information
on my head and nothing else because i want to 3d camera track only my head part and that's going
to allow me to replace just that we'll see in a second you know when you go into a creative
studio and they have things stuck to the wall like sketches and reference images ids notes diagrams
well miller note is just like that but it's entirely online and the walls are well infinite
millinode gives you a birth eye view of everything that's going on and when you're ready to share
your work you can invite your colleagues and even clients gather important feedback and
collaborate with them in real time i actually used melano to prepare the ghost rider video
because i always need reference from movies how fire looks and things like that so i stuck
everything in here i particularly enjoyed the fact that you can put your reference material together
with your checklist and just keep everything for that project in the same place melanote is
available for free with no time limit so sign up with a link in the description below and start
your next creative project alright so there we go we have our entire head isolated and so now
what i want to do is i want to go over to layer pre-compose this and move all the attributes and
this is going to be my head isolation and so now i want to apply the camera the 3d camera tracker
and i'm going to advanced and enable detailed analysis so that's all we have to do
and now let after effects do its thing with the 3d camera tracker alright so while we are waiting for
this camera track to be done we can already go online and search for a freeskill model
i found this one right here and that looks really good for what we want to do
so i'm going to be using that in combination with element 3d to place that on my head
it could be that i don't have enough information around your head so what i will do is press m
twice on the keyboard and just increase the mask expansion a little bit so we see a little bit more
of the head and if we go back now and reset this track data and detailed analysis
okay so by expanding my mask a little bit we can now see that we have a bunch of points
on my face and this is ideal for what we want to do so i'm going to select a few
points and i'm going to right click solid and camera and so now if on the solid we're going
to add a grid uh we should see that uh the grid is going to stick to my face
that's great so now we can jump back into the composition for this mask and we can set it to
none so we see our original footage again and so now we have our track data exactly what we needed
so now we need to create a new solid layer and this is going to be e3d
which is going to stand for element 3d and we're going to load element onto that solid layer
and so now what we want to do is open up the scene for
element and in here i want to import that skill that we just found online
open it up and there we go so now we can press e on the keyboard to rotate it and we're going
to rotate it facing the camera so if we zoom in a little bit i'm also going to create a quick cube
so i can see some reference of how big my scene is and i'm just going to press on my skull again here
in the group layer um make sure that the skull is selected and then press r on the keyboard and then
hover until you see this bigger square and we're going to just increase the scale of the skull so
we see it a little bit better click on the box and delete it so now we just have a little bit
of a bigger skull to work with in the scene it's just going to make things a little bit easier so
i'm going to click on the skull and open it up and now click on the material for the skull we
can always go and right click copy the diffuse material here and we can add it to for example the
normal bump so we can paste it in here in the normal bump so we'll
paste it and then we're going to open this up and convert the bump map and if we now click okay
and decrease this we create a little bit more detail in here we can always
invert it if you'd like so another thing that i'd like to do is create a sphere
and i'm going to scale the sphere down quite a bit and press w on the keyboard to move it
we're going to just move the sphere here to the front
scale it down even more and this is just going to be like a small eyeball
and like position it right here and now we can go into presets and search for other materials here
so right here we have this illuminating material we can apply that to our sphere we
can now hold ctrl or right click on the layer and duplicate it duplicate model and we can
now shift this over to the other side select both of these push them into the eye socket
and make sure that you have them in a pretty cool location
there we go so once you're satisfied with the eyes we can close this or actually before we close it
i'm also going to add an environment tag here and i'm just going to choose something outdoors
it's a little bit better and there we go okay so now i'm going to open up group 1 because
automatically everything is added to group one and i'm going to create a group no so we're going to
create that and if we are going to press f4 on the keyboard or toggle the switches we can see that
these are 3d layers if we press p on the keyboard we can also press p on the keyboard for the solid
and now see these two different values so in the end what we need is to copy the value of the solid
and paste it to this node so we're going to copy it ctrl c paste it on this position
here so paste it over there and now we can see that our head is tracked accordingly
so a few more things that we need to do is click on the null and we also want to press s
on the keyboard scale it up a little bit
maybe press p on the keyboard and just push it a little bit back into z space why because we're
tracking the surface of the face and not the inside so now we're placing the center of the
skull on top of my face which in the end we need to push it back a little bit so just the
front of the skill would be on the front of my skin hope that makes sense and so now i want to
rotate this a little bit and i'm going to push it over here maybe rotate it a little bit to the left
somewhat like that and then press s on the keyboard you can always scale it up a little bit
somewhat like that and we can also uncheck the solid so we see just the skull so that's sticking
really well to my face that's exactly what i wanted another thing that you could do is remove
your face entirely but because i added this day to night transformation you could barely see my face
and then i'm adding this fire on top of it so that completely took my face away so you couldn't see
my face anyway uh we can see if we want to make it bigger or smaller so take a look a few times
at both of the face and skill and try to match either to position and the scaling of both of
these but do know that a skull should be a little bit smaller than the face i think this scaling
does work fine so that's great another thing that i would like to do now is create a light so i'm
going to create a new light and create this into a point light click ok and so i want my shadow
part to be on the right side of my footage so i'm going to push this all the way to the left
and like this you can really sculpt a little bit more and make it look all nice just like that and
so we can still see that the skull is not pushed enough into myself so i'm going to press p on the
keyboard for the null and i'm just going to push it with the z here a little bit more into my face
i'm actually going to use the same technique as from the previous tutorial so i'm going to
copy all these layers and i'm just going to paste them here and so now we have a skull
also here in our night scene and all i want to do is bring my skull out of it
and so we can see it right here and now i can add a curves to the skill separately
and still do my grading maybe do make it a little bit darker
so now one more thing that we need to do and let's create the fire supportive fire you can
use simulation software and i'm going to be using ambergen with the biggest reason being that it's
super fast to create some really cool looking simulations so right here in ambergen i'm not
going to go over the entirety of this software but i ended up creating something like this
uh where you can see fire around smoke i imported the same skull model and now i'm just trying to
match the look of the skull and the angle of the skull and then i rendered out this version so you
can do a lot of fun things with this and if you want to follow along with the same footage as
me i will link them in the description below so you can also download the export of the fire and
so once you have the kind of same angle right here in ambergen i'm going to export my scene
and so while it's rendering i can already open up my image sequence so we can see what we're working
with and i'm going to drag this into my scene here so i'm going to close this panel we can
see the fire here of the skull and we can toggle the switches and set the blending mode to screen
and now we need to try and match the scaling of the fire to the hat here
and so something like that and now what you can do is either drag this to the face or you can just
turn this into a 3d layer as well and press a twice on the keyboard and then just off for
shadows and off for lights and then just readjust a little bit more and that should keep it into
position as well especially if the numbers here match up in the position so it doesn't so we need
to paste the solid position here to our fire and then just rescale it once more and bring it up
here somewhat like that and so there you have it and all you can do here is bring the perfect glow
layer on top so we also take the fire with the glow maybe decrease it a little bit
that's looking great uh one more thing that i've done in the example is i rotoscoped a little part
of my top body and i added some tint effects to create reflections of the flames so to do that
i simply duplicated my original footage and i used the extract feature to extract everything
dark something like that and then like soften it out a little bit and then using a mask technique
like this
and then toggling the switches and making sure the mask is tracked over the duration of the
entire video we can see that like this you create some reflections and all i've done is
added a tint on this with orange highlights f on the keyboard there we go it's better
and like that you create reflections so i just made sure i rotoscope this thing out
so you don't see any spill on the trees here in the background but that's basically the
full effect on creating the ghost rider and all i've done here also is at the moment when i went
up with my head i just boom i enabled the face you can either just uh fade it in you can also
use a technique from my outfit transformation tutorial where we kind of use fractal noise to
reveal the skull but basically you can treat it as a normal layer i'm going to keep it at this
i hope you enjoyed it if you did give this video a like and also be sure to subscribe to the channel
for more and definitely hit the notification bell to stay notified when i upload new videos
apart from that i hope to see you in the next one and until then create epic videos