Hey everyone, thanks for joining me for another HitFilm tutorial.
Today I'm going to be showing you how to use the new Puppet tool to put together an animated
Holiday greetings card.
This effect is only in the latest version of HitFilm Pro.
I'll start by showing you how I animated the snowman.
In this sequence it's easier for me to organize if the elements are animated in their own
composite shots.
Right click on the picture in the Media panel and select Make Composite Shot.
In the Effects panel, search for Puppet, and drag it onto the picture layer.
The only option you have is to first generate the mesh.
The Puppet effect reads the alpha channel of the picture or video to determine where
the anchor points will be.
Since my snowman is a PNG, there is a transparent background, which is what we want.
After generating, you should see thin green lines running all across the image, but not
outside the boundary of the picture itself.
If you need to fine-tune the area, you can adjust the Expansion or Tessellation.
The Number of Points slider determines how many anchor points are generated for the puppet
tool to work.
In this case I'll need 7.
Once I type that in and hit enter, another list will be created here.
You can adjust the position of the points from these controls, or from the middle of
the viewer, which is where they all appear.
Drag the points from the middle one-by-one and place them where it makes sense for your
character, usually at the joints and ends of hands or legs.
With my anchor points in place, come back into the Controls and change the Mode to Animate.
You should now be able to drag the points in the Viewer and see the movement applied.
To apply the animation throughout the video, we're going to use keyframes, just like every
other effect in the software.
Drop down the Control Points and find whichever is affecting the hand.
Activate keyframes and move forward a little.
Move the hand in a waving motion, and then do the same in the other direction.
Copy and paste the keyframes across the entire video, or just a specific section if you wish.
This is the basis of all the animation in this greeting card.
Depending on the complexity of the image, there may be more or less control points that
have all been keyframed to work together.
The pine trees, for example, have only four control points and one that is keyframed.
The Santa sleigh has six control points, with all of them keyframed to move up and down
at different intervals.
The lights on the house here use the Puppet tool as well, but they aren't animated.
I used several control points to bend the picture to the correct shape.
Animating the puppet tool for each image is the hard part.
Placing them into the scene is much easier- we scale and rotate as necessary.
The elements that I created from scratch in this shot are the ground, sky, the snow, and
the Northern Lights at the top, which is what I'll show you now.
Similar to the puppet animations, this effect was in its own composite shot.
Drag the Particle Simulator into the timeline.
Under General, set the Time Shift to -5 seconds to see them at the start.
In the Emitter category let's change the Shape from Point to Quad, so that the particles
spawn in a rectangle.
Adjust the width to cover the screen, and the height as you see fit.
Change the Trajectory to Cone to have them move in one direction.
Position the Emitter to where it will be in the final scene.
Down in the Movement section reduce the Speed a little bit.
Right now the particles are popping in and out, you can change that by selecting the
Particle System and going up to the Lifetime panel.
Under Alpha, change the Type to Gradient.
Move this square to the beginning and change the color to black.
Click under the bar to create another point in the middle and make it white.
Then add one more black point at the end.
This tells the particles to start completely transparent, gradually fade to opaque in the
middle of their life, then fade back to transparent as they end.
Back in the Controls panel change the Texture Source to built-in.
The Aurora Borealis texture is actually the first one in the list, so I'll leave it at
that.
If they're disappearing too quickly, increase the Life under Movement.
Now we can go back into the main composite and drop that shot in from the Media panel.
I used the Lightsword Ultra Glow only effect to give the lights some color.
The Inner Glow will be set to white and the Outer Glow will be the green color.
Something I did to add some stretchiness to the appearance of the lights was add a Bezier
Warp effect.
This will add control points similar to the Puppet tool all along the edge of the layer.
Click and drag to pull the video.
Finish off the Northern Lights with an Anamorphic Lens Flare effect.
The default setting works pretty well in this case- the flares are vertical and not too
flashy.
To overlay onto a card, I'll create a new composite shot and drop my texture in, followed
by the animation comp.
For this scene the Blending Mode that worked best was Multiply.
Now it takes on the texture of the paper below it.
Scale it down a little for the edges to show, and create a new Text layer.
Select the Text tool and type your title.
The font I used was called Tangerine, and I got it for free from dafont.com.
To make it stand out, add a Drop Shadow effect.
Thanks for watching guys!
On behalf of the entire HitFilm team, I'd like to wish you a safe and relaxing holiday
season.
Let us know if you have any questions and I will see you all in the next video.