Hey guys, Tom here, Today we’re going to be looking at creating a snow-globe and phasing
through glass. Link in the description will provide 50% off the 3D: Particle pack.
We’re going to begin with two Composite Shots; the first is already set-up for our
final result which I’ve named “Globe Exterior” and the other is forged from our footage layer.
I’ll right click this layer & select “Make Composite Shot” calling this, “Globe Interior”.
For the time being, let’s work on the snowglobe and camera motion.
The snowglobe look itself is rather straightforward, we’ll go into the Effects window, open the
Warp tab and apply “Lens Distort” to our Interior layer. By adjusting the Distortion
Amount & Scale we can see the initial effect. In my version I’ve gone for a Distortion
Amount of -0.45 and a Scale of 0.37. Just to neaten the positioning, I’ll also move
the globe up by using the Centre parameter. In order to animate this, drop down a keyframe
with the current settings. Move back a couple of seconds on the timeline and adjust our
distortion amount back down to zero & Scale to 1 in order to have the effect unfold.
I have here a PNG image of our snowglobe, of which I’ll drag into our timeline. We’ll
be using this for our snow globe's base, so I’ll go to the end of our animation. Select
the layer and scale down, moving it into alignment with our footage. Once happy, duplicate this
base and set it above our Globe Interior layer. We’re going to cut out a section in order
to give the appearance it’s sitting within the base.
So we’ll select our top layer, go over to the viewer and press F to activate the freehand
mask tool. Go around this area just to get the lip & enough to cover the sphere. Now
we need to parent this to our motion. However, our motion is caused by an effect, and we
can't parent to that- but we can cheat it. Let’s click on the New Layer tab & select
Point naming it Movement. Go to the position and set this to the same values as our lens
distort centre, then parent the base to our Point Layer. This will keep our scaling to
similar positioning and resembles the camera motion.
Now, by using the snowglobe base as a reference we can adjust the scale till we have a perfect
fit. In this example, the starting scale of 400 down to 100, gave a fitting result.
With the motion complete, we’ll highlight all the keyframes, and set them to ‘Smooth-In’
from the icon above of the timeline. Throw in a background and parent this to the
Movement Point Layer.
We should now have a smooth motion that gives the impression we’re zooming out of a globe…
Alright, that’s it. Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe.
I'm, of course, kidding.
This looks good, but we can add a few elements to take this further. For one, HitFilm has
a few effects we can apply to create a lens refractions. This will help give the impression
we’re passing through the glass. Let’s go into our Globe Interior Composite
Shot. Once in, right click and create a Grade Layer. By pressing the F2 key we can rename
this to ‘Refraction’. For this effect, we’ll go into the effects
window, open the Channel Tab and find ‘Channel Time Shift’, applying this to our grade
layer. This separate the RGB values dependant on the time. Try not to worry on application,
dependant on your values, the first few frames are going to highlight or remove a particular
RGB, simply extend the shot past this point. With this set, let’s move Red to -10, Green
to 2 & Blue to -15. This however, requires motion to see results, and currently in my
shot, I’m static.
To apply some motion and give that warp through glass, we’re going to apply a Chromenator.
Back in our Effect window, go into Distort and apply Chromenator. Leave the channel to
‘Luminance’. Keyframe the Reflection distance to rise & fall over the course of our camera
motion- starting at 0, peaking at .1 during the middle of the transition and drifting
back to 0. Set detail Scale to a size that covers the subject, for me this went to 500.
This will now provide the motion to also offset our Channel Shift, creating the Rrefraction
we need.
If we jump to our Globe Exterior composite shot, we can skim through and see the effect
is coming together nicely. Only thing missing from this snowglobe, is the snow.
We’ll jump back into the Globe Interior, and in the Effects window we’ll go to Particles
& Simulations finding the Particle Simulator. We won’t need to apply this to a layer as
HitFilm will generate one for us. We can name this layer ‘Snow’.
Let’s access the effects in the Controls window, and we’re first going to set up
our particle emitter. For our shape I’ll use a Cube, positioning it to the top of my
scene and use the scale values to extend over the sofa. I’m leaving this space between
the edges because in our other composite shot it’s going to cause some distortion in this
area, and that will look messy. Just as a creative decision. Be sure to extend the Z
value to provide some depth. For the Particles themselves, set to an amount
per second that you feel fitting. I went with 150 per second. As we’ll eventually provide
a ground to collide with, we need this to last throughout the scene, so extend the life
to 60, set scale to 25, Bounce to 0.2 and Friction to 12. So that everything doesn’t
move in unison, open Movement Variation and adjust the Scale and Speed. We don't need
too much variation. I tend to stick between 5 and 20. We’ll apply forces by pressing
the Plus icon beside it, and in Forces, we’ll open ‘type’ and lower the strength to
3, this will provide a gentle fall for our snow.
Last thing this needs is a Deflector, add one from the Plus icon beside it’s tab.
This will provide our snow a place to fall onto, representing the floor of my shot. First,set
the shape to cuboid, and like with our Emitter, adjust the scale and position to fit over
the collision area. Now once the snow reaches the cuboid, it’ll gently stop & rest.
With everything done, it’s always good to go through and see what little touches can
be added. For one, our camera movement doesn’t appear to have any motion blur. To cheat this,
we can animate a small zoom blur to our footage in order to help.
Something I felt really helped sell this effect was to copy the background layer, bringing
it into the Interior shot, and keyframe the opacity to grow over the motion- acting as
reflections of the surrounding area. Another suggestion would be adding a light leak on
exiting the snowglobe, there’s a lot of fun that you can have with this effect.
Thanks for watching- we here at FXhome hope you have a happy new year. We have an upcoming
sale to kick off 2019, so do keep an eye on your emails. Let me know if you have any questions,
and don’t forget to subscribe.