VFX Tears for Beginners in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jake. I've created a class on rainstorm effect in which I've showed how to create this interesting looking at the effects using After Effects. But many of you were really interested in the fake tier on my face. I also think it's really fun effect at it was used in the one-dimension TV series. And the cool part is that it can be done without using any plug-ins. But I wanted to take it a step further and also found this cool music video with stylized steers. And I also recreated this effect. So now in this class, I want to share with you a cool technique of creating tiers using After Effects without using any plug-ins. Also for these diamond like tears, I want to show you two versions with no plugin and with the plugin called Start low in case you do have this plugin and you would like to know how to set it up properly to get best results. I'll be happy to see you in my class as also your results after following all the steps. So let's get started. 2. Drawing Tear Itself: So I'm using Adobe After Effects 2020. As you can see, I'm using cellular layout and if you don't see any of these panels, you just can go to Window and enable it from here, like character, character. Let me enable this magnifying glass so it would be easier to see where I'm clicking on. So my goal with my class is not just to show you where to click, but to explain how software works and thought process while tickling the tasks. So let's go to file, import file. We need just to import our footage. These two files are available in research step to this class. So select them and click Import, select our rough flourish and you can drag it here to create new composition are here on timeline to create the composition, are here on this icon to create new composition. So you can see we've created new compositions. It's means that it has exactly the same dimensions and properties as our video. So to create this tear effect, we need to draw a teardrop itself. So you can just select this teardrop image and drag and drop on this icon to create new composition I just created using After Effects. I'm going to show it to you, but you don't have to repeat because we already have this file. I'm just going to show you, uh, so you would know how you can draw something like this inside of After Effects. So I just created a new solid, white solid. And with this tool here and just click and hold, you can select this tool and just draw this line. Then I have selected this rectangle tool and draw a bigger square like this. So with this square, I want to cut off part of this image so it would have this fading out look. So I said this mass to subtract its carrying out this previous mass. And if we go to feather here in Moscow by clicking here, we can just increase this feather at 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 500. So this is how we get this bit later. I just use the Ellipse tool and draw here this kind of mass. And with the selection tool, I'll just double-click on one of the points and set it here. So this is how you can just draw manually, but we already have this image here. We can use it. 3. Tracking Eye Movement: So next step for us will be to create an animation that our teardrop coming out from the eye. So let's write mouse-like here and go to composition settings. And let's call it this composition as final effect. So we would keep everything organized and Gulliver k. So first what we need to do is to make sure that our teardrop will stick to our phase. As you can see, we have here some movement of the face, especially here it goes to a from left to right. So we need to track this movement, select this rough forage, and go to animation, track motion. With this tracker point, we want to track this part of the face, but here we cannot see any contrast points which this tracker could stick on. And it works best on the high contrast points like from light to dark parts. But if you scroll through, you can see that we have Smallest moments in our eyes which will mess up the tracking. But however here and the eyebrow, you can see that it barely moves. So it's a good point to track. Let's set it here. Now we can just hover with our mouse here to expand this panel and click here to Analyze forward. As you can see, it's good track. And now we can just analyze backwards by clicking on this icon here. Now we need to apply this tracking data to null object, so it will save all the tracking data. We need to go to Layer New and create this null object. And here and tracker panel click on Edit Target and set to null and click. Okay. And then here, apply, as you can see on this button and click Okay. So let's drag and drop our teardrop composition into this composition here with the final effect. And let's start creating a bit of animation. 4. Creating Animation of Tear: Let's start creating a bit of animation. First of all, it's too big. So we can select this teardrop composition and press S to make it smaller. So scale, we'll look more appropriate to our CME. Something like this should work fine. And we can just check our tracking just by selecting this teardrop. We can parent with this pick whip to our null object, which means that this teardrop image will repeat the tracking data. So simply it will stuck to our face. And once again, we can see that trekking wouldn't well, we can disable this null object, so we would not see this red square. We didn't need it by clicking here on this Seibel icon, we can disable it. And now let's add some basic animation of the tear coming out. So about here I wanted to start so I can just select teardrop and press B to C, our position and create a keyframe by clicking on the stopwatch, leftmost click on the stopwatch. So this keyframe basically represents the point in time where it's remembers the value of certain property. In our case position, this value is remembered in this point in time. So if we scroll in time further to the un-solo first value is the x value, and second value is the y-value. So by changing this y-value, you can see that our drop is coming down. So let's set it about here. What we can do is to select this keyframe and click here on graph editor. And to make sure that here, you need to select this Edit Speed Graph. In this way, you will see the same graph as I see here. So we can select these keyframes, click and hold and drag by this handle to the left, like this. So we would have this kind of animation which indicates that it will start best and slower until the end. We can also select this keyframe and press F9 on keyboard, which will make this kind of shape also. So it would not start to fest, gain momentum. And here it's slower to the end. So you can click here to exit graph editor. And by pressing 0 on numpad, you can show the result. It's beautiful. It is beautiful. So we can disable the sound here by clicking on this icon. And now you can see we need to cut this top part. So to cut this apart, we basically want to select this footage which we have and duplicate it by pressing Control D on keyboard. And let's place it above, like here, and select this pen tool here. Now we can just draw a mask and just make sure that you've selected here duplicated layer and draw something like this. Basically you want to show this afterwards where you want to cut off the part of the eye by using wheel on the mouse, you can zoom in and zoom out by pressing and holding the spacebar on keyboard, you can left mouse click and move around to your image and close the mask here. So as you can see, if we will solo this layer, we're basically cut off this part which now covers this tear part here. But as we know, it moves, but our mask doesn't move at all. So to make this mask with our eye, we need to select our foolish and press M on keyboard. And then you need to right mouse click on this mass and click track mask. We will have the Strecker. We're going to use this position scale and rotation and skew. And it makes sure that our mask is just about here on our eye. Then let's click here to start shaking. As you can see, it's doing a pretty good job from this point here. As you can see, it's created a bunch of keyframes. And from this point here, let's track backwards by clicking here. So now we've made sure that our mask sticks to our face and just select these keyframes and adjust this last one because it seems to be bad tracking. So let's adjust it like this. And now as you can see, it looks much better. We can also select this raw footage and press F to C mask feather and increase it a bit so it will blend with our, I hear some music and see we have this drop which comes from the corner of our eye. So now we just need to select this teardrop image which we created earlier and set this track matte. If you cannot see this, you need to click on toggle switches and modes to see this track matte asset to Alpha inverted, which basically means that it will only use this mass to show this part of the image. So without its face shows both the image and are foolish. But we want to see only our teardrop. 5. Stylizing Look of Tear: So now let's precompose these three layers. You can just select first one and hold Shift and select the last one to select all three, and then go to layer pre-compose. What pre-compose means. It basically makes all of these layers into one composition. So let me show you, Let's call it an animation and tracking because these two techniques we already used and click Okay? And as you can see, it all precomposed into one composition. We still can access those layers by double-clicking on this composition. As you can see, it's still here, but now we have just one layer which looks more organized. So at this point we have this animation and tracking, which is great, but we want to work on this texture so it would look more like a tear and not just like a line. So let's disable this footage so we would see all the our tier. First of all, if we click here, we can see that it's completely transparent. In our case, we want to have black background against this layer because we are going to use CC glass effect, which works best on non-transparent footage. So let's go to effects and presets and type solid composite. If we left mouse click and drag on this animation tracking, we can see that it adds a solid. In our case, we want to have it black. So here we can just change it to black. And now we can see our teardrop. We don't have any alpha channel, which is rate or CC glass effect, which we are going to use in the next video. So let's work on this texture. What I want to use is turbulence displace effect. So here and effects in presets, Let's tie turbulence displays and let's drag and drop here onto our animation tracking. So basically what this effect does is creating this displacement effect. And with the size, if we decrease it, we starting to see a smaller texture. And if we decrease the amount, we can add this kind of texture which adds a bit of complexity to our teardrop. So let's maybe a set our amount to 22 and let's set size to about two, maybe bit moral amount. So we would have more of a texture to our teardrop. We can actually duplicate this turbulence displays and use it one more time to duplicate it, you just need to select it and press Control D on keyboard. And with the second one, we want to increase the amount and increase the size to add this kind of waviness to our teardrop. So maybe 56 is looking good. And if you want to play around with the look of this, you can just change this evolution like this to get a different button or change this offset turbulence, which will also give a different kind of look. So for this class, I'm going to go with this kind of look. Once again, you can change the size. So if you want to have less of the waviness, you can just increase the size like this to have this bigger wave and decrease it if you want to have these kind of wispy motion and decrease the amount. So basically here with these two values, you can change the path of your tear, my case 588 lakhs, good. And finally I want to add some Blur. Gaussian Blur should work fine. So we would not have to rough edges. So I'm going to set to five. So this is basically our texture. What we want to do is to go to Layer and click pre-compose and let's call it texture. We need to also click on this move all attributes. So it will move all of these effects into this composition which we are creating. And click AKI so they can see, we don't see any effects here because it's inside the texture composition. 6. Finalizing the Look: And now finally, we can use CCG less effect. In order to use PSI-BLAST effect, we needed to pre-compose all of this texture inside of the composition because it would not see the previous effects which we have applied disabled this layer. We can see our footage and we need to duplicate our foolish to apply CC glass effect on AI. So select this foolish and press Control D here. Let's type CC glass effect and drop it here on this duplicated footage. As you can see, it's pretty fun effect to give this kind of highlights. And you can imagine that we are going to use to create the highlights on our tier. So first of all, which we can do is to change this track matte. Once again, here, if you can see this track matte and change to luma matte, which basically will tell the software that it will display this effect only on the parts, which is bright. And our case, we're using this as a matte. So we have only our tier as a bright spot. And as you can see, if we change to a luma matte, it only works in this part of the image. So let's change some settings in this CC glass effect. First of all, let's change this bump map. We need to make sure that it uses texture which we have created here. As you can see, it's already working and I want to decrease the softness so we will have more sharper image. Let's set it to 0. And basically with this height and displacement, we will control the look of this teardrop is also our shading and ambient. Because with this ambient, we will try to blend better with the skin tones. So as a starting point, we can increase a bit of height, increase a lot the displacement to see more reflections and refractions of the image itself. It uses our raw footage, so let's decrease this a bit. I'm going to set to 350. We can also play with the diffuse. I'll set specular to 0 because we don't want to have these bright dots here solid set it to 0, roughness. I'll set it to 0 as well and metal, let's set it to 0 as well. So as you can see, this is excellent starting point of this effect. So now I'm looking at this foolish and I want to have it a lot bigger than this figure. So what we're going to do is to select this texture composition and apply a levels effect. And with this levels affect, we can just click here and drag to the left music in C, we increasing the thickness of this teardrop. We can also move this middle point to include more of these sites parts. And to control this even more, we can go to animation and tracking here and select this teardrop and press S on keyboard. Click on this icon here to be able just to adjust the scale in the exit I mentioned, as you can see with changing this value, we are making it figure. So let's set it to 75 and you see results. And as you can see, we've added a bit more of thickness and with this texture, we can just control the blending of our teardrop. So let's decrease that a bit and just by jumping from decomposition to composition. So you can just play around with this scale with this first value to make sure that you have the proper scale which you want. Now what I want is to blend with the foolish, but I can just select this raw footage and apply some Gaussian blur. I'm going to set my value to maybe a six. As you can see, it's not that sharp anymore and you can just play around to decrease the sharpness. So it wouldn't be sharper than to your eye itself. So maybe two is good. And with this ambient light, you can make sure that it blends better with your foolish. I like to set this diffuse to lower value like 13 and play with this ambient to blend with my skin barrier has also, I like to set it a bit brighter than my skin. I think it looks better. And at this point we can just press 0 numpad to see a result. It already looks pretty cool. What you can do is to just go to animation tracking. And here press F on the keyboard if you want to blend this part better in C result is again, see it blends better. I'm pressing Control Z, Control Shift Z and to see before and after. And as you can see here, it blends a bit better. And also we can change this mass expansion because you can see by changing this expansion, we are playing with the point where it touches our I. So if we want to set it below like this, it will fade here. So in some cases it works best like the scent also, we can select this texture and play with this graph to blend with our skin tones better. So as you can see by changing this middle value, we can just entirely blend with our skin. Or increase visibility just by changing this slider. I think it should be more subtle like this. It will look much more believable, but it's up to you how bright you want to see your tiers. So I would leave something like this. I think it looks much more valuable. So I'm going to press 0 numpad to preview this. I think it looks really cool and really believable. As you can see, it's really dynamic and reflections and the teardrop itself changes with the movement of our face. I think it looks really cool and really believable. So I'm going to use it as a preview to this class. 7. Music Video Style: Finally, let me show you how you can make it more like a V effects and motion graphics. We should be C and the music video of tiers of gold. So to create a sparkline tiers, we are going to need to have red giant star glow plug-in. If you don't have start low plug-in, don't worry. At the end of this video, I'm going to show you how to make this effect without using star glow plug in. But you still will need to repeat all the steps besides the steps which involves the plug-in. And at the end of this video, I'm going to show you how to get the similar look like start low plugin, but without using any paid plug-ins at all. So what we're going to do is to select these both layers, just like one of them, press Shift and select other one and go to layer pre-compose. Let's call this star glow because this plug-in we will use. So let's click Okay, and let's duplicate it. So we have both copies of this effect, this one we can just disabled. So with this layer I want to add a bit of sparkling and this teardrop. So it would look like something expensive like diamonds software, this, I want to use fractal noise effect and apply on this or glow composition. You want to switch this mode to add if you cannot see the most, just click here. Fractal noise may want to use this turbulence small and increase the contrast and decrease the brightness. Basically, we want to have some bright spots, so it will shine like diamonds. So here I'm transform. We want to decrease the size. So we would get really, really small dots, something like this. Maybe even to seven set the scale Alice to decrease the brightness. And so we would have these kind of dots. Now we can enable this star glow effect, which basically our teardrop effect. And what we also can do is to animate the evolution before we will take a look closely, we can see that if I change this evolution, it will give this sparkle to our teardrop. So let's animate here where we cannot see the tear itself. Click here to create a keyframe. And here are the and laid him over it like this, basically at one full rotation, maybe even bigger. So we would see a lot more of this sparkling, something like this looks good. And I want to open this start low and copy these two layers. Just select one of them and hold control and select other one. Let's press control C to copy. Close this composition, Let's go to final factor. We can close this one too and press Control V to paste it, because I want to have it separately in case if I would want to change the brightness and shading, something like this. So now we would have in this final effect composition and it will be easier to adjust. So let's delete this, sorry, low. Basically what we want to have is some glow with this fractal noise, which gives this sparkle animation, the teardrop affected cell which we've created. And if it doesn't work properly after the copying, you need just to set bump map to texture. And finally, we can just select the start low and press Control D to duplicate. And let's set it above and use star glow effect itself. Here in the presets, we can just select Y star to preset. And you already can see some effect going on here. If we solo this layer, we can see that we have the whole tear shape and we don't want to see it, we can just change the source capacity to 0. So we would see only the star glow effect itself. So we need to boost our light. Now we can see some of the effect. And to see better, we need to tweak this fractal noise effect because this third law takes only the bright spots of the fractal noise effects. So let's increase the brightness and maybe tweak some contrast. So I'm going to set my brightness TO minus 110. See we already have this kind of effect and we can also go to pre, process and change the threshold. And by lowering this value, we can see that we are getting much more of this effect. So let's set to really low value and let's increase the threshold soft so it would be softer and would look more natural with our food chain here and the boost light, we can decrease it a bit. And finally, we can just un-solo this layer to see how it works on our footage. As you can see, it's too bright. So let's say that boost light to 1.7. Once again, by playing with this threshold and by adding some brightness, we can add more of this shining stars. I want to decrease this streak line to about five. So it would be more sparkly unless tweak the brightness, maybe I set it lower bit. And now we can just press is 0 a numpad to see our previous. So as you can see, we've added this kind of diamond tier, just like in the interiors of gold music video. And we can also add a bit of light streak on our heel drop just by selecting this rough forage and by increasing the height, we can add this kind of line, really bright if we want to add more light to our teardrop like 69. And finally end the video itself. It had really orange goldfish kind of color correction. So we can just go to layer, new adjustment layer and add a curves effect. Let's set it above and here in blue channel, let's set it to be a lot more yellow. And with the reducing of the green, we can add this kind of reddish, bluish kind of tones. We can also duplicate this curves and change to RGB channel and reset this kind of effect and increase the brightness if we need an contrast. So we would have these kind of gold colors wish we could see and the music video. And finally, let me show you the version without plugin, without this paid plug-in Stark Law. So what we can do is to disable this layer, but before let's duplicate it, select it and press Control D to duplicate it, let's disable this layer below, and let's delete this star glow effect. So to achieve similar kind of look, we need to add Gaussian blur, type it here, and effects and presets Gaussian blur and apply it to this star glow effect. Let's set it to about 22. And let's change this to horizontal, which means that it will draw these kind of lines. One cool trick which you can do in After Effects as that you can apply an effect called transform. And if you apply it before, and then press Control D to duplicate this effect, and it applied after like this. So Gaussian Blur would be between the transform and transform like this. You can change the rotation, for example, to 30 degrees, and as you can see, it rotated 30 degrees. And here we can cancel this rotation and this second transform minus 30 degrees, you can just set it to 45 degrees. And here two minus 45 degrees and it will give other angle. We can apply curves effect like this and increase the visibility by changing this RGB curve. So as you can see with this curve, you can adjust how soft or how sharp these lines are. So something like this could work good. And finally, let's duplicate this target low layer on which we applied all of these effects. So select this start low and press Control D to duplicate it. And we want to change this to opposite value. So minus 30. Let's set it. It was minus 30. So cancel, we need to 30 so they can see it gives o, so this kind of star glow effect. And perhaps it's not that good as the plugin. But if you don't have, the plugin is a really good way to go for you. And once again, with the curves effect itself here, you can just change the intensity if you feel like it's so bright. So if you lower the curves here and lower curves here, you can change the intensity. So you can see it's pretty universal effect which you could use in your future work. Thank you for watching my class. You can also follow me here on Skillshare to see which affects I'm going to share with you next. Just don't forget to click on this. See More button to see all the work which I did here on Skillshare. And I'm gonna see you next week. It's beautiful.