HOW TO MAKE A LIGHTSABER - AFTER EFFECTS VFX TUTORIAL

Key Takeaways

so yeah if you're new to the channel this is a series that we do we teach you how to get started after effects start making really dope stuff if you did not get the notification that's probably because you weren't subscribed so go ahead and make sure you do that right now you're getting right into this so wasting no time at all let's go okay so last time we made fire in our hand before that we made black pink blow up but this time we're recreating our favorite Disney approved childhood weapon master and I'm talking about lightsabers have you ever wanted to instantly make something cooler give it a lightsaber so this effect brings me back to the old school days of YouTube when I used to watch Freddie Wong or even mob kid and I just used to think how on earth did they do that well luckily for you we're gonna be going through that step by step depending on your knowledge of plugins for After Effects this can be either really easy or really hard I highly recommend you check out the top 5 free plug-ins for After Effects and it's okay if you haven't seen that before because I'm gonna also include a link in the description to the plug-in I'm gonna be talking about it's completely free not sponsored one of my all-time favorites you might even be like Nate there's a bajillion tutorials out here on how to make lightsabers but I'm gonna tell you if you haven't been doing it like this way that I'm about to show you right now you're probably doing it the super hard way okay so your fever excited become a Jedi Master but before we do anything isn't it first need to get some footage if you don't have a clip already I'm gonna be uploading this same fit that I'm gonna use up to the patreon but I highly recommend you go out and take your own clip so you know you're actually being able to use it on yourself and it's a little bit more personal anyways let's hop right into After Effects in three two one okay so as you can see I'm in After Effects so this is completely new to you you might want to go check out the VFX basics to tour that we released cuz I talk all about the UI and there's gonna be moving a little bit quicker than I did in the last tutorial but hopefully still had an easy enough pace where if you're a beginner to After Effects this isn't gonna be super difficult and also if you're advanced user you're gonna find some tips and tricks are gonna help you beat up your workflow and doing an effect like this translates to a whole lot of other effects from VFX compositing and animation we're gonna be going over things like key framing masking rotoscoping what else we're going to do it using plugins which is a huge plus if you've never used a plug-in After Effects highly recommend I save you so much time and it's one of my favorite reasons as to why I use After Effects versus something like hit film or nuke I mean those all have third-party plugins but After Effects has a super comprehensive list so we're gonna be getting this footage now I have this clip so you can use either one that you've taken yourself or the one that you got from a patreon pretty much this looks like it's gonna be able to work I have me and crystal fighting against each other with these two lightsabers that we found at Target I'm just shooting with the fisheye lens on my Canon adda damn I'm just gonna import this clip by dragging and dropping it into After Effects and from there we're gonna be making a new composition think of a composition like the plate for VFX sandwich so be whatever size you want they just you know make sure that you have it set nice and right because it's gonna be essentially housing all the effects setting up this composition with the right settings which is 1920 by 1080 P basically the dimensions of it how big it is and then the framerate which is super important I'm gonna set this down to 24 frames per second the reason why I'm doing 24 frames per second is because I actually shot this footage in 59.94 frames per second that's a whole lot of frames that's essentially double 24 frames per second and that means I'm gonna go through with a lot slower render times because it's more frames to render and I'm also gonna have to set more keyframes because it's a lot more frames essentially in between so what we're gonna do is work in 24 frames per second which is gonna bump that 59.94 down to 24 and hopefully make it a little bit more workable at the very very end we're gonna do a technique which is gonna help us change it back from 24 to 59.94 without us having to set too many settings along the waist so once you have that set you can go ahead and click OK we're gonna import the footage that we took into the timeline now you're gonna see me just dragging it over so I get just about the right timing so it's like exactly when I hit the record button but probably when I'm just about to you know slash up this lightsaber and start getting into this quick little target fight though ads okay so once we have that clip nice and set inside of the composition at about the right timing you can go ahead and create a new solid by right clicking in the timeline and this solid can be just about any color you want it to be does not matter at all but make sure that's the exact size of the composition so a way to do that is by clicking on this button right here which is make comp size and it's super useful because this is gonna set those dimensions of the solid to the composition settings that we have before and once that set you just go ahead and click OK okay cool so next we're gonna select on that layer gonna apply saver now there's two ways to apply saver it's by right-clicking effects and then going all the way down to Video Copilot and clicking on saver you're gonna see me do it the faster way which is by pressing the spacebar and the control key at the same time which pops up this really easy customizable menu that lets me just type in Sabre and instantly get access to it so if you're curious as to what that feature is highly recommend you go ahead and download it's called FX console it's a free plugin for After Effects I talked about it in this video as well it's super stacked make sure you get some of those things it's gonna save you a whole lot of time with your workflow and once you have that set you have saber installed you're gonna see that the entire screen is gonna go black except for this line of the saber but what we want to do is go down to the timeline and click on the blending mode which should be set to normal and change it instead to screen what that's gonna do is take out all the black background and make those pixels transparent so that we can start to see the footage below underneath so now that we have that visible I'm gonna want to go ahead and move this saber effect to match up roughly where the lightsaber that I'm actually holding is so the way that I'm doing this is by changing a course start in the core and positioning which there's multiple ways to do this it's just by either moving these values over or by clicking on this little like target icon that lets me specifically select on the footage where to make those start and end and I'm also going to mess around with the course size which is pretty much the thickness of the core of the lightsaber I'm gonna make this look hopefully like it's covering up the entire lightsaber that I'm actually holding I'm gonna go also down to core taper and change those settings just so it matches a little bit more cleaner than when it - off the bat with the default settings so since I'm noticing that it's really difficult to see exactly where the lightsaber is underneath now what I'm gonna do is select on the lightsaber layer which is the Sabre plug-in that we added that layer and I'm gonna click on my keyboard and press the T key which is gonna pull up my opacity settings and I want to lower down this opacity so I start to see the footage even underneath my lightsaber just so that I'm getting a little sense of reference and I'm able to see what's going on and I'm not just always covering up the footage once we're done we're gonna go back and bump that opacity to a hundred percent but for just working mode right now I'm dropping this down to probably something like 20 percent maybe 50 percent so it's just slightly visible I'm seeing both of these at the same time in order to get this lightsaber actually matched the lights they were for all these frames and not just the first frame or the one that we're working on right now I want to go ahead and click on this stopwatch icon it's a really important icon in After Effects it's basically what you need to do the start key framing and if you have no idea what keyframes are pretty much their points of data that says a lot of different things in this case specifically it's saying hey at this point this course start is going to be at these specific x and y values all we're gonna want to worry about is clicking on this icon making sure it's selected and we're gonna make sure that that keyframe that set hopefully matches up well with the footage so as we scrub forward to the timeline I'm going to adjust the course start and the port end and even the taper if I need to just to make sure that we're matching up with the original footage again as you can see I'm just going ahead shifting these keyframes around making sure that the lightsaber matches up with my movements okay so this is looking pretty good but I'm noticing that it could be a little bit better so once we have that preview area done we're gonna go ahead and change the work area which is essentially how long this composition lasts for now if we have a work area that lasts super long more than we need it to After Effects is gonna go ahead and try and render in those frames in the background whenever we shorten that work area which we can do by dragging this slider at the top and then we're gonna go up to the top to composition settings and click trim comp area to work area so that it also makes sure that everything is happening only in the amount of that we needed to once I have enough keyframes set that's looking pretty good I'm gonna go ahead and change back the opacity to 100% so I can see how this looks I'm gonna press the spacebar to start to preview that and it's gonna quickly cache some of the frames and once it's caching enough of them it's gonna go ahead and play it out most of the time it might not play in real time just because After Effects takes a little bit of rendering and processing power in order to play each frame after one another so we're gonna go into Sabre and click down on its special effects and these different settings that it's got here the most important setting that I'm gonna be looking at right now is the pore size roundness and the offset offset is going to be dealing a little bit with exactly covering over the footage that we needed to and the N roundness is also gonna let us change the roundness to either be more round or less round depending on the shot so for this one I think I'm just gonna have it kind of a little bit in between there and another really cool setting over here is the flicker setting which we're gonna go ahead and adjust as well this is gonna make the light effect a little bit more realistic to what you probably would have seen in the star board movies we're also gonna go down to distortion and I'm just gonna add a little bit of values to this I think I'm just using within probably something less than 10 because I don't want it to look all the way distorted and kind of funky I want it to just be really subtle just so that this Sabre effect is not something that's entirely straight throughout the distortion either works on the court or the glow so I'm gonna add it to both the glow and the core distortions that way there's just a little bit of variance in between and when it comes to making some of these special effects variants is gonna be one of your favorite friends because it makes footage just all of a sudden look like it's not something done entirely by computer but at least something that can happen in real life with different flicker settings or different distortions pretty much things that people can't predict but they're also associating with just being real life effects because I like how this looks right now and I think that the motion blur is one of my favorite elements of it I'm gonna go ahead and increase that so that it's not such a short trail already the trail looks pretty decent but I think I'm just gonna go ahead and make this trail even longer by going down to the motion blur phase and the multiplier settings and increasing with those just slightly on note I'm not telling you guys like specific numbers off the bat because I don't want you to worry about that I want you to worry about more of what looks right to you it's kind of just about using your best judgment go ahead and hit the spacebar preview it as many times as you need to set you're getting a clear sense not just how one frame looks but how multiple frames look across the entire timeline okay so this is looking really good there is one more thing that I want to go ahead and add actually there's a few things that we're gonna add to this so we're gonna right click on the timeline in the empty space and we're gonna create a new adjustment layer and what adjustment layer is do in after-effects is it affects all of the layers below it so if we have this adjustment layer at the very top and then we have let's say the Sabre effect and then the footage below it whatever effect we applied to the adjustment layer is going to be applied in a downwards order to the effects below it so there's all kinds of things that you can start to do but just no adjustment layers are gonna become one of your best friends and I pretty much use them because when it comes down to color correcting or adding something that I want elements to be affected by an adjustment layer is one of those easy things that we can do in compositing to make things look a little bit similar like they're having an effect being applied to them across the board and not just happening to one layer and another layer this is just one of the techniques that you can use in order to blend your layers in between each other and after effects not to be confused with blending mode which is an entirely different thing yeah we're getting more into compositing which is pretty much making your VFX look like they're happening in the real world or a little bit stylized to however you want them to look so on this adjustment layer we're gonna be applying two of my all-time favorite effects I actually talked about them in the top 25 best effects for After Effects video this is curves which is gonna let me change the color correction of this by adjusting these curves right here so maybe if I want to add a little bit more contrast and a go with something that looks like this maybe if I want to lower the highlights essentially the X and Y's of these graphs are gonna be the different areas of brightness and levels on your video this area more towards the right is gonna be dealing with your highlights and things like that whereas on the left side is gonna be dealing with more of your shadows and your black so once I have something that looks generally nice I'm also gonna go ahead and add in CC vignette which is gonna blend in the corners of the footage it with this nice vignette and make it look as if the entire effect is happening to each other so it's just kind of a neat little lighting trick that it can be super useful when use right okay so that's looking pretty good but I'm noticed that this lightsaber is not matching the original footage exactly how I wanted to and one of those reasons is because I'm shooting with the fisheye lens which is about eight millimeter lens super super wide or getting all this distortions around the edges of the frame so you're going to see all of the straight lines start to curve in and this lightsaber though is going exactly straight so one of the things that you can do to fix that is select on the saber layer and I'm gonna right-click it or I'm gonna press control space to access ethics console where I'm going to type in optics compensation optics compensation is really useful for fixing VFX shots that have a little bit of distortion because of the lenses themselves so in this case even though it makes sense probably to make this lightsaber wrap around much like how the original VFX looks I'm gonna go for a little bit of a stylized effect in which I'm gonna actually make it go in the opposite direction and it's going to be extra straight but at the same time it's gonna hopefully cover up all the rounded features of the video so this is gonna make the lightsaber feel like it's acting out of the balance of the fisheye lens or a little bit more impact it's something super subtle that no one even notices but when you're watching it should convey the feeling that slight saber is a little bit more 3d a little bit more independent of the video I'm gonna go ahead and tweak these settings a little bit here and once that's looking pretty good to me I think one more thing that super iconic if Star Wars are the sparks that come off in the lightsabers whenever they're deflecting something or whenever they're hitting something easy way to add sparks to footage is by pretty much having a resource of sparks so I'm gonna be using video co-pilots action essentials which has a whole bunch of spark effects I know though that you can type it on YouTube and like VFX sparks and they may be on a black background there is a little bit of tweaking that I'm going to do to these sparks that they actually match the footage but essentially this is going to be the pack that I'm gonna be using I'm gonna import the sparks from this folder into our composition and I'm gonna go ahead and place the sparks at about the right time that they should be coming on so now that this is in the composition we're gonna press R on our keyboard which is gonna pull up the rotation tools and that's gonna let me rotate this around now you're noticing I'm able to just click and drag anywhere to reposition it and once I have it in a nice spot I'm gonna drag that layer down below the adjustment layer and below the lightsaber that way the sparks are happening beneath all of the effects that we're gonna be putting on top of them and using this little time stretch feature right click on the layer what I'm trying to do is make these sparks happen with a little bit more realistic timing to this effect so I think it's gonna maybe speed it up a little bit or slow it down just something until I know that we're having something that looks nice and natural for the scene okay so these Sparks look pretty good but I think that I can add a curves to them so that way they also are color corrected to the entire scene and one of the things that I'm noticing is that the lightsaber itself the core of it is super right super bright so let's go ahead and make these sparks that come off of it also with the same brightness and by just increasing the highlights of this is one of those ways that we're just gonna be able to punch it up and make these sparks extra brighter than they already are I can even go ahead and add something like a glow and change the threshold and radius but I think I ended up scrapping that because it looked a little bit too unnatural for the scene surprisingly right the sparks that I had already looked like they had their own natural glow settings or their own natural glow in the footage itself so if you're using a footage though that doesn't have something that looks natural you can just go ahead and add a glow to it maybe even double up the glows I talked all about using glow in the last tutorial as well so go ahead and check that out if you're a little bit confused on how to use blue essentially we're just going to be messing with two features of it which is the radius and the threshold the threshold affects what is going to be information for glow so the lighter parts are going to be used for glow if you have it set to only like 80% in above but if you have it lower than that then that's almost the entire footage is going to be used glowing all right so this is looking cool now this is getting a little bit messy because we have multiple layers going on so let's go ahead and quickly clean up this project by renaming these layers and the way to rename the layer is by clicking on the name inside of the timeline thank you might have to double click it or hard hold it for a few seconds or at the pop-up properly and then type in whatever name you want I'm just going to go ahead and name it this right here and once all of that is nice and neat and clean we get to do all of that all over again for the second lightsaber in the scene so you probably don't have to sit through this because you get what I did before I'm pretty much doing the same exact thing as I did earlier except now I'm doing it for crystals lightsaber yeah let's just run through this really quickly you know again quick rundown of what happens I am making a new saber solid I am changing the keyframes and I'm making sure that all of these horse start and end features starting and where her lightsabers actually is the way that I'm even fixing these keyframes if you want to be able to access them you can press you on your keyboard so you can see all the keyframes laid out for whatever it is inside of the composition for this layer okay shoot I kind of just wiggled this camera real quick okay so this is a super important part that I want you to pay attention to this is where crystals sword is crossing over my lightsaber and why did I call it a sword it's a light say we're done okay so this is the part where her lightsaber is crossing over mine but I wanted to be hidden behind the actual handle of the lightsaber and so the way that I'm gonna do this is by doing a process called the world of scoping now the way that we're gonna get to be able to rotoscoped this out is by clicking on the pen tool which is all the way up here and then I'm just gonna quickly click in points around this lightsaber doesn't have to be perfect you know you just kind of give it something kind of general and rough here okay so once that mask is set what we're gonna go down and do is change the mask blending mode to subtract which you can find by clicking down on the layer and pressing M on your keyboard to pull up mask options once we have that set to subtract then we're going to go back into the Sabre layer and change the alpha mode specifically to mask core and that's looking pretty good so as you can see the glow is still acting on the layer above it which is just that lightsaber right there and it's going to get this nice blue glow which is kind of like a light wrap except we're gonna be taking out the core so it's gonna look like it's behind it which is essential for making this scene look like it's happening in 3d space right now we're gonna go ahead and keyframe in now this mask if for the rest of the frames and the way that we're gonna keyframe this is by going back into the mask settings and clicking on the stopwatch icon right next to mask path and this is going to be the path that we just set or this mask specifically it's gonna lock in that frame and as we scrub through the timeline we can go ahead and make changes to that mask and the mask is going change accordingly so that way we get a nice looking sequence just like we have right here I'm also going to go ahead and add an adjustment layer and then I'm gonna also add in curves just to do another bit of color correction here and what this adjustment layer is gonna be is the way that lights when they like collide into each other they grow for a bit before dying out I want to mimic the same effect of two lightsabers just slashing and is making this super powerful blinding light except I don't want to just hit this with a full white light what I want to do is instead make the entire footage and the saber starts to glow a little bit brighter actually probably a lot brighter and the way that we're doing this is entirely a curve is gonna be this dynamic lighting that we're adding to it one of the things that we can do here is also click the stopwatch tool right by this graph which lets us keyframe in the lighting and the color correction information that curves lets us adjust so it's gonna start off normal looking like a linear line just completely straight and then I'm gonna move forward a few frames up to right when the collision hits and I'm just gonna bump up the highlights all the way up still keeping a little bit of curve so we're just not blowing out all that all the colors and blowing out all the information there but hopefully making it look like getting hit with the extreme light flare huge energy coming from this impact pretty sure if you could tell from the original footage there was going at this pretty slowly there's not like this huge impact but it's going to be able to communicate a lot more energy happening once we add this adjustment layer now the cool part is we can also retime this adjustment layer to only happen for few frames and only have this curves adjustment going from normal to upwards and once we have that set I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate that same adjustment layer and move it over to every single point wherever there's a collision of these two lightsabers in the timeline now since I don't want it to look exactly the same each time for these collisions I can change the opacity of the adjustment layer it's gonna change the amount that is affecting all the layers below it so if this opacity is set to something like 80% and we're gonna see that the footage is not gonna get as bright as it was for the other one and this little variance is hopefully gonna give us something that looks a little bit more natural and a little bit more representative each of these lightsaber impacts I can even adjust how the curve is affected for variants but I think this is already looking pretty good so I might just leave it at that and as I'm going through I'm just previewing this again and I might have to do just a little bit more cleanup making sure that these impacts happen at the right time that my keyframes are all in the right time it's really good just to go back always and keep previewing some of the sections once you're at a nice good resting point you know maybe you'll get something to drink maybe you take a walk you know come back get some pizza who knows take a hit take breaks along the way because sometimes you might just be working on something thinking it looks super dope and then you come back to and you realize oh this looks you know pretty ass I got so much more to do from a the mental fatigue has worn off so that's exactly why I'm going through this and making sure multiple times that my keyframes are lined up to where I want them to be now if you're noticing some little hiccups along the way you're gonna want to do something that I recommend for every single project at least at one point which is purging your disk cache it's a part of using After Effects something you know I wish that they kind of just did it earlier on when things start to mess up but hey I get it you know it's just a part of the workflow so After Effects is actually saving all of these frames as a part of your cache and once it gets too big it starts getting all confused and wonky so we're gonna go up to here on the top top bar select purge and purge this cache clean up and delete all the preview frames that we made we're just gonna let that go ahead and rerender again and we should see a lot of the problems and crashes and glitches and after-effects go away just by doing that if that does not fix some of the issues with After Effects you can go ahead and also just close the program open it back up but I still recommend you clear the disk cache because that's going to be the number one cause of issues when using After Effects okay so this is looking pretty good now I'm gonna select all these layers here and I'm gonna pre-compose it once I have all that pre-compose I'm also going to go into the composition settings and I'm gonna change it now back to 59.94 since I have all the keyframes set pretty well in 24 frames per second it may be a little little bit off when I shift to 59.94 the main points of it will still be there it you know it won't be too far off it's just about a double increase in the frames but all the things that happen in between will start to come together the reason why I'm doing this is because I'm going to be adding another effect this one isn't a free one premium plugin is called twixtor let's meet I'm a pretty useful II creates all the frames in between if I'm going from a hundred percent to like twenty percent speed after effects also comes built in with a time remapping feature so you can use that the same exact way I right clicking on the layer and clicking time remap it's gonna let you set keyframes where you want certain things that happen being able to shift those around will speed up footage or slow it down depending the reason why I'm adding a Twix turn out to this time remapping it at the very end is because most of this does not look like it's an intense bite so we're gonna go ahead and speed up at certain points of the footage it's changing this speed value from a hundred percent to maybe two hundred percent for a little bit door forward through the timeline and then actually cranking this all the way down during something like an impact this is gonna add a little bit more energy to every movement that we do in the footage hopefully be able to clean up the fact that we weren't really fighting with lightsabers in this what I'm doing with these now is just changing the keyframes I'm having it go from a hundred percent speed to twenty and I'm gonna hold it here at twenty percent so I want this moment of slow-motion just scrub forward in the timeline I'm gonna select another keyframe to make it at twenty set wait for this entire little section is going slow motion and moving a few frames forward to a hundred percent so that way it's speed ramps all the way back up and pretty much that's how you make something called a speed rink it's one of the useful tools of After Effects and even in Premiere you can do it but a lot of video editors use speed ramps to make things look a lot better Gibson has a view speed ramps a lot who else anyone even does it just one of those nice ways to be able to control time in After Effects so this is looking pretty good now I think that we're just about ready to make this a final render so I'm gonna select on this composition the one that we have time remap I'm gonna go all the way up to composition and click add to render queue the settings that you render out in are gonna be dependent on what you are probably going to be doing with this final clip I'm gonna be specifically uploading to YouTube so I know I'm gonna go through to my after codec so I'm gonna make this an mp4 file or a small MOV pretty much set this however you want it to be just note don't use avi for something like this because that's going to become a huge huge file it's pretty much an uncompressed file one of the best ones things start to use is MOV or mp4 sometimes your computer might not come with mp4 installed so go ahead and use emoji animation or use MOV ho res appending if you're on a Mac really gonna be dependent on the computer you're on a little bit more information on rendering will be coming up in another tutorial okay so that looks just about done this looks like a pretty cool effect now I'm just gonna go ahead and add sound effects and premiere said this entirely comes together if you follow along this part you know just go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back because you just sat through becoming a Jedi Master in After Effects and if you're able to make something really cool with this effect go ahead drop us a tag on Instagram so we can see it or even other people in the community can see it I'm sure they're gonna enjoy seeing what you make it is something that I did not go over in the video that you think I absolutely need to go over it just didn't make any sense just please leave a comment down below we're gonna check it out and maybe someone else who saw this and it was a little thing or two about After Effects will be able to help you out as well make sure you hit like and subscribe that notification though as well I hope to catch you guys on the next one peace [Music]