An Explosion To Remember
Page 3 of 4
Next we need to add a fireball of an explosion to accompany the debris.
I used the Perseus fireball from the Artbeats collection, placed it on the layer above the explosion and resized and rotated it until it lined up nicely with the shatter layer. To make everything blend nicely, turn on the Transfer Mode to Add. Now there is a nice explosion but something doesn’t look quite right. The fireball is popping out of the wall before any bits of debris are. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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| Artbeats has a great collection of stock and effect footage for just about any project. |
Let’s duplicate the shattered window effect a few times. The top most layer will be for those early bits or building. Open the effect panel for this layer and turn the Rendering Settings to Pieces. This will only render the shards from shatter and not the whole layer. Place this piece on top of the fireball layer. Also turn off Force 2 for this layer, as Force 1 will be used to represent the early explosion.
The second duplicated layer should be underneath the fireball layer. Turn the Rendering Settings to Pieces, and this time turn off Force 1. These pieces will represent the late debris after the majority of the fireball has exited the hole in the building.
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| Rendering pieces only will help in compositing the fireball with the debris. |
Beneath the late debris layer, place the original shatter layer (the hole layer), but instead of Rendering All, turn the Rendering Settings to Layer. This will only render what is left of the layer after the pieces have fallen away.
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| The Shatter effect with only Layer turned on. |
This looks so much better now, but if you play through the comp, you’ll see that the debris falls on our heroes and doesn’t get larger in size. Because of the distance between the car and the building, the debris should fall behind the car. To fix this, duplicate the original video layer, and move it to the top of the stack.
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| With the shatter particles on top of our hereos the effect falls apart. |
Now use the Pen Tool to draw a mask around the foreground items (the car, our heroes, the parking lot, etc). Scrubbing through the timeline reveals that the debris does indeed fall behind the car, but there is one additional thing we can do to improve the effect.
Zoom into the layer so that the front windshield fills the view. Apply the Vector Paint effect to this layer and using the Erase Tool with the Opacity set to 5%, lightly erase the windshield. The debris should be visible behind the window, but still obscured enough to finish out this portion of our overall effect.
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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