After Effects Tutorial How To Create Realistic Explosions After Effects. In this Feature Tutorial, Ill show you how to create a common special effect in After Effects, one youve seen many times blowing a window out of a building as if a bomb had gone off inside. For this tutorial, well just do a basic version of this effect so you can get an idea of how to put it together on your own. It wont be super realistic, but youll certainly get the idea. Lets get started. Step 1 Assemble Your Source Footage. Pixel-Film-Studios-PROFIRE-Volume-2-Fire-Effects-FCPX-Effects-Fire-Flames-Fire-Emitters-Composites-2d-3d-Final-Cut-Pro-X-FCPX-Plugins-Store-Image-3.png' alt='Final Cut Pro Explosion Effect' title='Final Cut Pro Explosion Effect' />To begin, youll need some source footage to work with. Ill be using a still photo of a neighbors house, which has nice big glass windows on the second floor, and an explosion sound effect from my own SFX library. In addition, well be using a piece of stock explosion footage from Art. Beats, purveyors of all kinds of digital stock footage. If you dont have access to a commercial stock library, there are also many free explosion clips available online you can use instead. Step 2 Create Your Explosion Composition. Screen_Shot_2559-11-15_at_10.46.17_AM_large.png?v=1479181727' alt='Final Cut Pro Explosion Effects' title='Final Cut Pro Explosion Effects' />50 Free Plugins for Final Cut Pro X. FiltrCutPro 12 instagramesque effects for Final Cut Pro X. Old Time Scouting Games there. Final Cut Pro X The ultimate FREE Plugin list for FCPX. Final Cut Pro X effects for you. Final Cut Pro video editors have always been one of the top notch video editors available in the market. Final Cut Pro X Use chroma keys. You. Drag the effect to the timeline foreground clip you want to apply the effect to. Shows the final composited. Im going to be working at at a relatively small frame size of 6. Since this is an Intermediate tutorial, Im going to assume you know how to set up a new comp and import footage. Next, add your still image to the comp. This layer should run the entire length of the composition Step 3 Mask the House Window. Next were going to mask out the window in this layer which will be the rearmost in our final composition to create the effect of the blow out window. Masking the window will create a hole in the layer through to the black background. So, double click the house layer to open it in the Layer window, grab the Pen tool G, and draw a simple 4 point closed mask with straight lines that outlines the window Go back to your Comp window, open the Mask properties for the mask you just created, and click the Inverted button for the mask Youll now see the house layer with the window masked out Step 4 Duplicate the House Layer. Free Downloadable Effects, Transitions and Titles for Final Cut Pro X. New Final Cut Pro Plugins Old Final Cut Pro X Plugins. CrumplePop features a series of free Final Cut Pro X plugins and effects. Including SplitScreen X Lite and Noir Moderne Lite. Spectrogram Software'>Spectrogram Software. Creating Realistic Explosions in After Effects. Add an Explosion Sound Effect. The final step is to add an explosion. This free sound effects download includes the following. Realistic explosion sound effects that are perfect for war or battle. Maintained by FinalCutKing. Final Cut Pro X offers power and speed for the next generation of video editors now with a clean new look and the revolutionary. Simply special effects. Muzzle-Flash-in-FCPX-Step-1.gif' alt='Final Cut Pro Explosion Effect' title='Final Cut Pro Explosion Effect' />Select the masked layer and type Command D to duplicate it. Select the upper or frontmost layer of the two identical layers, open up its Mask properties, and uncheck the Inverted button for that layer. If you turn off the visibility for the rearmost layer now, youll see just the window isolated on its own layer. This is the layer were going to blow up to reveal the empty hole behind it Step 5 Apply Shatter to the Isolated Window Layer. The After Effects Shatter plugins whole purpose in life is to blow things up, so thats what were going to use here. With the frontmost masked window layer selected, choose Effect Simulation Shatter. In the Shatter Effects Control window, the first thing you should do is set the View pop up menu to Rendered which will show you the final results, rather than just the wireframe of the shattered pieces, leaving everything else the same, and preview the results Even with the default settings, thats pretty cool, although it obviously doesnt look like a real window explosion but you can see where were going with this, at least. Next, lets tweak Shatters settings to give us more realistic results. Step 6 Adjust Shatters Settings. Now, this tutorial isnt really the place to go into Shatter in depth, but fortunately we dont have to do too much tweaking to give us good results. First, open up the Shape properties in Shatters Effects Control window and choose Glass from the Pattern menu this will give us more irregular, realistic exploded shapes, rather than the default blocks. Next, set Repetitions to 2. Finally, set the Extrusion Depth to 0. At this point, your Shatter settings should look like this and your previewed movie should look like this Much better However, the explosion is a little slow right now, so were going to do two more tweaks before moving on. First, open the Force 1 properties and set Strength to 1. Next open the Physics properties and set Gravity to 6, which will help pull the chunks down a little faster after theyre blasted out. Step 7 Delay the Explosion. As youve no doubt noticed, the Shatter explosion starts right at the beginning of the layer, which it always does. Id like to delay the explosion a little, though, so it doesnt start right at the beginning of the final clip. There are a few ways to do this, but with this material, a simple way is to just move the Shatter layer a little later in time and add another copy of the still image at the beginning of the comp to make up the time. So, just drag the Shatter layer in the Timeline so it starts at 1 0. Layer window so it starts at 0 0. Next, trim the end of the new layer so it ends at 1 0. Timeline. The first few seconds of your comp Timeline should look something like this And a preview of the first four seconds or so should now look like this Step 8 Add the Explosion Footage. Now, of course, we need to composite our explosion stock footage into the scene so we have something to blow out the window with. It is possible to simulate explosions with particle systems in After Effects, but youre almost always going to get better results with a real explosion, which is what well use here its also a lot less work. Heres the one Im going to be using As you can see, its shot against a black background, and the explosion stays completely within the frame, so its edges dont get cut off, both of which will make this clip particularly useful in this context. So, drag it into the comp and position it between the Shatter layer and the masked background layer. We want the explosion to appear behind the shattered window layer but in front of the blown out window layer. Then drag the footage in the Timeline so its beginning lines up with the beginning of the Shatter layer. Step 9 Screen the Explosion Footage. With this footage, the first thing we need to do is remove its black background so we can composite it in the scene. We could try keying, but theres a simpler way Screen Mode. So, reveal the Blending Modes column in the Layer window, and set the explosion footage layer to Screen, which will knock out the black background and leave only the brighter explosion pixels behind. Step 1. 0 Position and Scale the Explosion Footage. At this point of course, the explosion is centered in the frame and nowhere near the window. So lets just drag it in the Comp window until its centered in the empty window frame, adjusting and previewing as needed so the explosion itself appears in the correct position. With this particular footage, we also need to scale it in my case, to 8. You may also want to adjust the start point of the explosion footage layer slightly so it lines up better with the start of the Shatter explosion. This will depend on how your own stock footage begins, of course. A quick preview, and heres where we currently stand Step 1. Apply Levels to the Explosion Footage. Were almost done, and have just a couple of tweaks to do to complete our tutorial. First, youll notice that the explosion footage looks a little washed out and thin, which is the result of applying Screen to it. So, with the layer selected, choose Effect Color Correction Levels, which will let us brighten up the footage a bit and strengthen the effect. In the Levels Effect Controls window, drag the right hand arrow under the Histogram towards the left, which will have the effect of brightening and increasing the opacity of the footage while still keeping the black background transparent.