Page 1 of 7 Tiago Dias works at a corporate television and news production company based in London with subsidiaries around the world, as a video producer and Flash developer — this is Tiago's ideal job, as it combines 2 of his favorite technologies! In his free time he writes tutorials on Flash and After Effects for various communities.
The question I get most nowadays is: How do you create Fire & Smoke? What are your little hints for accomplishing it? Should I use a plug-in or go with the built-in effects? This tutorial will show you how to create Fire & Smoke with only the bundled plugins that you get when buying the Pro Version of After Effects 7. In case you are using the standard version, you can download a trial of Cycore Cult Effects from their website.
Before we even start, do some experiments to see how fire reacts to different
physics and how smoke reacts/moves.
(Please experiment in a safe location outside your 4 walls.)
Below is a screenshot of the effect we are about to create:
Figure 1 – Car burning
Before I started to write this tutorial I was thinking: What should I set on fire? I came up with a few ideas such as a car, a match, a tree, a newspaper. In the end I went for the car. That's where our tutorial starts.
I've found this picture of an old car somewhere in the woods by simply searching Google's picture search site.
Figure 2 – Car image
There is a lot of stuff which we need to remove so we get a clear view of the effects that we are creating. I've opened this image in Photoshop, and with the lasso tool I've removed the inside of the window. I've also made the top of the car transparent.
Figure 3 – Edited car image
Why are we doing it this way? The transparent parts of the image will be recognized as Alpha Channels in After Effects.
An Alpha Channel is the opacity channel of an image or video footage. If a pixel has a value of 0% in its alpha channel, then it becomes transparent. This way you can put other pictures behind or in front of another.
When you're done with removing the window and top of the car, create a folder for this project and save the car image as a Photoshop file named old_car.psd.
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Keywords
after effects,fire,smoke,cycore,cult
