Creating Fire in After Effects – Tips, Tutorials & Templates
There are numerous other ways of creating fire in Adobe After Effects. Here are a few tutorials and free presets to get you up and running:-
Fire Presets & After Effects Templates
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- Trapcode’s latest plug-in – Mir looks like being an excellent tool for creating fire effects in After Effects and it has the added bonus of rendering extremely fast. We created a Free Trapcode Mir Fire and Smoke template using it and the Fractal Noise effect. Download the free Trapcode Mir Fire and Smoke template here.
- Videohive has a number of excellent fire based After Effects templates and also a good range of stock footage of fire. These aren’t free but they are very inexpensive. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you are on a tight deadline with client work and need a decent fire effect fast. Check out the fire stock footage and templates here.
- Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot used After Effects CC Particle World and vector blur to create fire. You can You can download the After Effects project file here.
Creating Fire in After Effects Tutorials
- Create Fairly Realistic Fire using CC Particle World.
- Pyrotechnics: Creating Fire, Explosions, and Energy Phenomena in After Effects.
- After effects fire tutorial.
- Build a furious procedural Disintegration effect in AE.
- Create a Burning Building VFX Shot.
Creating Realistic Slow Motion Fire With Trapcode Particular & Twixtor
Red Giant recently aired their latest masterpiece – Tempo, which showcased a range of amazing visual effects that can be created with Trapcode & Red Giant plug-ins. One particular eye catching effect was the slow motion fire. Aharon Rabinowitz has released an in depth tutorial into how they managed to pull off this effect using stock footage, Trapcode Particular & RE:Vision Effects Twixtor & ReelSmart Motion Blur.
The workflow involves adding fire footage inside a Trapcode Particular particle system. This footage can be easily obtained from sources such as Video Copilot Action Essentials. Using Trapcode Particular’s textured Sprite you load the footage and set it to Random-Play Once. To get the best blending mode for the sprite, set the transfer mode to Lighten. In order to make the effect even more impressive, Aharon used a couple of very useful After Effects plug-ins that should be part of every VFX artist’s toolbox – RE:Vision Effects Twixtor & ReelSmart Motion Blur.
Twixtor allows you to slow down the fire footage to give you that cinematic, slow motion, flame effect, without the stuttering artifacts you’d normally get from slowing down footage. ReelSmart Motion Blur (RSMB) allows you to add realistic motion blur to the footage Particular is emitting, making the effect look much more realistic. Like Aharon mentions in the tutorial, you can use After Effects native Time Warp plug-in for free to create motion blur, but the results are often not great and it takes forever to render. You can save 5% off Twixtor and Reel Smart Motion Blur here.
