How to Make It Snow - Adobe After Effects Part 1/2

Hey you guys it’s Gerry here for Iceberg Creativity. Finally back into the swing of things making new tutorials for you guys. I took a little break for the last few weeks. Three weeks to be exact, and I haven’t made any tutorials overviews on iceberg not even on the boxing video, but that all change today. I’m going to announce right now that Iceberg Creativity has been bought out. That is right a large faceless corporation that cares about profit and not the end user has purchased Iceberg Creativity for $43,000. Actually no I’m joking I’m just trying to add humor to my videos. Now if you could not tell from the title we’re going to be doing an after effects tutorial. I know I need to do something special to break the ice after not doing anything for three weeks, so I figured after effects is the best road to do this. I guess we can start it up by showing you what we’re going to be making. Well, yes that makes sense, so I’m just going to pop up my documents that’s here and let’s call Snow Day. It’s a very basic composition all that I used is a few basic layers and a photo that I got on stock website, and like previous tutorials I will actually provide a down loading for you to get this stock photo. Well, I don’t know if I did this in previous tutorials or not. I do believe for member linking the original artist stock website and software, but this one is free. It only requires a registration at a free stock site, so I’m going to go ahead and hit play here now. [Demonstration] Okay, so now you have a feel about what we’re making. We’re going to be using this image of a Snowy Tree Feel field rather, and we’re going to have some snow falling and we’re going to have a logo. This text will not be in our final composition though. Actually I have the final camp open right here in after effects. You can see there’s not many layers at all to work with this pretty basic and it’s pretty easy to export as well. So I’m just going to go up here and hide after effects for a minute. I just want to quite, quite time, so without further adieu let’s get started. If you want to follow along with myself you can down load the image in the description. Okay to officially kick out the tutorial now no fooling. You need to down load yourself the image that we’re going to be using. Now if you find an image better and you want to use that when I said sure go ahead by all means. The composition should be the same, but it might be slightly varied from my final version. So the image that we’re going to be working with is just called Snowy Winter’s Day. This is a free image that is from PhotoExpress.com. You can see it is actually much different looking than our final composition. You can down load this in the description once again, it is from PhotoExpress.com. Now we are going to be using a custom PSD that I used within the cam. It’s just the basic little image I made in Photoshop for the snow flakes, and you can download that as well if you want to follow along. I will show you at the end of the tutorial how to make your snow flake within Photoshop. It ‘s actually quite easy. All right, let’s begin, shall we? Bring after effects back off. I’m going to go to file new and new project. I’m going to hit save because I did my file something there. I’m going to go to composition and chose new composition. When you’re face with this style art box I’m just going to call it Winter’s Day. My height and width are 640X480. I want to keep it basic for these tutorials. For the duration you can leave at that 30, but I use to trim it down and trim it down to about 20 seconds or so, and then I’m going to click okay. And now we have our composition ready to go, and now we need to import some files for the project. So over here in the projects manager window just double click and you’ll be presented with an import file dialogue. I’m going to import winter ‘s theme and snowy winter’s day JPEG. Once again, well the JPEG will be provided about the sun will not be. It’s the ending theme for an anime, and can be found somewhere else online. I’m just going to click open right now. I’m going to double click once again because there is no other element we need that is hidden within my documents folder. That’s the cannon logo and this snow flake PSD, so I want to open this up and now we have everything ready to go. So the first thing we’re going to do is is detext snowy winter’s day and drag it down to the timeline and it will appear in our composition where right here on the main view of your window, but it’s much too big. We need to resize it for to fit. So right click on your screen, go to transform and chose fit the cam. This will resize the image properly without you having to get the sliders or any adjustment and it’s just done quick and simple. All right, the first thing we need to create is a new solid. Now to do this is pretty easy. I’m trying to go basic here guys, so anybody who hasn’t used after effects that much can follow along, and achieve the same effect I do. So go to layer new and choose solid for the purpose of my tutorial I’m just kind of keep a basic and use a black solid, but I’m going to call it instead of black solid a noise, and then I’m going to hit okay. And now we have a black ugly shade here on the screen that we need to get rid off. So to do this we’re going to add a little bit of an effect which will help with the blending in the future of the composition. Let’s go to effect and noise and grain and then just click noise. Nothing will really happen over here because you need to actually enter an amount and you’re not given the set preview like in Photoshop. So go to amount of noise and I’d like to use anywhere from 20 to 50%. For the purpose of my tutorial I’m going to use about you know 20 seems good, and then just hit enter. And you see a bit of noise grade here on the screen okay. Now we do have two steps left to complete on this layer. So go ahead and make sure it’s click down on the timeline and hit T on your keyboard. This will bring out the opacity. Change the opacity from 100% to 40%. I find 40 to 60 works best, and then once again right click. Go to your blending moods and chose either over light soft light or hard light whatever you think to work best. I like using soft light because it achieves a nice effect, so hit soft light and really not much happens. I mean if you turn it on you know there’s a bit of darkening, and this will help in the future of the composition as I stated earlier. Now hit T on your keyboard once again to hide the opacity on the noise layer, and you see up here your snow flake layer you’re still flake PSD however. I want you to take it and just drag it down to the timeline. And you get this snow flake appearing on the screen. I don’t want this. This is here as a place holder, so go over here to the timeline you see these ice turn it off. This is still in the actual timeline, but you can’t see it this is for the future particles systems. And now I’m going to show you two different ways in which you add snow in this composition. —Okay guys now I hate to do this I really do, but I’m going to have to make a second part to this tutorial. The reason being is it’s going to exceed the 10 minute limit when explaining just one part of the particle emitter, so part two will be of right after this one. Actually, what I’m going to do, is I’m going to render this tutorial out, and then record part two upload them both and wait for them both to process. So you guys have to view them at the exact same time. To fill the void I finally put up a Photoshop tutorial in between them processing, so you have something to watch while you wait for this tutorial even though you probably won’t know about the whole waiting as it will appear online at the exact same time. Okay guys stay tuned in for part two. All right, I’m not going to show how to make the snow flake PSD file. Open up Photoshop, go to file new make sure your width and height is100X100 click okay delete or rather first create a new layer right away and delete the original layer and select bigger here on this layer. It’s a default shaped tool in the all selection of your shapes chose this snow flake by going to this menu choosing all okay then select this snow flake, and then just make your selection in the center of the image then hit B on your keyboard to get your brush with the 45 soft brush which is right here on the default brushes click five times in the center of the snow flake one, two, three, four and five. Then on your keyboard hit command I to invert to white hit command A or control AM window to select toll and align it perfectly to the center, file, save as and we just save it to my desktop, and I’m going to call it snow flake PSD hit okay. Okay and here it is ready to go.