Unleash your inner Jedi (or Sith) with this quick guide to creating a lightsaber in After Effects.
For example: Here was my thought process on the Saber plug-in: Man, my short film is taking way too long I need to release something cool now that I’m back from Star Wars! Let’s release the Saber plug-in. That thing is pretty cool! I haven’t posted cool stuff in a while though, This plug-in needs to be sweet! I Should make a trailer too! In this After Effects CC tutorial I run you through the most efficient and realistic way to animate a lightsaber!Help Support my channel if you learned somet. There’s nothing you can’t create with After Effects. Create cinematic movie titles, intros, and transitions. Remove an object from a clip. Start a fire or make it rain. Animate a logo or character. Even navigate and design in a 3D space. With After Effects, the industry-standard motion graphics and visual effects software, you can take any.
Image above from Star Wars: The Force Awakens
If you’ve used AfterEffects for any amount of time, chances are you’ve wanted to create a Star Wars effect at least once or twice. Let’s take a look at how to create your very own lightsaber in AfterEffects using 100% native plugins. (Subtly waves hand.) This is the tutorial you’re looking for.
Step 1: Create a Solid
The first thing you need in order to create a lightsaber effect is some great footage. In this tutorial I’m using a clip from Shutterstock. Once you’ve imported your footage into a new AfterEffects composition, create a new white solid. The label I chose for my solid: Purple Lightsaber.
Step 2: Mask and Keyframe
Next, mask and keyframe the solid so that it surrounds the motion blur of the lightsaber from your reference footage. Try to keep your mask to only four points. If you use more than four, you might begin to get confused about which part is supposed to be at the base of the lightsaber and which part is supposed to be at the top of the lightsaber. By using four mask points, you can keep the exact same points at the top and bottom throughout the entire animation.
Step 3: Create an Inverted Alpha Mask
Next, create a mask so your lightsaber will not cross in front of your subject if it’s actually supposed to be behind your subject. To do this, create a new solid and mask out the areas where your lightsaber should be behind your subject. Our example above is fairly easy; we’ll just have to mask out our subject’s head.
Quick Tip: Make sure to trim your mask layer so that it doesn’t accidentally cover up your lightsaber in any other parts of your composition.
After you mask and keyframe your alpha mask, it’s time to set your track matte. Position your masking layer above your lightsaber layer and change the track matte to Alpha Inverted. This will automatically hide your masking layer in your timeline and create a hole where your subject should be.
Step 4: Add Stylization Effects
Saber Adobe After Effects Plugin
Precompose both your alpha mask and your lightsaber layer. Now it’s time to add a few quick stylization effects. The two that I use every time are Fast Blur and Glow. The Fast Blur effect makes your lightsaber seem a little more organic, while the Glow effect adds color to the white layer if you’ve set the Glow Colors to A&B Colors. After you add your stylization effects, simply turn your transfer mode to Screen and adjust any of your effects as needed.
Here’s what our final result looks like.
Want to see a step-by-step tutorial about how to create this cool lightsaber effect? Check out this great tutorial by Legacy Entertainment that uses the same layer technique outlined in this blog post.
This is just one of the many different ways you can create a lightsaber in After Effects. Another popular method is to use the lightsaber preset designed by Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot. I highly recommend checking out their tutorial.
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Make a cool reveal intro logo with Saber plugin in After Effects
You could make a cool reveal intro logo with saber in After Effects with ease. Saber is a plugin for After Effects. Making advantage of masks inside After Effects, everything is possible and quite interesting. And the great thing about it is extremely easy to accomplish it, trust me.
For making the reveal intro logo you will also need Adobe Illustration. It’s not must but it’s far easier if you have it.
The reason: if you don’t have Adobe Illustrator you have to re-create your logo inside Adobe After Effects from scratch. And depends on the complexity of your logo, how much is going to take to do that.
Saber in After Effect is an amazing Free plugin by videocopilot.
The founder of the company is Andrew Kramer. I love this guy and all of his work. He is extremely inspired and well knowledge fellow. I actually learn After Effects from his tutorials, which I highly recommend if you are interested in After Effects and motion graphics in general. It doesn’t matter in what level you are, you always learn new things and cool stuff from his enormous experience. I can’t say enough for Andrew, is just the best.
If you don’t have the Saber plugin, you could download it from here.
I won’t explain how the plugin works, not because it’s not necessary but more like because Andrew Kramer has already made a great job, demonstrating how the Saber plugin works. After all, it’s his plugin 🙂 You could find the video demonstration of the plugin on the same page you download it. A well made 37 minute video, with tons of cool stuff.
Making a cool reveal intro logo with Saber in After Effects:
Preparation of the logo:
I will be working in the coca cola logo. I suspect everybody is pretty much familiar with this brand.
So, open up Illustrator with your logo vector file. Just select the “whole” logo and press copy.
*You could also select each time a part of your logo and copy it and then past it in After Effect (more advanced).
Open up a new After effect project, create a new solid layer (make it black), apply the Saber plugin. Now is the time to just paste the previous copy you made in Illustrator.
Now the solid layer has all the logo information from Illustrator as separate “masks” inside After Effects. How cool is that, right! Just one copy – paste and all the information has transferred. You could verify this by opening the solid layer which has the Saber effect and take a look at the separate masks over there.
The masks are there, but the glowing line doesn’t seem to really follow the shape of the actual coca cola logo, right! The only thing you have to do to address it, is to go to Saber effect and under customizecore chooses the layer masks and you are good to go.
After playing with some paraments like color, glow intensity, etc. i came up with the following result.
Reveal animation:
Now the actual reveal of the logo it’s pretty simple. You just have to set some keyframes on the start offset parament, started from 100% to 0%.
That’s it, you have made a cool reveal logo animation by yourself in a matter of minutes.
Composition enhancement:
The black feeling color which I gave in our composition it wasn’t much appealing, so after playing a few minutes more with it and adding some blur and a little bit of camera motion, i came up with this short intro of coca cola. It’s nothing special, it’s pretty much basic stuff, but it’s a lot more interest than a black background, don’t you think!
Saber Adobe After Effects
Conclusion:
This post does not reveal the full power of Saber plugin, it just gives you a small taste of what you can do with it for reveal intro logo purpose. It has so many paraments that you can alter and so many preset you can choose from which can save you some time.
As I already said, if you want to get the most out of Saber plugin I highly recommend visiting the site and watch the well made 37 min video.
You could make a ton of cool stuff with Saber. You could mix things up with 3d elements, text, blending modes, using more Saber layers at once and much more. It’s up to you how much complexity your reveal intro logo will have.
You could visit an early post I made for converting 2D logo intro 3D and use that technic to mix things up using the Saber plugin.
Thanks for reading, see you in a week 🙂