[Jordy whistles]

No, we're not doing that.

No, we're not doing… come on, guys…

No, we're not doing the disintegration effect.

Stop doing that.

No, we're not doing the disintegration effect!

You guys have been asking me for this for an entire year now, no!

Get away.

[Multiple popping sounds]

No!

Guys, come on, stop!

No, we're not doing the disintegration effect!

What is wrong with all of you?

No!

Alright, you win.

Yannick, get over here!

We're doing the disintegration effect.

[Cinecom's intro music]

Hey guys, it's Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Copy Cat Friday,

the weekly series in which we recreate effects

from famous films and music videos.

And since the first Infinity Wars film got out

we've been getting so many comments from you guys

asking us to create that disintegration effect.

Personally, I never wanted to do it

because there're already some great tutorials out there

that I think show the effect really great.

I think the ones from ProductionCrate and Filmlearnin really stand out.

And I don't just wanna make a copy of them.

So, we're gonna do it a little bit different today.

Everyone is using a third party plugin called Trapcode.

It does costs some money, and although it's worth every penny,

we are gonna do it without.

The only thing you're gonna need is Adobe After Effects.

Now, one problem we were running into was the motion of the particles.

And I strongly believe that we can never get it perfect without Trapcode,

so we did make a disintegration effect that is fairly simply to make,

however it's not exactly the same as in the film.

But I think for everyone who's starting out with Adobe After Effects,

this tutorial right here is definitely gonna tackle some very nice techniques.

[Yannick whistles]

-Hey Yannick, when you're done cleaning up here,

could you help me out?

I'm trying to create this effect but I just can't get it to work.

-Sure. -Ah, thanks Yannick.

Oh yeah, before I forget, Have you seen Lorenzo somewhere?

-Did you check the toilet? -No, I haven't yet.

You know, there's this pile of dust somewhere

and I want him to clean it up, but I just can't find him anywhere.

I'll check the toilet, thanks, Yannick.

-Jordy!

So, I guess I'll just do all the work around here!

Where is Yannick now?

First Lorenzo is gone, now Yannick is gone,

What's with all the ashes around the office here?

Anyways, let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor,

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Definitely check it out by clicking the first link in the description below.

And now let's mop the floor a little bit further.

To make your shots, you are gonna need to shoot yourself against a green screen.

We actually did a tutorial a few weeks ago on how to pull the perfect green key,

so definitely check that out.

I'll leave a link to it in the description below.

Also take an empty shot when you're done

and make sure that both of the shots were done from a tripod.

That's it.

Then bring the two shots into Adobe After Effects.

Place your empty shot on the bottom and the green screen shot on top.

With the pen tool you wanna draw on the inside of the green screen

to get rid of the rest.

Finally search for the Key Light effect in your Effects Library

and we're gonna grab that Key Light preset

that also has a cleaner and a spill light remover.

Again, I'm pointing to our in depth video about green screens

where I show exactly how to get the best results with this Key Light effect.

After you've picked the green, it'll be keyed out,

which is gonna make sure that your background and the talent

is gonna be in a separate layer.

And that is exactly what we want.

Now we're about to work with an effect that is not super stable.

We've had After Effects crash several times,

so there're a few things we have to take in account.

First of all, make sure that you're working on 1080p footage.

The effect can't handle 4K, unfortunately.

If you're doing a green key, I would first do that in 4K

and then export it to 1080 to do the rest.

The second thing is that you wanna have your renderer set to Full at all time.

Don't ask me why, that's just how Adobe works.

Alright, we can now go ahead and duplicate the shot of the talent.

This duplication is gonna be the effect where your talent turns into brown ashes,

not the actual particles yet.

On this duplication we're gonna add a fractal noise.

Change the brightness and contrast so that you get a nice contrast pattern,

as you can see right here.

After that, add a Tint effect to it as well

and map the white color to something brown-ish.

The color of the ashes.

Finally add a Linear Wipe to the clip.

We're gonna use this to reveal the layer.

Start by animating the transition completion from 100 to 0.

The speed of this animation will define the speed of the disintegration as well.

When you're done, change the angle the way you want.

Of course, where you see this layer appear first

will also define the start of the disintegration.

And finally add some feather to that Linear Wipe to top it off.

And this is what the complete animation should look like.

Alright, we can now go ahead and select the two layers,

right click and choose precompose to group them together.

On this composition we're gonna add the effect called Shatter.

And this is that very unstable effect that I was talking about.

I really hope Adobe will update this effect one day

to be more compatible with modern hardware.

But anyways, let's have a look at it.

For starters we're going to change the view to rendered

so that we can actually see what we're doing.

For the pattern, select Glass, which is gonna give us the right texture.

Next increase the repetitions to around 200.

This will define the amount of particles.

Extrusion depth is gonna be to 0 as we don't want a three dimensional particle.

Next head into the Force.

The position property is gonna shatter your clip.

So we're gonna position that one above the starting point,

where we also let the Linear Wipe start.

The Radius defines the radius of that position point.

In the beginning it has to be small so that we don't see the shatter yet.

And then comes the strength.

This defines how much the particles will explode.

We're gonna set this to around 0.2,

since the disintegration will gently shatter and not explode.

Alright, now jump into the physics.

The rotation speed can be set to the max, together with the randomness.

And this will let the particles flow more organic as they break apart.

The Viscosity, if I pronounce that right, can be increased to around 0.2.

This will keep the particles more together.

We'll get back to this one in a moment.

The ashes of the disintegration is something very lightweight.

So we're gonna decrease the gravity to around 0.2.

Eventually, the ashes will move away

and you can define which direction they have to go to

with the gravity direction.

Setting it to 0 will make them go upwards.

And finally is the Gravity Inclination.

You can kinda see this as the ramping of the gravity.

We're increasing this to 50, which will first break the particles apart

and then it will slowly rise.

Kinda the same thing as setting an ease to a keyframe.

Alright, those were all the settings.

We can now go ahead and make the animation,

which actually goes very simple with this effect.

We don't need to create any masks or anything like that.

I'm going to create a Keyframe for the position, radius, viscosity and gravity.

Then move forward in time, try to follow your previous Linear Wipe animation.

Now change the position to go over your talent,

and at the same time, increase the radius

so that it shatters everything that comes in its path.

Finally, decrease the viscosity to 0

so that the particles will move a little bit more apart

and increase the gravity to around 0.6 to make the particles go up faster over time.

And when you got this right, you already have yourself a disintegration effect.

But of course, we can make it look better.

So the next steps are gonna be some fine-tuning.

For starters, we're gonna add some fine dust to the effect.

To do that, we're going to create a new solid.

Make sure that it is a black solid.

On this new layer we're going to add the Add Grain effect.

Change the viewing mode to Final Output and then jump into the tweaking,

where you wanna increase the intensity and the size to 10.

And then decrease the softness to around 0.02.

This will give you some very nice sharp grain.

Under Color, we're going to check monochromatic

and for the animation speed, set that one to 0.

Because we don't want the grain to move around.

Now, those who are wondering why we didn't simply used the Noise effect

to create this pattern.

Well, that's because we couldn't disable the animation of the grain

with the Noise effect.

Alright, this is gonna be the fine dust.

But we're gonna use that layer as a pattern.

So we can now go ahead and disable the layer output.

Next we're going to duplicate the layer on which we've created

that first disintegration effect.

Make sure it's on the top of your edit.

This also copied the entire Shatter effect with it,

including the animation keyframes.

Now, important is that you're gonna move your playhead

on top of the first keyframes of this layer.

From this point we can now change a few settings from within

and those keyframes will be automatically updated.

For starters, change the pattern to Custom.

And from the custom shatter map below,

we're going to point to that solid with the grain onto it.

Make sure you also select 'Effects and Masks' from the dropdown next to it.

The Shatter effect will now use that grain for the texture of its dust.

We're going to add a little bit of depth to this dust.

So, change the extrusion depth to 0.05.

Then jump into the Viscosity property and decrease that to 0.15.

This will make them spread a little bit more,

since the smaller dust is a lot more lightweight.

The Gravity can be increased a little to 0.4.

Again, finer dust is more lightweight so it has to raise quicker.

And finally is the Gravity Inclination,

which defines the start animation of the gravity.

On in other words, an ease on a keyframe.

Decrease that to 40, so that the finer dust flies up quicker.

And that's it!

The last step is to animate one property different.

So, move your playhead to the last batch of keyframes.

We're gonna update the gravity to a little bit more than what's currently set.

This is to add an extra acceleration to the motion of the fine dust.

And that's it!

Wow, that was pretty intense, I know.

But you've just created the disintegration effect from Thanos

without any third party plugins.

Optional, you could add one last element to fine tune the effect even more.

We're going to use a stock smoke clip.