explosion | Evil Planet Studios

After Effects Template: Pressured – Explosive Steampunk Logo Opener

November 9, 2016November 9, 2016 by admin

For months now I’ve been wanting to do this After Effects template, but two massive factors have been getting in the way. The first one, of course, being the lack of time due to customers, since I do these in my own time, but the second was: Boy, those smoke simulation renders take bloody ages! And there is literally no way around it. No matter how you slice it. It’s like going to jail. You’ve got to do the time. And smoke sims take forever to render. So I finally decided to do the explosion via Trapcode Particular, which I wasn’t too happy about it, but at least I’d be able to release this After Effects template. So I did the whole explosion inside After Effects and it didn’t look too bad, so I decided to render this mechanical boiler ball of pressured madness in 3D and imported into AE and composited a test and it looked really good! I was genuinely happy with how it turned out, granted I could’t render the more realistic smoke sim in Blender like I wanted, but still looking good.

This After Effects template is a whole lot more flexible than it appears on the surface. Many of the elements such as the steam jets and the explosion are in fact separated in layers for a better control of the coloring. And while the explosion cannot be changed by means of the control panel, you can still do this manually, which is why several layers of the explosion were provided in this After Effects template instead of only one. The color of the lights and the logo and the background lights (which also affect the lens flares) CAN be changed via the control panel.
The music, is a modified version of Disaster Zone, from my own music library, which will ALSO be available as an independent stock music track in my store.

Hit the break to watch the template in action!

Halloween After Effects Template: Bloody Gore Ball – Disgusting Gory Sack

October 22, 2016October 17, 2016 by admin

Continuing with the Halloween After Effects template frenzy here’s yet another AE template and this time it’s a gross one. Yes, Folks, as gross as it gets! If you’ve been following Evil Planet Studios and Nevermore Graphics you may remember two of my best templates; “Blood Bath” and “The Alchemist“. Both of them great on their own, but not too popular and that’s largely due to the fact that neither of them were horror AE templates. So I decided to combine them into a single, magnificently gory Halloween After Effects template! Enter the Bloody Gore Ball: Your new favorite reason to throw up! This disgusting, self-peeling, stitched-up, bloody sack of flesh is a huge step forwards from its old version in “The Alchemist”. I re-baked most of the simulations for the stitches, skin and blood, added some cool slow motion and 3D floating text to it and re-rendered the whole thing. The first time around the 3D wasn’t particularly the best either because it was rendered via Element 3D, which there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, but at the same time you know that a dedicated 3D program will give you way better results and since I wanted this Halloween After Effects template to be solid, nauseating gold, I stepped it up a notch and took that gore factor to a whole new level by adding some sexy sub-surface scattering!
On top of the visual overhaul, the music soundtrack for this gory contraption was specifically designed to make this Halloween After Effects template an awesome and exciting gorefest. But as with all the awesome AE templates, unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of options available to meddle with in this one and it’s largely due to the fact that changing the color of the blood in this template is utterly pointless. It’s like making a 3 dollar bill. Sure, it can be done but it makes little to no sense and it would be a complete waste of time and resources.
Of course this doesn’t mean this template is going to be suckey just because of the lack of features. In fact, the complete opposite! The dripping text at the end is completely procedural! Yes, Folks! Your eyes are not deceiving you! The bloody, drippy text is in fact 100% procedural AND editable, all done within After Effects with only After Effects plugins! Granted, the drops don’t actually detach from the text, but that’s a small price to pay for the ability to edit your own bloody text! While working on this project I went ahead and looked for tutorials and ideas on how to achieve this effect just to be stumped by a huge wall of nothingness. Turns out no one has ever attempted to do this. There are no other tutorials, no other templates, nothing. This is, quite possibly the ONLY procedural, dripping text out there!

I Suppose the video doesn’t actually show or depict actual gore in the traditional sense, but still, viewer discretion is advised. Just in case you had lunch/dinner recently or are queasy, I wouldn’t recommend hitting the break if you have a weak stomach.

After Effects Template: Hammer Smash – Epic Thor’s Hammer Logo Opener

August 16, 2016August 16, 2016 by admin

Regrets. We all have them. And one of my biggest regrets is not being able to make the Rage Hammer/God of Thunder After Effects templates epic enough at the time. And I wanted to, I really did. You see, each template I’ve ever made has a code-name in the beginning. Just before I decide on a catchy title to use. For example: “Jungle Temple” was “Agkor Wat”, “Life+Line” was “Ambulance”, “Calm Waters” was “Crystal Clear”, so on and so forth. Anyway, as it turns out, Rage Hammer’s code-name was “Hammer Smash” and I wanted to title it “Mjölnir” (in the end I went with “Rage Hammer” when I released that After Effects template). And incidentally, Hammer Smash’s code-name was “Mjolnir Mallet”, and yeah, I ended up calling it “Hammer Smash”. So it all comes full circle, you see. And the reason I didn’t make it as cool as I wanted to was because of time constraints. Because on top of modeling the hammer itself and texturing it, I also had to create the wall breaking and texture that as well, then make an additional smoke simulation for the hammer impact and in the end that would’ve resulted in a project lifetime way longer than I anticipated for this particular After Effects template so I decided to leave it at that for the time being. I kept going back to that project folder and studying it for some time until I finally decided to make it just the way I wanted. Now that the hammer was already made, I could create the break-away wall and an additional smoke simulation, to give this After Effects template the epicness and glory it deserves.

Now, in regards to technical challenges, surprisingly there weren’t many. It was very straight-forward since I already knew how to put it together after doing the first one and doing 3D metallic text in other templates, but there WERE aspects that I really wanted to add interactivity to and sadly couldn’t because the file-size of the final thing would’ve been jacked up too much like procedurally changing the lighting on the hammer (and the background lights that illuminate it) but I still ended up explaining how that can be achieved by hand in the readme, if you are knowledgeable enough in After Effects.

Hit the break to watch the template in action!