Today, we dive into After Effects and take a look at how we can create some amazing looking flames without any 3rd party plugins. Although we aren’t trying to create 100% realistic flames, with some color correction and tweaking, you could pull it off as real flames. We will be using the powerful ‘Fractal Noise’ effect and ‘Colorama’ to colorize our flames.
If you want to overlay or add the flames into your scene, try using blending modes such as Add, Screen, or Overlay, that should get rid of the black. If you want true transparency for the flames, precompose the flame composition and apply Unmult to gain transparency. I have a tutorial on achieving transparency with Unmult here. To make the flames look a little more realistic, try adding some smoke or heat waves.
Remember, you’re not limited to the animation of the flames, you have full control over how the flames animate and move. If you want to adjust the flow or direction of the flames, play around with the Offset Turbulence. The key to getting really good looking flames is to color correct and tweaking the values!
If you liked this tutorial and have any questions or feedback, leave your comments down below.
Robert says:
Very cool! I’m going to try this out.
VinhSon Nguyen says:
Thanks for the feedback Robert! Feel free to show me if you make anything cool out of it
Nam says:
Exactly what I needed: stylized flames using built-in tools. The more realistic or uniformly shaped stuff just doesn’t quite cut it for me. Thank you!
VinhSon Nguyen says:
Glad you found it useful Nam, thanks for the comment and support!