Volumetric Light and Dust in After Effects
NOTE: This tutorial is not necessarily aimed at After Effects beginners. If you have any questions, please comment them on the YouTube video or DM me on Instagram (@tregdemedia).
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you a method to create volumetric light in After Effects and composite it with dust and text. This is a great effect for building motion backgrounds or adding dimension to a shot in your music video or film.
This example I’ve created a very dramatic, fantastical look with shimmering light reflecting on dust particles and glowing off of this text. It’s not exactly photorealistic, but since I’m making more of a motion background with it, that’s okay.
Volumetric Light
Here’s the settings I used to get the volumetric light look from a fractal noise layer.
Start with a new solid, then add the Fractal Noise effect and jack the contrast way up. I used 500 for my effect.
And I also lowered the brightness to -20.
Then I animated the evolution using the expression <time*100>
Next, I added CC Radial Fast Blur and set the amount to 100. I moved the center point to the top of the frame to match the lighting direction of the shot I’m working on.
I precompose the black solid with the Fractal Noise effect and then mask the precomped layer to limit the area of my shot where the volumetric light shows up.
Using some Curves and Levels adjustments, I increase the contrast of the volumetric light effect.
Dust
To composite the dust footage, I set the blending mode to screen so only the light dust particles show up over the background footage.
Then I add the Set Matte effect to the dust clip, and set the Take Matte from Layer to the Fractal Noise precomp layer and toggle the Source selector to Effects & Masks. Then select Luminance for the “Use For Matte” selector. This will limit the dust to only showing up inside the bright parts of the Fractal Noise layer.
Using the Levels effect, I adjust the gamma and highlights until I make the dust “pop” from the footage.
Text
After typing the text, like to add just a bit of fast box blur to take the edge off my text layers. I set my text color to one of the mid tones in my image so that when I add the glow layer it will really stand out.
Instead of using a drop shadow, I actually duplicate my text, drag my new text under the original, and use the color picker from the shadows of my background image. Then I to put the fast box blur up to 4. Then I’m going to grab the Corner Pin effect to match the perspective of my text to the rock wall it’s meant to be on. And change the blending mode to soft light. It’s very subtle but it adds a little something. You can use any sort of distortion effect you want to achieve this effect in your footage, including a Bezier Warp or a Displacement Map.
Now, to get the the text to glow from the light beams, duplicate the original text layer again. I use Deep Glow, which is a third party plugin from Aescripts, but you can use whatever glow effect you want here. Now set the Track Matte for this glowing text layer to Luma Matte. This will automatically turn off the layer above it, in this case our Fractal Noise layer, so you’ll have to turn that back on to see your volumetric light again. But now, the glow on the text is activated by the Fractal Noise Layer. Dial in your glow threshold as needed to get your desired look.
Now we can just throw some noise HLS auto on an adjustment layer in Overlay mode for a little texture. And there you have it. A volumetric light effect complete with dust and text glow in after effects. It’s pretty simple, and it’s easily customizable to whatever background footage you have.
