The hardest thing about portal effects isn’t
the effect. It’s figuring out what you’re
supposed to see through the portals, depending
on where the camera is, and what’s out the
other side. It's a real brain pain. It's a
mirror that's flipped but to a different location
but needs to be the same but opposite perspective...it's
been known to cause brain hernias.
Here’s one of the more straightforward portal
shots. It started off as two separate videos
- a shot of the silo, and a shot of Arris
doing his henchman thing.
So what we're going to do is start off with
the Silo shot and add the built-in Dimension
Rift effect to a 3D surface, which is called
a ‘plane’ in HitFilm. This makes it easy
to very quickly position the portal in the
right place, tracked onto the shot using HitFilm’s
motion tracking.
One of the great things about the dimension
rift is that it has built-in animation. Tweaking
the Expansion slider opens and closes the
portal, and adjusting the Connection slider
reveals the portal hole. By going into the
View options I can select the shot of Arris,
which composites him right inside the portal.
There’s a ton of extra customization you
can do to the look of the portal, by digging
into the controls. Now, the thing about visual
effects is that it’s all about layering
up lots of detail. So the standard dimension
rift effect looks good, but for PORTAL COMBAT
we came up with a more visually exciting flame
portal design and played around with some
heat haze distortion using the displacement
effect.
HitFilm 3 Express makes it easy to create
effects quickly, but it’s also a flexible
toolkit which you can use to invent your own
stuff completely from scratch.
To find out exactly how to do all this, download
the project files and check out the extended
tutorial from Simon over at HitFilm.
