From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

708 The Marvel disintegration effect

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

708 The Marvel disintegration effect

- Hey gang this is Deke McClelland, and welcome to Deke's Techniques! Now last week I told you that we were about to create this poster art that's a kind of blend between E.T. and Jurassic Park. Super fun project, and we are gonna get to it, but not today, and that's because something has come up. And that something is Avengers Infinity War. Now if you haven't seen this movie then you probably don't wanna watch my movie. If you have seen this movie, no it's okay I'll wait. Because I'm about to completely ruin the ending here. If you have seen this movie then you may recall that one or two minor characters sorta, disintegrate and flake away to ash. Now I imagine the folks who created this effect used particle generators, and other advanced motion technology. But it got me thinking how might I approach this effect inside Photoshop. Now I will not be using custom brushes as I have seen demonstrated a couple of times over the last couple of weeks. Nor will I be breaking the image into a bunch of triangles per the popular meme. Instead we'll use displacement maps. So I'm gonna start with this guy. I think it's obvious that I've masked him against this forest background. And we'll apply a total of three displacement maps, including this guy right here. Which I created using the crystallize filter in order to shatter the guys face! And then we'll mask the effect and adjust it as well, in order to capture the dude at the moment of disintegration. And we watch in horror as he utterly flakes away to dull, dead, ash. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright here's that final disintegration or if you prefer flakes and ashes effect opened up here inside Photoshop. Now if you happen to open this file as well do me a favor, here inside the layers panel notice this dude layer with it's five smart filters. Do not attempt to turn any of these smart filters off. Because if you do, the program will generate an error message. And I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that it's just a little bit of a bug associated with applying displacement maps as smart filters inside the program. Now the good news is, that the file's gonna work just great. As long as you don't turn any one of these guys off. You can turn the one associated with the blur layer off if you like. And mean while if you follow along with this movie your effect will work out just fine. Alright, so I'm gonna switch over to my starter file which features a couple of photographs from the Dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php Now we wanna start by building a displacement map that we will use in order to displace the colors inside this image. And we'll let the displacement map to match the exact dimensions of this image file and the best way to make that happen is to press control K or command K on a Mac. To bring up the preferences dialogue box and then turn on this checkbox 'use legacy new document interface' and that's gonna bring back the old style and I believe much better, new document dialogue box. So just go ahead and click okay, and now go up to the file menu and choose the new command, or you can press control N or command N on the Mac, to bring up the smaller and better new dialogue box. And one of the reasons I think it's better is because I can now go up to the window menu and choose either one of the images I have open right now in order to load it's dimensions. And that's not something I can do with the new, new dialogue box. And so notice that the width value is now set to 2978 pixels and the height is 1942, and my unit is set to pixels by the way. The resolution is 300 pixels per inch although that doesn't really matter. We do want the color mode to be greyscale and you want your background contents to be white. Not transparent, this is gonna make a big difference. So go with white and then click okay, and that's going to result in this file right here. Alright, next you wanna go up to the layer menu choose 'new fill layer' and choose 'solid color' and I'm gonna call this layer, gray base like so. And then I'll click okay And next here inside the color picker dialogue box you wanna set both hue and saturation values to zero and then take the brightness value up to 50%. In order to create a neutral gray, and then click okay. Alright now we wanna turn this layer into a bunch of black and white noise and you can do that by going to the filter menu choosing 'noise' and choosing 'add noise' at which point Photoshop's gonna tell you well you actually can't apply a filter to a solid color layer. So you either need to rasterize it or better still convert it to a smart object. So I'll go ahead and click on that item, and that way we can apply noise as an editable smart filter. Now notice that I've cranked the amount value up to 100% and that I've set distribution to gaussian. That way we have higher contrast noise and the reason I'm applying this noise to a layer of gray is so we have an equal distribution of black and white noise inside the final effect. At which point notice that we can see black and white noise inside the preview here, especially if zoom in a little bit. We've got a little bit of grey noise as well, where as it looks pretty darn gray back here in the image window and that's just a function of the fact that I'm zoomed out to 33.33%. In any event I'll just go ahead and click okay in order to create that noise. Now we don't need this filter mask, so I'm just gonna right click on this white thumbnail here and choose 'delete filter mask' that way we'll be able to better see what we're doing here inside the layers panel. And next what you wanna do to create the flakes, that is a sort of polygonal flakes that are first appearing in that Marvel disintegration effect. What we're gonna do is go up to the filter menu choose 'pixelate' and choose this guy right here, 'crystallize'. And then I'm gonna crank the cell size value up to 48, happens to work well at this particular resolution. And then I'll click okay, and again, I say it happens to work well at this resolution you can experiment with that as much as you'd like. Now you'll notice as you're working along with me, that your effect looks different than mine. You're gonna see a bunch of black and white and gray polygons but their distribution is gonna be different and that's because both 'add noise' and 'crystallize' produce random effects. And so you're gonna get something different every single time. Alright now we wanna save this out as a displacement map so I'll go up to the file menu and choose 'save as' and I want you to notice that I've gone ahead and saved this particular layered file and everything I'm about to do as Dmap generator. But that's not how we wanna save the displacement map. To make the displacement map you wanna save it as 'Crystals 48' you wanna make sure that the format is psd, that is to say the native Photoshop format. And then, and this gonna surprise you, you wanna turn the layers check box off. That's gonna give you this little warning here, that's gonna tell you that not everything is gonna get saved; specifically the layers. And that we're gonna save this file as a copy. But that's what you want, you want a flat psd file in order to make this feature work. And then just go ahead and click on the save button in order to save that file. I do wanna replace the original so I'll click 'yes'. Alright now the thing to know about displacement maps is that black regions move pixels in on direction, white regions move them in an opposite direction, and then gray results in not movement whatsoever. And so to see what that looks like, I'll go ahead and switch over to my base file right here. I'll get rid of that url layer, by pressing the back space key or the delete key on the Mac. And then I wanna take this guy and his mask, right here and convert them to a smart object. By making sure that my rectangular marquee tool is selected up here at the top of the tool box, and then I'll right click anywhere inside the image window and choose 'convert to smart object'. And that will go ahead and place the mask inside the smart object as we're seeing right here. Alright now you wanna go up to the filter menu choose 'distort' and then choose 'displace' and I came up with the horizontal scale value of 100, this is just trial and error stuff, and a vertical scale value of 20. And these values determine how much horizontal and vertical movement are produced by those black and white polygons that we saw just a moment ago. These next options should be set to their defaults. So displacement map is stretched to fit, and then undefined areas is repeat edge pixels. At which point, click okay, and then locate that file you just created, Crystals 48.psd named after that cell size value. At which I'll click the open button in order to apply that displacement map as we're seeing right here. And that's gonna go ahead and displace those pixels in all sorts of different directions. And that friends is how you create the base flakes associated with my version of the Marvel disintegration effect using dynamic displacement effects here inside Photoshop. Alright, now if you're a member of Lynda.com/LinkedInlearning I have a follow-up movie in which we'll apply two more displacement maps. In order to absolutely shatter this guy's face. If you're looking forward to next week well that's when we're going to achieve this final effect here. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Don't be like this guy, he stopped watching. Keep watching!

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