How to create flaming text in HitFilm

Hi guys and welcome back to another HitFilm tutorial. This week we are joined by, the
legend that is, Simon Jones. He's not been on the channel for a while but we've invited
him back for an awesome tutorial on fiery text so take it away Simon.
Hi! I’m Simon Jones. Some of you might remember me from -
Hi I’m Simon-- Today we’re talking about how--
This week I’m going to show you-- This week I’m going to give you--
Today is all about-- This video is all about HitFilm--
HitFilm-- HitFilm--
It is REALLY good to be back. Here we have two primary effects working together
- the 2D fire effect with the 3D particle simulator. At its core, this effect is simply
about some text and some fire and can be accomplished incredibly easily.
You can’t make flamey text without some text, so let’s create a new composite shot
- I’ll go for a standard 1080 comp - and then I’ll grab the text tool and draw out
a box. Let’s type out….HITFILM. I’m going to use Courier New as the font, because
it has a satisfyingly old and physical look which you can imagine being set on fire - it
makes sense in my head - adjust the settings. I’ll make it pretty big, maybe reduce the
character spacing. You can, of course, go for any font and letters you want.
Onto this text layer I will drag some effects, starting off with the Fire effect. If I now
drag the playhead along a bit, you’ll see that we get some fire, and it looks kind of
OK. But I want it to look like this text is so hot that it’s on the verge of melting
into the ground. To do this, let’s customise that fire effect.
First up, I’ll change the the blend mode. Currently it’s set to screen, which means
the fire is blended on top of the text. I’m going to switch this to None, which means
it won’t blend at all - in other words, the fire effect entirely replaces the text.
It’s still using the text as its flame source, but the letters aren’t visible. This makes
it pretty hard to read, so here’s what we do.
Go into the fire’s simulation properties and reduce movement all the way down, almost
to nothing - maybe 0.02. This draws the flame back towards the source. Source fill we’ll
put all the way up to 1, so that fire is being generated across the entire text, rather than
being all patchy. Source variation controls how much the fire
wibbles about. If you put it really low, you get a smooth, calm undulation, like a small
candle. Ramp it all the way up and you get a lot of flickering intensity, as if it’s
much hotter. I’ll go somewhere in the middle, like 6.
Iterations I tend to put all the way up, but if this has too big a performance hit on your
machine feel free to lower it. Essentially, the more iterations you have the more realistic
the simulation. We now have clearly recognisable letters which
look like they’re rippling with intense heat.
To create the flame we’ll add another fire effect. This builds on top of the previous
one. Combined together it’s looking pretty great.
In this new fire effect’s simulation properties I’ll put iterations up to 900 again but
otherwise leave it at the defaults. You might want to fiddle around with these to get a
particular look. If you want a calm, candle-still flame, go for low source variation and movement
properties. If you want something bigger and more dramatic, ramp them both up.
I’m going to reset these both to the defaults. Now for HitFilm’s secret weapon, which is
the lightsword ultra (glow only) effect. This is designed primarily for creating cool lightswords
in your Star Wars fanfilms but it is also PERFECT for making fire look amazing. After
finding it in the effects panel and adding it to the text layer, I’ll go into the presets
and change it to ‘Red distortion’. I’m pretty happy with the defaults here.
The glow and distortion makes it feel far more like fire captured through a camera lens,
rather than a perfectly exposed CG simulation. We’ve got a bit of glow bleed going on at
the top of the screen here but don’t worry about that - it’ll be gone in a moment.
This is nice, but it could do with some embellishment. For this I’m going to create a new black
plane and put it below the text layer. I’m going to then copy the second, larger fire
effect from the text layer and the lightsword ultra glow and paste them both onto the new
plane. This is pretty crazy and I think my screen
might be about to melt, so I’m going to use masks to restrict where the fire can originate.
Select the ellipse shape, then select the plane layer and draw a long, slender shape
below the text, like an underline. This’ll constrict the flames to just that area. Don’t
forget to switch the text layer’s overall blend mode to screen so that it combines with
the plane layer properly and doesn’t hide anything.
I’m going to add a couple more masks. The first I’ll put somewhere over the left side,
a smaller oval sitting over the ‘H’. This creates a hotspot where the flame can go higher
and be more excited. I’ll do a similar thing over here on the right. You can add as many
of these shapes as you want, reintroducing some of the fire.
Remember how we copied the second fire effect from the text layer? That one had it’s blend
mode set to ‘screen’, which is why we can still see the layer shapes. I’ll go
in and switch it out to ‘none’ blend, just like we did earlier, so that only the
flame remains. Once it’s all up and running and composited,
the viewer won’t be able to identify these individual flame generators and will instead
see a single, unpredictable fire. By breaking up the consistency of the burn, you’re making
it look more real and chaotic. With fire, chaos is the key to it looking right, really.
“Hahaha. See here I’m now by myself, er, errr, talking to myself. That’s...that’s
chaos theory.” I’m going to add another copy of our black
plane at the bottom here, so that we have a solid black background rather than this
transparent checkerboard. Finally, let’s add some sparks., using the
particle simulator. In the emitter’s shape group, I’ll change
it to a Quad and stretch it out to the width of the text, positioned near the top of the
letters. For Trajectory I’ll opt for the explode option, so that the sparks all burst
out of the emitter quad. In the particle system’s appearance I’ll
switch to a built-in texture called Sparks Streak, switch off billboarding and activate
align to motion. This means the sparks will automatically point in the direction they’re
travelling. In the Movement group I’ll change life to
0.5 seconds, scale to 10% and speed to 250. In Movement variation I’ll set life to 0.5
seconds, scale to 10% and speed to 50. This ensures that the particles don’t all do
exactly the same thing. In General I’ll change the particles per
second to 400. I’ll now go and add a Force. By default
this provides a handy gravity force. Without us having to change a thing. I will however
add a Deflector, then go into its shape properties and make it very wide and deep, then position
it so that it is sitting on the bottom edge of the letters. The sparks will hit this and
bounce off. I’ll create one more force and change it
to Turbulence. This can be effective for this kind of chaotic effect, adding a random element
to the particles’ movement. Onto the particle layer I’ll add an old
fashioned Glow effect. I’m not using the lightsword ultra glow this time because I
want a bit more fine control over the look. I’ll ramp the intensity of the glow all
the way up to 5, drop the threshold to 0 and change the radius to 6. This create a very
close, hot glow around the sparks. In per channel intensity I’ll increase red a touch
and drop green and blue to get an orange ember look.
I’ll duplicate that glow effect and on the second one change it to have an intensity
of 2 and radius of 28. Don’t forget to set the blend mode of the
particle layer to screen so that it blends in nicely with the fire.
The last element to add is a new grade layer, which sits above everything else. Onto this
I’ll find and drop the Heat Distortion effect. You can go in and customise the exact look,
but the defaults look pretty good. This adds an additional element of intensity and heat,
and would be particularly effective if you were going to be compositing this text onto
a live action or photographic background. With all these elements working together,
you get pretty convincing molten text, which looks like it’s disintegrating and dropping
great globs of fire onto the floor. The principles I’ve covered here aren’t
specific to the word ‘HITFILM’ or even to text. You can use anything you want as
your flame source, which opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities.
As always, many thanks for watching. I hope this was useful!

How to create flaming text in HitFilm

Latest Posts