I’ve been re-watching Stargate Atlantis again recently and really enjoying myself. The show sparked my interest to attempt some of the iconic visual effects on my own. I started with the Stargate Event Horizon.
These are some of the reference images I pulled for inspiration.
Using my trusty weapon of choice, After Effects, I started with some basic fractal noise to lay the foundation of the portal as a displacement map. After tweaking various settings to get the look and an expression to animate the evolution of the fractal, I had the basis of the displacement map.
These are some of the settings that gave the look I was going for.
I created the base of the composite by centering the standard AE Lens Flare, blurring it quite a bit with a handy dandy Fast Blur, and coloring it with Curves.
For additional shading and definition I placed the map above the flare, but below the displacement, with the blend mode set to Overlay.
The displacement map wasn’t having the feel I wanted so I decided to experiment with some other built-in AE plugins. Some that I tried were Turbulent Displace, CC Plastic, and CC Glass. CC Glass ended up doing the trick quite nicely as it both distorts and adds a bump map all at once. The lighting settings on the bump map turned out to be the icing on the cake as I had planned on doing the surface lighting separately a little differently. It worked out nicely however, and a pleasant surprise after my displacement map hadn’t worked out the way I had hoped.
I felt that it needed more detail so I took a duplicate of the (shading) displacement map layer, put it above the shading and flare layers, and added the following: Find Edges with invert checked, Levels to crunch the luminance, Channel Blur to add some subtle color variation, and Glow just because. I played with various iterations of Scatter to add some interest, which I ended up not liking so I turned it off. This layer was set to Add.
I continued to fiddle with settings until I thought it looked cool. I found some online fan art of a Stargate that I liked, so I comped it in to see how it held up, just for fun.
Making these quick and fun effects is something I like to do for entertainment to ease my mind in the midst of stressful projects. Sometimes I just need a break.
