The Captain America: Brave New World trailer showed off some intense action, including Red Hulk making a fiery entrance. In this tutorial, our very own Wyatt turned himself into Red Hulk in After Effects.

Learn how to make Hulk's glowing eyes, red skin, expanding hands, and ground-shattering impact.

The best part? You can do it all for just five credits or less using the ActionVFX library.

Here's a quick rundown:

Step 1: Turning Your Skin Red

The first thing we need to do is change skin color. Using After Effects, you can create this effect by:

• Duplicating your base footage
• Using the Roto Brush Tool to isolate skin areas
• Applying a Tint effect and mapping black/white values to a deep red
• Adjusting brightness, contrast, and blending modes to make it look natural

By keyframing the effect, you can make the transformation happen gradually, just like in the movies.

Step 2: Adding Glowing Red Eyes

No Hulk transformation is complete without those intense glowing eyes. Here’s how to do it:

• Mask out your eyes so they stay unaffected by the red skin tone
• Import an ActionVFX iris texture (included in the Essentials Catalog)
• Scale and position it over the eye and set the blend mode to Overlay
• Use Mocha tracking to lock it in place
• Add a glow effect to make them pop

This technique makes the eyes look alive and dynamic, rather than just color overlays.

Step 3: Creating a Ground-Smashing Impact

This is where things get destructive. When Red Hulk smashes the ground, you'll need:

• Ground cracks
• Burning steel wool effects to simulate fire spreading (redeem for free with code "HULK")
• Steam and dust waves help sell the impact

To make it work seamlessly:

• Track the ground plane so the cracks match the perspective
• Use blending modes like Overlay or Screen to integrate the effects
• Add motion blur to enhance realism
• Keyframe opacity changes so the fire and smoke evolve naturally over time

Bringing It All Together

With these elements in place, you can refine the scene by:

• Layering atmospheric effects like embers, sparks, and dust
• Adding subtle camera shake for extra impact
• Fine-tuning depth of field to make everything feel cinematic

Try It Yourself (Free Asset Included!)

Ready to give it a shot? Watch the full tutorial and grab a free burning steel wool asset in the video description before February 26th.

Watch the full tutorial

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