Recreating The Last Of Us Titles Was A Challenge... 

The titles were created by Elastic using Houdini, Cinema 4D and Octane. I was working as a designer for part of the sequence doing lookdev as a freelancer for a little bit

The game title sequence is actually photography + premiere pro. The veins are practical. So cool.

Any chance to have a detailed tutorial on this? Or the assets to reproduce. I'm trying to recreate it my self with a different text also.

SO many emotions flowing just watching this!! Amazing work!

Your talent and creativity to come up with the ways to recreate the effect is inspiring

Never been interested in editing, but this video popped up in my recommended since I'd been binging some Last of Us content. Glad it did! This was direct, well-explained, and aspirational. Good shit!

Wow,I still can`t believe it! It`s truly wonderful to see you recreating those with ease and really interesting, to see how you achieved such. I`m here with my jaw on the floor about the fact, we all can achieve a few of those wonderful projects by ourselves with time and knowledge (and a bit of online help)😄

First time watcher, but CHEERS to you for giving love to the Original Creators of the Effect. I immensely dislike when RU-vid creators act as if they are better or like, "theres no reason you had to spend any money on this!". I'm a fan of you now, great job too!!

Thank you for this Ben, your content is incredible.

Amazing recreation Ben! Big Congrats! ❤

This is incredible to watch no matter which approach you used for any project. The process, breakdown and final results were identical to the real deal especially this one that looks really difficult! I must ask how do you know which approach, plugin or technique to use or to try help reach the results faster? You hit it right on the head each time and I'm forever impressed ALWAYS!

This is amazing Ben! For the gradient grow I would have tried stacking only one delayed layer of the growing veins map, invert it (maybe use minimax and gaussian blur), set it to multiply (this would have only output the tip of the layer) and then use echo for the smooth fade out

Awesome work dude! Love it

Looks super nice ! I would have try to add some slight CC glass over the veins to add this bumpy/light/Plastic effect that we see on the original. Really cool result tho !

Something that might also have helped is to use something like the oil filter in photoshop to give it that more sticky veiny feel

Realy impressed by the tought process in recreating this, amazing work !

The pain of experiencing the post-apocalypse < the pain of learning about the Physarum plugin way too late

As a motion designer myself I'm very very impressed Congrats Ben!

That's awesome Ben! I think a subtle CC plastic would look good on it

That looks amazing! Great Work!

As always amazing work !

Fantastic work Ben!!

This was awesome! Great work!

The literally first thing I did when I saw this opening last Sunday, was to think: Ohhhhh, I'd like to try making that! Thanks sooooo much for this tutorial Ben!

I am impressed with your ingenuity good sir, your work here is some really quality stuff!

This somewhat inspired me to push through the week. Thanks, Ben!

This was AMAZING Ben!!! 🙏

Yours came out great! A lot of really good problem solving here

The snickers at the end really got me 😹

I love the respect and recognition you give to the original, really makes the video more enjoyable

More of these, concept is soo good

Great content, loved every second if it

Good job Ben! I love it

Woohoo! Congrats man you got it out before Friday re your LinkedIn post! Great content as always.

Brilliant as always. And this one I can totally get my head around, which it rare LOL.

you truly are a wizard larry, so sick mate, well done!

I would made a white to black mask in the vascular animation and control the fade with a echo effects. The result can be the same but you have a parametric way to control the time, expansion, etc. And use an emboss effect to add some dimension to the veins. Also i think Autofill have a way to control the speed of propagation trough alpha or luma layers. A turbulent noise for that maybe add some kind of dynamism.

This was sick - haven't watched the show yet. Thanks for reverse engineering effort to give ideas for future projects LUV IT.

Omg you're so talented!

Hi Ben. Thanks so much for this tutorial. I found the easiest way to get a smooth darkening of the veins is to pre-comp the original vein growth, then in a new comp duplicate the vein growth, offset by a bit in the timeline, and apply the autofill effect to those dplicates. I upped the speed of each a little and in the compositing settings used a colour fill with a darker colour. (I did this with two duplicate layers, the top layer being almost black). I also used a speed map so the autofill followed the vein lines in a more controlled manner for my particular image. Having fun with this, thanks so much

Amazing work Ben, was thinking roughen edges on the text would look good too!

Really well done. Very creative

awesome...awesome work!

This is really incredible!

great video! That was fun :)

MAN! THIS IS AWESOMEEEEEE!!!!!

Shout out to the Japan World Cup cameo in this. And as always, AMAZING JOB

Amazing job Ben

Awesome! 🔥🔥

The final result shocks me, you nailed it!

This is awesome!

This was Great!!!

Bro that plot twist at the end had me laughing for a while 🤣

I feel like that layering some emboss/edge detect can help getting that vascular effect you are tryin to achieve!

Yeah I tried engineering a similar spreading vascular effect in AE, my first thought was also funky masking (tho the lightning effect does surprising heavy lifting as a vascular form with some tweaking, and in retrospect maybe a matte choke and a time displacement would have been a good fix for evolution). Physarum ended up saving me the whole headache. Rly cool method u came up with, love seeing how different ppl crack challenges I've faced before.

OMG wow that was too close you are awesome Ben I'm not even 1% of you. ❤ loved it.

Great video!

I think you made the right call using autofill. The physarum plug-in is really neat but can be a fit fiddly trying to get the results you want.

if you can't use the autofill plugin, you could mask the veins and use the stroke effect, with the "sequentially stroke" disabled, is the same technique for signatures

Great job!

This is fire please do a detailed tutorial !!!

Love this. Subbed

Awesome. I was guessing who made the main title sequence between Prologue and Elastic and I'm not wrong because they are the agencies that do the best motion graphics, the go-tos of films. Ash Thorp also came from Prologue, such great talent of these people.

Great work

your efforts is valuables

You’re the best broo!

This was awesome. I Wana try it now

Makes me want to replay Last of Us. Great tutorial!

Very cool!

Wow, that's very helpful. I appreciate that:)

I love it!

Cool effet! I was always under the impression this was done with a 3d rendering/modelling software, with a dissolve shader and a texture with mesh modifiers. But otherwise this is a pretty good workflow!

"Always label our layers" hahaha brilliant! I hate unlabelled layers with all my life 😂

Very nice! I feel like the veins could have been enhanced even more with something like cc glass or cc plastic or whatever that’s called to give it a bit more of that wet look the original has. Nevertheless quite impressive Ben!

Awesome 👏🏼

Loved it :)

Great work. The Zodiac film titles are cool and would take no time for someone of your talents to recreate. A quick win as they say.

The snickers got me 🤣🤣🤣

That turned out great!

impressive!!

sheeeshh more intro sequence tutorials!

I used to do a similar animation a while ago; I think I generated the fadeout of the tentacles with the echo effect. But I think Autofill also has a special gradient function for such effects (at least I think I`ve read that).

Great stuff, Ben! I just feel like you could have used something like a bevel and emboss or that tecnique from Andrew kramer to simulate bump maps within after effects to create some of that glossiness and little volume that the original one has. Other than that, superb work! And thanks for sharing all your knowledge with us all the time! Cheers!

You lean something new everyday ❤️

you're amazing! thanks for that

Maybe some innerglow or bevel to pop some thickness with cc glass or something? Love the work btw!

Wish you embossed the text like it is in the actual intro!!!! Great job, by the way.

Awesome vid, thank you very much :3

Amazing!

the fast of us got me so good 😭

I think adding a CC glass or plastic over the veins would have given it a bit more depth and "gooeyness", and they are basic effects as well! Great work as always! Keep it up :)

As a suggestion, you could play with the displacement map just to have a little bit of distortion when the text appears.

You can do the fading efect duplicating the layer you added the efect to show the picture and use set mate inverted on the main veins comp with the alpha of the duplicated layer. It will cost a lot less resources and you can control the fade with the plugin setings of the second layer.

you can duplicate the autofill in the same layer, reduce the speed number and check the alpha inverted matte box on the composing drop down menu

that joke on the "double-clickers" .... Nice !)

I DIED AT THE BIG REVEAL! I didn't really read it (I was just admiring your work) and then heard Vinny D come on and re-read the text: G O L D E N

awesome!

I was hoping at the end you'd play the sound bite of "You're not you when you're hungry"

This work is more Beautiful then my whole life.

Awesome! We need more recreation of professional intros!