Make Your First Effect: Talking Potato
Let’s get you started with a simple tutorial that will help you familiarize yourself with Effect House tools, basic features, and the general creation process.
Follow along with this video tutorial!
Prepare Your Assets
First let’s look at how to create the 2D potato object that will back the facial features. When drawing your asset, think about where you would like the facial features to be positioned. Once you’re satisfied, export the potato as a PNG with a transparent background.
Next create the background image. In this example, we’ve drawn someone ready to eat from a plate at a table from a first-person perspective. Make sure the image has an aspect ratio of 9:16 and export it.
Feel free to download the following project file here:
Import Assets Into Effect House
First, let’s import the potato texture. To do so, click the Add button [+] > Import > From Computerin the Assets panel. Locate and select the potato image, then click Open to see your potato texture appear in the Assets panel.
Next let’s create a plane. You can do this by clicking the Add button [+] > 3D > Plane in the Hierarchy panel. Feel free to rename the plane to “Potato” by right-clicking the plane and selecting Rename. Then create a new unlit material by clicking the Add button [+] > Material > Unlit in the Assets panel.
Click Unlit in the Assets panel and select the Texture On checkbox in the Inspector panel. Click Default Texture to open up the assets picker window and select your potato image under the Textures folder.
Open Render State 0 and change the Blend Mode to Transparent.
Add a Face Inset
Add a Face Inset by clicking the Add button [+] > Face Effects > Face Inset in the Hierarchy panel. Feel free to rename the Face Inset object to “Mouth”. Drag the plane into the new Face Binding object. With the Face Inset object selected, click the Depth Testing checkbox in the Inspector panel. Adjust the position, scale, and rotation of the Face Inset and the plane.
To add more facial features to the potato, duplicate the Face Inset object twice by right-clicking it and selecting Duplicate. On the new duplicates, set the Face Area to Left eye and Right eye. Adjust the positions to your liking.
Add a Background
Import the background asset into Effect House. Add an Image by clicking the Add button [+] > 2D > Image in the Hierarchy panel. Click the Image and change the Texture of your background image through the assets picker window. Change the Size to 720 x 1280. You can rename the image to “Table_BG”.
In the Hierarchy panel, drag the General render group below the 2D Foreground Effects render group to ensure the potato and facial features render in front of the background image.
Face Inset provides a variety of additional effects including feathering, color overlay, and outline that users can use according to their needs. Feel free to test out your effect!