1. IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 |
(music playing)
| | 00:04 |
Hey folks. Welcome to this training series where
we're going to learning Trapcode Form
| | 00:07 |
from the ground up.
My name is Chad Perkins, and I'll be your
| | 00:11 |
host through this course.
I couldn't be more excited about this.
| | 00:13 |
Trapcode Form is an extremely unique 3D
particle system.
| | 00:17 |
It doesn't constantly spit out particles
like almost all other particle generators
| | 00:21 |
do, like Trapcode particular for example.
Form particles just exist.
| | 00:26 |
No birth, no death.
Because of that you could do all sorts of
| | 00:30 |
unusual and beautiful things with form.
But this unconventional system comes with
| | 00:35 |
a price.
Form can be difficult to understand and master.
| | 00:40 |
So, in this course we're going to start
from the basics.
| | 00:43 |
In most cases as we go throughout the
course we'll introduce a concept in the
| | 00:46 |
most simple way possible.
Then once we understand the tools we'll
| | 00:50 |
elaborate and create beautiful art and
subsequent movies.
| | 00:55 |
We'll look at how to use other objects
such as graphics as your own custom particles.
| | 01:01 |
We'll look at how to use form to create
organic objects like stars and even fog,
| | 01:06 |
as we turn a still daytime image into a
nighttime tracking shot.
| | 01:11 |
We'll learn how to mess these particles
up, with fractal distortion, spherical
| | 01:16 |
distortion, dispursion, twisting and
more.
| | 01:20 |
We'll solve the mystery of the often
confusing quick maps and then well if you
| | 01:24 |
got the basics down, we'll use those
quick maps to generate an organic
| | 01:28 |
fireball from scratch.
We'll make holograms.
| | 01:34 |
We'll enhance form with after effects 3-D
tools like lights, shadows, And a shallow
| | 01:41 |
depth of field.
We'll tackle the big and powerful world
| | 01:45 |
of audio reaction to control form with
audio.
| | 01:49 |
We'll start with the basics (MUSIC), then
build an elegant example (MUSIC).
| | 01:55 |
(MUSIC).
Then combine audio reaction tool with a
| | 02:04 |
quick map stuff we learned earlier to
create this.
| | 02:07 |
(MUSIC) We look at how to import 3D OBJ
files and use them as the shape of our
| | 02:16 |
form object.
Finally we'll put it all together and
| | 02:20 |
look at several practical examples.
Dissovling a logo, creating light using
| | 02:25 |
hdr forum particles and creating a
rotating orb consisting of multiple
| | 02:30 |
copies of form.
We'll cover all this stuff and much more
| | 02:34 |
in this training series.
If Form has baffled you in the past, have
| | 02:38 |
no fear.
This course will get you up to speed and
| | 02:41 |
making phenomenal project with Form in no
time.
| | 02:44 |
So let's get started.
| | 02:45 |
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 |
For those that have access to the
exercise files that accompany this training.
| | 00:03 |
I'd like to show you a little bit how I
lay out those files.
| | 00:06 |
You'll find the accompanying project file
based on the chapter that we're going to
| | 00:11 |
be working in.
So as you're watching the movies.
| | 00:13 |
For chapter eight for example, then you
can go into the chapter eight folder and
| | 00:17 |
you'll find those projects.
These projects link to the media inside
| | 00:22 |
the media folder.
So if there is a problem with relinking
| | 00:25 |
and maybe if you've moved these folders
around you'll get that, you can just go
| | 00:29 |
into the media folder and relink the
audio files, or the graphics, or whatever
| | 00:35 |
other files you need.
| | 00:36 |
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|
|
2. Form BasicsUnderstanding how Form works| 00:00 |
Trap Code form is a somewhat unusual
particle system.
| | 00:04 |
Most particle systems such as the one
found on this layer called regular
| | 00:09 |
particles, is actually cc particle
systems 2.
| | 00:12 |
We'll have particles that spit out and
they have a birth rate and they die.
| | 00:18 |
So they're, they're born and they live on
screen for a little bit and we can
| | 00:23 |
control usually their behavior over their
life span.
| | 00:27 |
So in this case they were born yellow,
and then they fade out.
| | 00:31 |
And they get a little bit more
transparent, and more blurry.
| | 00:33 |
A little bit bigger, as they fade out.
And they're generating particles.
| | 00:37 |
Form is a different animal entirely.
I'm just going to go ahead and turn off
| | 00:41 |
visibility to the regular particles
layer.
| | 00:43 |
Actually I can just delete that.
I'm going to select form.
| | 00:46 |
And I'm going to go to effects and
presets.
| | 00:47 |
And I'll do a search for form.
And apply that to this layer.
| | 00:50 |
As you can see with many particle
systems, it removes the entire layer it
| | 00:55 |
was applied to, now we can see out
background here.
| | 00:57 |
And when you first apply form it doesn't
look too great honestly.
| | 01:02 |
It's just kind of like this block of
particles and so it's going to be really
| | 01:05 |
fun as we go through this training series
to kind of bring this to life because
| | 01:09 |
What it ends up looking like is nothing
like this default state.
| | 01:14 |
But again, in order to really wrap our
heads around what form is doing and make
| | 01:18 |
that great magic that we're going to be
making throughout this training series,
| | 01:21 |
we've got to be able to understand what's
really happening.
| | 01:25 |
So I'm going to select this camera tool
here, the unified camera tool, and I'm
| | 01:29 |
going to click and drag because we have a
camera in our scene and this is a 3D
| | 01:32 |
particle effect that responds to lights
and cameras as we'll see.
| | 01:35 |
As I rotate this around, we can see that
we have three squares of particles.
| | 01:42 |
And unlike most particle systems, if I
scrub this, we will see no change in the particles.
| | 01:50 |
Form doesn't worry about death.
Not to get all existential up in here.
| | 01:55 |
But it doesn't worry about the birth of
particles or the death of particles.
| | 01:58 |
These particles just exist.
And that's why it's called, form.
| | 02:02 |
It's just because these are just a form
of particles.
| | 02:05 |
As we'll see the power comes as we start
fiddling with these particles, and these
| | 02:11 |
different sheets of particles if you will
and causing them to interact with each other.
| | 02:16 |
For example if we open up dispers and
twist, we get increased twist and wrap
| | 02:22 |
these particles around themselves.
And now we have something completely
| | 02:25 |
different entirely, and all started with
just these three squares of particles.
| | 02:30 |
So, it's all about combining these
squares to create a new form, a new
| | 02:36 |
object, out of these different particles
and it seems like there's some limitation
| | 02:41 |
here, but it's unbelievably powerful as
we start getting into these additional settings.
| | 02:46 |
So the thing you take away from this is,
that these particles here in form, do not die.
| | 02:51 |
They are not born, they do not have a
life span.
| | 02:54 |
They just exist.
As you see throughout this training, we
| | 02:58 |
can open up base form, Increase the size
of these particles or the shape that this
| | 03:04 |
is, rather.
And we can also increase the number of
| | 03:08 |
these sheets of particles.
There.
| | 03:12 |
We could also adjust where this exists,
we could also rotate these, of course,
| | 03:17 |
and we could change the actual type of
form, so instead of just a grid, we could
| | 03:22 |
make Strings, or we could make a sphere.
And we'll look at all these in depth.
| | 03:28 |
We could even use, a 3D model with these
particles.
| | 03:32 |
And we'll look at how that works.
In addition, we have particle settings,
| | 03:35 |
so we can change the type of particle.
We can make these little stars instead of spheres.
| | 03:39 |
If I zoom in really closely here, you
could see how those are indeed, stars.
| | 03:44 |
It does slow things down a lot because we
got a lot of stars going on here.
| | 03:48 |
But I could also take down the number of
particles, maybe I only want ten
| | 03:51 |
particles in x and y, and now we have
these stars, and we could increase the size.
| | 03:57 |
And you can see how flexible this is.
And now we have a cube of stars.
| | 04:03 |
So, this is Form /g, and as we'll see
throughout this training series, it can
| | 04:06 |
do some amazing, beautiful things.
| | 04:09 |
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| Altering Base Form properties| 00:00 |
Let's now look at the base form
properties up here at the top and form.
| | 00:04 |
Base form is a category, that's also a
value.
| | 00:09 |
Base form here, the, the value,
determines what form, or shape, that
| | 00:15 |
these particles will take.
By default it's set to grid and that's
| | 00:18 |
what we're going to use throughout this
movie.
| | 00:20 |
And the following movies, we'll look at
these other values, but leave it set to
| | 00:24 |
box grid for right now.
Again, I'm going to select my unified
| | 00:28 |
camera tool and click around so we can
see this grid of particles a little bit better.
| | 00:33 |
By default there's only three particles
in Z, so it looks like we have three
| | 00:38 |
different sheets of particles.
Now, before going on any farther, you'll
| | 00:42 |
noitce as I click and drag that I get
adapted resolution in the upper right
| | 00:46 |
hand corner of my comp window here.
And it makes everything kind of go yucky
| | 00:53 |
for a second.
For a lack of a more technical term
| | 00:55 |
(LAUGH) of all I'm scrubbing around here.
And I actually don't need it to do that.
| | 00:59 |
I'm going to go down to my fast
preference preview section here.
| | 01:02 |
And I'm going to change this from adapter
resolution to off.
| | 01:06 |
And I actually do have the ability to
scrub around this in pretty much real time.
| | 01:11 |
So if you're finding that you're in
adaptive resolution that's a problem for you.
| | 01:15 |
You can take it to off and might even
have better results without adaptive
| | 01:18 |
resolution on.
Now let's talk about these particles here.
| | 01:23 |
This is a little bit confusing, you see,
cause it creates this weird kind of
| | 01:26 |
moire-like pattern as these panels
overlap but, let's look at these size
| | 01:32 |
values here.
Now don't get confused with the size
| | 01:36 |
versus the particles.
As we increase let's say for example size
| | 01:39 |
X which is left and right.
As we increase that value these particles
| | 01:44 |
spread out but there's not any more
particles.
| | 01:47 |
Just the size of the grid is increasing.
And, let's say we'll take down the size Y.
| | 01:55 |
That will appear, to, make the lines more
thick, even though what its doing is
| | 02:01 |
really just smushing these particles.
And there's 70 particles in, in Y.
| | 02:06 |
So as we make this shorter, we shrink it
along the Y axis.
| | 02:11 |
It appears these particles are closer
together so they appear more solid.
| | 02:15 |
And the exact opposite happened with X,
there are 70 particles in X.
| | 02:18 |
But as we increase the size X, it spread
those particles out, making that thinner.
| | 02:23 |
Now, I'm going to go ahead and click on
the reset button for the form effects, we
| | 02:27 |
get back to square one here.
And I want to take down the number of
| | 02:31 |
particles in X, which I can, I can
actually do using a cool After Effects trick.
| | 02:34 |
If I click in here so that the number is
highlighted, then hold down the Shift key.
| | 02:39 |
And while holding down the Shift key on
both platforms, I can use the arrow keys,
| | 02:44 |
the up and down arrow keys, as I hit the
down.
| | 02:47 |
So, Shift down arrow.
I'm reducing this value by 10 as I use
| | 02:52 |
shift up arrow I'm increasing the value
by ten.
| | 02:56 |
So if I continue to add more and more
particles then I will have a solid line.
| | 03:02 |
And I realize that this whole tutorial,
this whole movie is probably not the most
| | 03:07 |
thrilling, exciting thing, we're not
building anything.
| | 03:09 |
But you have to really understand the
basics of form in order to make cool stuff.
| | 03:14 |
And also to problem solve.
One of the things you'll start noticing
| | 03:17 |
is you'll start twisting and disbursing
these particles is that it creates this
| | 03:21 |
kind of spread apart pieces like this.
Where you could see the actual,
| | 03:26 |
individual particles.
And a lot of times you want to a more
| | 03:29 |
dense line like this.
And this is how you fix it, by increasing
| | 03:33 |
and adding more particles.
So we haven't talked too much about size
| | 03:37 |
and particles in z, but it's the same
type thing.
| | 03:39 |
If we want to spread these plates if you
want to call 'em that, apart.
| | 03:44 |
We can increase the size z.
And if we want to add more of these, then
| | 03:49 |
we can increase the particles in z and we
have more there.
| | 03:53 |
Now I'm going to take particles at x down
really small To maybe 35, that works.
| | 03:58 |
Let's take Particles in Y to 35.
So both Particles in X and Y are 35.
| | 04:02 |
And if we take Particles in Z up really
high, it's almost like we can create a
| | 04:09 |
cube here or a box shape.
And actually, probably want to take down
| | 04:15 |
the size of each of these to 100, and
then probably make the particles of X, Y
| | 04:24 |
and Z all even.
But you can see that as we increase these
| | 04:27 |
values you could create this digital cube
here.
| | 04:30 |
And as we were to change the....uh, if we
were to change the particle color and the
| | 04:35 |
blend mode, we could have a really cool
Cube here.
| | 04:38 |
We'll look at how to do that in the next
chapter.
| | 04:40 |
For now let's go ahead and reset this one
more time and just be aware that there
| | 04:44 |
are x and y rotation settings here, which
again alter the base form.
| | 04:50 |
And we also have kind of like position
controls, center x y, and center z.
| | 04:54 |
But this refers to the initial state of
where things are, remember that we've
| | 05:00 |
moved things around with our camera.
So this is, if we increase our center Z
| | 05:05 |
we change that, this is not going to give
us a predictable result because our
| | 05:09 |
center of Z is off because of the camera.
If we were to go to our camera settings
| | 05:14 |
and reset those.
By clicking the Reset button Exit Transform.
| | 05:17 |
If we were to then adjust the center Z,
and actually let me go ahead and zero out
| | 05:23 |
the rotation values here.
But if we were to then adjust center Z
| | 05:26 |
then it would be predictable.
Same thing with center X and Y.
| | 05:30 |
But if you've played with the camera
settings and are looking at a different
| | 05:33 |
angle then you're not going to get the
same results.
| | 05:37 |
So again, really basic stuff here folks
but this is absolutely tantamount to
| | 05:41 |
understand really thoroughly before
moving on to more adventurous stuff.
| | 05:46 |
In the next movie we're going to start
getting a little bit more exciting as we
| | 05:49 |
start looking at other base forms.
| | 05:50 |
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| Using String objects| 00:00 |
Okay, now we're going to start having a
little fun.
| | 00:03 |
Just a little, but still some fun.
So go to the base form, change the base
| | 00:07 |
form from box grid to box strings, and as
you do, notice the particles along the X
| | 00:13 |
axis changes to strings.
And what it does is that it takes the
| | 00:18 |
particles along the X axis and turns them
into one solid string.
| | 00:22 |
So we no longer have individual control
over those particles, it becomes one
| | 00:26 |
solid string.
As you can see the particles in X turns
| | 00:30 |
into greyed out value.
You can still adjust the size of X but
| | 00:35 |
that doesn't adjust the number of
particles, it's just one solid string.
| | 00:40 |
Now, before we get to the fun stuff,
let's be clear what's going on here with
| | 00:44 |
another few settings.
I'm going to go ahead and click and drag
| | 00:46 |
with my camera tool here so we can see
kind of like a side view of these strings
| | 00:53 |
and I'm going to open up this string
settings which are now no longer greyed
| | 00:57 |
out because we chose the strings as the
base form.
| | 01:00 |
And I'm going to skip density and we'll
come back to that in a moment.
| | 01:04 |
And I just want to talk about size
random.
| | 01:07 |
As I increase size random it increases
the randomness.
| | 01:12 |
Of the size rather it randomizes the size
of the strings.
| | 01:17 |
Actually, I'm going to take the strings
and Y down to about 25.
| | 01:21 |
So we can see this a little bit more
clearly.
| | 01:23 |
So as increase size random we see that
some of these get, bigger and some of
| | 01:29 |
them stay the same.
And the distrubution is pretty, pretty even.
| | 01:35 |
If I wanted to have bigger pieces and few
of them bigger.
| | 01:41 |
Then what I could do is take the size
random up really big and then increase
| | 01:45 |
the size random distribution value.
And what that does is brings everything
| | 01:50 |
back down just a little bit.
And that still leaves some of the bigger
| | 01:55 |
ones fairly big, but it kind of flattens
out the medium in smaller ones.
| | 02:00 |
So you just have the occasional pop of
size.
| | 02:03 |
So just be aware that I'm going to right
click and reset both of these values.
| | 02:07 |
And now I start making this look good.
And I'm just going to scroll down here,
| | 02:11 |
open up the particle section.
And we're going to talk more in detail
| | 02:15 |
about all this stuff there is.
We can't get ahead of ourselves.
| | 02:18 |
We have something more beautiful to look
at.
| | 02:22 |
Go ahead and click on the color swatch.
And I'm going to click right about here,
| | 02:28 |
that kind of blue cyanish color, click
Okay.
| | 02:34 |
And I'll go ahead and increase size X, a
little bit.
| | 02:39 |
We have kind of like, some banding going
on here.
| | 02:41 |
Here's a big band of strings.
And then go down to the fractal field,
| | 02:46 |
open that up and go through the displace
value in the fractal field section and
| | 02:52 |
we'll go ahead increase this, oh yeah,
looking awesome.
| | 02:59 |
Now, the benefit of working with strings
is that it's 1 solid string right.
| | 03:06 |
And so we have this cool connected
effect.
| | 03:08 |
If we did this with the regular form as
these particles spread out as they
| | 03:13 |
displace then we would have random
seperate dots.
| | 03:17 |
So it all looks great and smooth.
However its with if we continue to
| | 03:21 |
increase this value.
And actually, I'm going to go ahead and
| | 03:25 |
scroll back up to Strings in Y.
I'm going to take this down just a little
| | 03:30 |
bit more, so we don't have quite as many
strings here.
| | 03:34 |
But as we increase that displace value,
the more we start to see that even though
| | 03:39 |
these are strings, they really still are
just connected dots, really a connected particles.
| | 03:45 |
So they do break up after a while.
So one of the things we can do is go back
| | 03:50 |
to our string settings and increase the
density of those.
| | 03:54 |
I don't want to do that too much, because
then they get too opaque.
| | 03:58 |
But that looks good.
We fixed our density issues.
| | 04:00 |
Well, we gotta few problems up here at
top, but I think I'm willing to live with
| | 04:04 |
that for the sake of how these other
lines are looking, and we can increase
| | 04:07 |
density to fix that.
Another cool option here are the taper
| | 04:10 |
values, so we can taper the size of the
strings.
| | 04:14 |
Let's say I'll use smooth here.
And so that makes it so these strings
| | 04:17 |
start small, get big in the center, and
then get small on the other side.
| | 04:21 |
For just the same thing with the opacity.
Changes to smooth and so now we have
| | 04:26 |
these lines that fade sort, completely
faded out, fade in and then fade out
| | 04:31 |
again on the other side of the string.
And the options here for both taper
| | 04:35 |
settings we have smooth and linear.
And smooth just kind of has an easing to
| | 04:41 |
it, so it eases into The size on the
sides.
| | 04:45 |
Linear just basically means it's just
kind of a straight increase in size.
| | 04:51 |
So we can play with those settings.
I'm just going to go ahead and take this
| | 04:54 |
back to smooth for right now.
And as you see here as we move the camera
| | 04:59 |
around, which now I'm not able to do in
real time so I could go back to my fast
| | 05:04 |
use preferences and go back to adaptive
resolution.
| | 05:07 |
But as we move around here.
You can see that we are moving a 3d group
| | 05:14 |
of strings here and again it;s not super
clear with the adaptive resolution.
| | 05:19 |
There it goes a little bit but you can
see that we're moving around these 3D strings.
| | 05:24 |
Its looking a little bit dense in these
areas so I might want to take the density
| | 05:28 |
back down a little bit.
And we'll get some dots as we zoom in close.
| | 05:33 |
But I think seeing individual particles
is better than having super solid lines.
| | 05:37 |
I like these very partially transparent
crosses as they kind of overlap each other.
| | 05:43 |
We can tell that they are semi-opaque.
And I love that, I love that look.
| | 05:50 |
I'd rather have that than super dense
strings.
| | 05:52 |
But it's up to you what you want.
Next up, we're going to look at creating
| | 05:55 |
another type of base form, a sphere.
| | 05:58 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a Form sphere| 00:00 |
All right, another fun one here folks.
We're going to change the base form now
| | 00:03 |
from box grid to sphere layered.
And what this does, obviously as you can
| | 00:09 |
see here, it creates concentric spheres.
So it's the same type thing as we saw
| | 00:15 |
with the grid for example, where we have,
three.
| | 00:19 |
That's basically like blocks, like sheets
set up in Z space, except now with the
| | 00:26 |
layered sphere we have again these
concentric spheres.
| | 00:30 |
I'm going to go ahead and increase the
size X, Y and Z all to 400.
| | 00:38 |
As you could see here, we could adjust
this without keeping them, uniform.
| | 00:42 |
But I'm just going to keep them uniform
for now.
| | 00:45 |
And we could adjust the particles in X,
and as we increase that high enough, we
| | 00:50 |
start to see almost like, strings, like
lines.
| | 00:54 |
Around these spheres.
And we can adjust the particles in y.
| | 00:58 |
Next time you can go ahead and undo the
particles in x and we can increase
| | 01:02 |
particles in y.
We have lines in y.
| | 01:05 |
I'll undo that.
And then we have sphered layers.
| | 01:08 |
This controls the number of spheres.
So if I take this down to one we're just
| | 01:13 |
getting the big sphere here.
Now what I'm going to do is jump down to
| | 01:17 |
the Particle section and click in the
Color swatch again.
| | 01:21 |
And I'm going to choose, kind of like an
orangish reddish color here.
| | 01:27 |
Maybe a little bit more red than orange.
And that looks fairly decent.
| | 01:33 |
We'll go ahead and click okay.
Close up the particles section and I'm
| | 01:36 |
going to go back here to my settings and
I'm going to increase particles in x.
| | 01:42 |
and I want to bring out something and we
kind of saw this in the last movie with
| | 01:45 |
the strings is that a lot of these
settings, they seem really boring.
| | 01:49 |
Like when I first saw those spheres, you
might think, what would I ever do with
| | 01:53 |
these spheres?
As we start playing with these settings
| | 01:56 |
it's amazing the kind of shapes and ideas
you can come up with.
| | 02:01 |
So, I'm going to increase particles in X,
and I'm going to take particles in Y all
| | 02:06 |
the way down to one.
And now we have just a single ring.
| | 02:13 |
And, again, this is kind of like a 3D
ring.
| | 02:16 |
So, it's already kind of cool just for
that.
| | 02:19 |
Now as we crease, increase these sphere
layers, let's take that to two, for example.
| | 02:23 |
You see where the next concentric sphere
would be.
| | 02:27 |
So in the same way that we have just one
particle in wide in creates kind of like
| | 02:33 |
a hemisphere here.
We have the same hemisphere around the
| | 02:36 |
internal sphere that we added.
So as we increase sphere layers and keep
| | 02:41 |
adding sphere layers, you can see now we
have kind of like this cool disc of lines.
| | 02:47 |
It's pretty interesting and again we can
stretch out the size X, so we have just
| | 02:52 |
kind of a interesting series of,
nonuniform ovals here which are 3D, it's
| | 02:55 |
kind of cool.
I'm just going to go ahead and undo those
| | 03:02 |
actions using Cmd+z on the Mac or Ctrl+z
on the PC.
| | 03:07 |
Now, let's go crazy with this.
I'm going to take sphere layers down from
| | 03:10 |
16 back down to one.
And let's say we'll use particles, or
| | 03:14 |
take particles in y, as you see, we
increase particles in y.
| | 03:17 |
It's like we're building the sphere here.
But let's not go that far, let's just say
| | 03:22 |
we'll have three of these particles in y.
And as we increase the sphere layers We
| | 03:30 |
have lets take this to two for example.
We have those same three rings on the
| | 03:34 |
next concentric circle, or sphere as we
saw before.
| | 03:38 |
And you continue to increase that we make
some really interesting shapes.
| | 03:44 |
Now instead of increasing this even more
we might want to do is open up the
| | 03:50 |
particles which we'll be talking about in
the next chapter, and increase the size
| | 03:54 |
of the particles.
If you take this to just two, or three,
| | 03:57 |
or something.
Now we could take down the particles that
| | 03:59 |
x, because we have more particles.
And we have this really interesting shape here.
| | 04:07 |
Now, as we continue to increase the
particles in y, we'll see this shape get
| | 04:11 |
infinitely more complex, and now we have
this cool little fire flower type thing.
| | 04:18 |
And keep in mind folks every time we see
one of these stop watches it means this
| | 04:21 |
property is animatable.
So we could build one of these one of
| | 04:27 |
these shapes by animating these values.
Which looks pretty hypnotic.
| | 04:33 |
(LAUGH) Pretty awesome stuff here folks,
pretty cool.
| | 04:38 |
So anyways, these things that look, did
look like just plain old spheres, can
| | 04:42 |
actually get fairly complex and very
visually interesting.
| | 04:47 |
It's good to keep in mind, as we saw with
strings, as we're seeing here with
| | 04:51 |
spheres, sometimes just changing a couple
simple parameters, such as the number of
| | 04:56 |
particles in y, and the number of
particles, or number of sphere layers, or
| | 05:01 |
the size, or the color of particles, can
really make a dramatic difference in what
| | 05:05 |
you're seeing with form.
And that's why it's really great after we
| | 05:08 |
learn, through going through this
training series, we learn these concepts,
| | 05:11 |
it's great to just play around and
experiment with what you can do with form.
| | 05:15 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Particle SettingsExploring particle types| 00:00 |
So far as we've worked with form all
we've dealt with are these little tiny
| | 00:04 |
default dots, these little spheres as
particles.
| | 00:07 |
But we're going to look at in this movie
is the fact that we can change these
| | 00:10 |
spheres to a few other things.
Later in this training series we'll look
| | 00:14 |
at how to turn these little spheres into
whatever you want.
| | 00:18 |
Now we actually have a little bit of an
assignment in this movie.
| | 00:20 |
I'm going to start with this image here
and it is a still shot And the assignment
| | 00:27 |
is to take this still image and turn it
into a moving night scene.
| | 00:33 |
And here is what the final looks like,
that we turned it in, that we're going to
| | 00:39 |
turn this into camera kind of pans.
And the stars here were actually created
| | 00:48 |
in Trapcode Form.
So we're going to look at how to create
| | 00:51 |
these stars.
And then for those of you that are
| | 00:53 |
interested I'm going to give you a little
breakdown for this project.
| | 00:56 |
For how I turn this into a moving, active
night shot.
| | 01:02 |
So let's go ahead and jump over to the
particle types start composition where we
| | 01:06 |
have a default application of form on the
form layer.
| | 01:10 |
And let's go ahead and open this up Now
what we're going to do is first take the
| | 01:14 |
particles in z from three to one.
We're just dealing with a sheet of particles.
| | 01:20 |
Let's go ahead and take down the center z
value so we can see these spheres more clearly.
| | 01:27 |
And when they're at their default value
of zero they just kind of look like dots.
| | 01:31 |
But as they get closer we can see that
they are actually spheres.
| | 01:36 |
Now, the settings for changing the type
of particle that you're using as well as
| | 01:41 |
the settings to change what that particle
looks like are in the particles section.
| | 01:45 |
So go ahead and close up base form and
open up the particle section inside of
| | 01:50 |
the form effect.
And what we are going to talk about here
| | 01:53 |
specifically is the particle type drop
down.
| | 01:55 |
So, again as we've seen that.
the default choice is sphere and you can
| | 02:00 |
really work miracles just never touching
this setting.
| | 02:03 |
But again, you can do some cool stuff by
fiddling with it.
| | 02:06 |
Let's take it to glow sphere, which
basically makes so these spheres have a
| | 02:10 |
little bit glow applied.
We can't really see what's going on here
| | 02:14 |
so I'm going to zoom out.
Go back to base form and we'll go ahead
| | 02:18 |
and spread out these particles and now
you can see a little more clear what's
| | 02:24 |
going on.
Basically here's the default sphere and
| | 02:27 |
then the glow sphere just has the little
bit of glow applied to it.
| | 02:31 |
To adjust what the glow looks like you
can open up the glow section in the
| | 02:34 |
bottom of the particle section here.
And you can change the size of the glow.
| | 02:41 |
You can change the opacity of the glow.
And these tethered percentages as well.
| | 02:46 |
To close up the glow section, go back to
particle type and we'll change this now
| | 02:51 |
to star.
And, I'm going to go ahead and reduce the
| | 02:57 |
number of particles in X.
And reduce the number of particles in Y.
| | 03:01 |
So we really can see what's going on with
these stars here.
| | 03:05 |
Note that stars also have a little ring
of glow applied to them, around them here.
| | 03:10 |
And in the glow section, we can go back
here to our glow settings.
| | 03:13 |
And increase the size or decrease the
size of that globe.
| | 03:17 |
We just want like a cool design element
with these little pluses that's totally cool.
| | 03:21 |
And actually it's these stars we are
going to use for the stars, kind of
| | 03:26 |
fitting wouldn't you say.
There's also a cloudlet that we'll look
| | 03:29 |
at a little bit in the next movie, but
it's kind of a random cloud shape.
| | 03:33 |
And by default it doesn't do too much
other than provide a little randomness to
| | 03:37 |
the sphere but we'll look at how later on
to make this into a cool smokey texture.
| | 03:43 |
Now in this section, there's also
Streaklet which is pretty similar and
| | 03:49 |
used for making cool streaks.
Don't use that too much in form, but use
| | 03:53 |
it a lot in particular though.
And then we have these sprite and texture
| | 03:56 |
options and these are for when you can
choose a custom layer, separate layer To
| | 04:02 |
be a texture, so if I have another layer
that was a happy face and I chose one of
| | 04:06 |
these options.
I could make these all happy faces.
| | 04:09 |
So if I had them like a hexagon or
something like that I could make them all hexagons.
| | 04:14 |
And using sprites in textured polygons is
actually a little bit more complex than
| | 04:19 |
it seems like so we're going to save that
for a separate movie a little bit later on.
| | 04:22 |
For now, I'm going to go back to star,
because it actually does work pretty good
| | 04:27 |
for creating stars.
And we can shrink our stars.
| | 04:32 |
I could also by taking down the size
value by the way.
| | 04:34 |
And I can increase size random.
So that the size of these stars is fairly random.
| | 04:40 |
And the cool thing why I'm using stars
instead of spheres is that when you do
| | 04:45 |
have stars, they get a little bit bigger,
you can tell that they have like, a
| | 04:50 |
little bit of a look to them, they're not
just completely round, which looks
| | 04:55 |
kind of boring, every once in awhile we
get ones like this right here that are
| | 04:58 |
just a little bit of shape to them.
A little bit of glow, a little bit of
| | 05:02 |
twinkle, and I actually like the way that
looks.
| | 05:05 |
So what we can do, is go ahead and take
the base form from box grid to sphere.
| | 05:11 |
And you don't have to do that.
I just chose to do that, because that
| | 05:14 |
works a little bit better for me, for
creating stars.
| | 05:17 |
And then, we can, adjust the X and the Y.
I'll spread that out so it doesn't look
| | 05:25 |
too spherical.
And the Z, to give it some depth here.
| | 05:30 |
And with a sphere, you're seeing that
we're kind of entering in a sphere.
| | 05:34 |
We're, like, looking straight on at a big
sphere.
| | 05:37 |
So we kind of only have two depth levels
here as we adjust the size of Z.
| | 05:41 |
We have the front of the sphere and the
back of the sphere, we really want stars
| | 05:45 |
kind of going all over the place.
So we're going to skip ahead by scrolling
| | 05:49 |
down and open up the disperse and twitch
section and increase disperse.
| | 05:55 |
It will spread stars all over the place.
We'll talk more about disperse and twitch
| | 06:00 |
as well as settings after on.
but suffice to say it's a pretty simple
| | 06:05 |
setting it just spreads stuff out all
over the place.
| | 06:08 |
Now if we want we can increase the
particles in X, the particles in Y, and
| | 06:12 |
we can also go back to our particle
settings and maybe increase the setting
| | 06:19 |
of the size or take it down.
I want mine to be really small.
| | 06:25 |
Somewhere around there, about one.
And then, we could take down opacity a
| | 06:29 |
little bit, and increase opacity
randomness by increasing opacity
| | 06:34 |
randomness value.
Now we have something that looks quite a
| | 06:36 |
bit like stars.
So I'm going to go ahead, I'll just close
| | 06:39 |
up the glow section for now, and I'll
turn on the visibility of this bottom
| | 06:44 |
layer, which is our cloud background with
the trees, or still image.
| | 06:49 |
And then I've already created for you a
couple things to darken it.
| | 06:52 |
I have got this blue solid here.
And this blue solid is a gradient blue solid.
| | 07:01 |
It's masked, with a feathered mask, so
that we have a little bit brighter stuff
| | 07:04 |
down here at the bottom.
And it fades to be a little bit darker.
| | 07:07 |
There's also a black layer that creates
darkness up at the top because this is
| | 07:12 |
kind of how the way the environemtn
works, f you look at a night sky, we have
| | 07:15 |
bright stuff down towards the bottom,
which often creates really cool
| | 07:18 |
silhouettes of things like trees, like
this, and it gets darker.
| | 07:21 |
And you know, now that I look at this,
I'm going to actually zoom into full
| | 07:25 |
resolution at 100% so I can really see
what these stars are doing.
| | 07:28 |
And these are a little bit too twinkly.
The size of these is a little bit too
| | 07:32 |
big, so I'm going to go back to form, and
one of the things I can do is just adjust
| | 07:37 |
the center z value and I can increase
this until they're a little bit farther back.
| | 07:44 |
We're still getting some of the twinkle,
some of the irregularity.
| | 07:47 |
So they don't look like spheres, from the
stars, which is good, it's what we want.
| | 07:51 |
Maybe we'll do even more of that, just a
little bit more.
| | 07:54 |
But one of the problems I'm having here
is that there are stars on top of the trees.
| | 08:00 |
And because the clouds and the trees are
all one layer.
| | 08:03 |
We can't really put the stars behind the
trees.
| | 08:08 |
So one of the things I did to get around
that is I made a mat.
| | 08:11 |
See, the thing is with form, it doesn't
respect masks that are applied to the
| | 08:16 |
layer, so if we were to select a
rectangular, for example, and click and
| | 08:20 |
drag on the form layer to make a mask, it
does nothing.
| | 08:23 |
I'm just going to go ahead and undo that
with Command + Z or Control + Z on the PC.
| | 08:27 |
So we could pre-compose this layer with
the layer with form on it and then mask that.
| | 08:32 |
But the problem is, is that I wouldn't
have access to my form settings in this
| | 08:37 |
main comp and that'd be an annoyance that
I'd rather not deal with if I don't have to.
| | 08:42 |
So here's a quick and dirty solution.
This isn't actually the solution I used
| | 08:46 |
but it can work in a pinch.
I'm going to apply the set mat effect to
| | 08:51 |
the form layer and what I can do oh its
already there.
| | 08:55 |
I'm just going to go ahead and delete the
original instance of that and what I can
| | 08:59 |
do is take the mat from layer.
Change this to the solid in the background.
| | 09:04 |
And then use (INAUDIBLE) changes from
alpha channel to luminance.
| | 09:08 |
This kind of does what the track mat drop
down does, what this effect does.
| | 09:13 |
But it doesn't have to be respective of
the layer order.
| | 09:17 |
So when you're adjusting the track mat
drop down.
| | 09:20 |
It only uses the layer right above it and
that's not going to work for us, in this case.
| | 09:25 |
We need this layer to be above the
darkening layers and above the image of
| | 09:31 |
the clouds and trees layer too.
So that and that effect works really well
| | 09:36 |
for us.
It can use the brightness and luminance.
| | 09:41 |
Of this background plate, which actually
really works perfectly.
| | 09:44 |
So, the black areas where the trees are,
there won't be any particles there, and
| | 09:49 |
there will be in the in the sky here
where it's brighter.
| | 09:54 |
So we've just made a little lua mat from
a different layer using the set mat effect.
| | 09:59 |
Now I chose not to do that because as I
got a camera and I animated this, there's
| | 10:03 |
actually holes in the trees where at
these stars can show forth and it just
| | 10:08 |
kind of look kind of weird, like right
here there's a star and because there's
| | 10:12 |
no tree and that's the way it would work
in the, in the real world.
| | 10:17 |
But it just looks like we have a sloppy
matte.
| | 10:19 |
What I decided to do instead of using the
set matte effect, I decided to make a
| | 10:22 |
special precomp and in that precomp, I
used the layer here, let me go ahead and
| | 10:30 |
take off these effects.
I used the original layer, the, the image
| | 10:34 |
that we have.
I use curves to posterize everything here.
| | 10:39 |
So I made everything really bright that
was not trees, and then made the trees
| | 10:44 |
really black.
And then I used the Minimax effect, with
| | 10:49 |
the operation set to minimum and the
radius of 16.
| | 10:52 |
To increase, so if I take this down,
that's what it looks like normally.
| | 10:55 |
And I increase this to 16, so that
basically it grows the black, and it
| | 11:02 |
fills in those holes.
Then I also add in a ramp layer which is
| | 11:07 |
basically a gradient.
With the multiply blend mode on from
| | 11:11 |
light at the top to dark at the bottom,
and that way, when we use this as a Luma
| | 11:17 |
Matte here, which I'll take.
I'll do that by going to the form here,
| | 11:21 |
and changing the Track Matte drop down
here to Luma Matte.
| | 11:25 |
>> And so now we have No stars at the
bottom which I'd say lot more realistic
| | 11:30 |
because of that ramp.
And then as we getaway from the city
| | 11:34 |
lights and luminosity down here at the
ground, it's starts getting more and
| | 11:38 |
more, more and more bright because of
that ramp is getting brighter there.
| | 11:43 |
Now if I'd say a couple other things like
I did there, I add an adjustment layer to
| | 11:48 |
make these clouds at the bottom pop a
little bit, also added some glow.
| | 11:53 |
And the glow, kind of, is a little
sloppy.
| | 11:55 |
Goes over the trees, which adds a nice
atmospheric effect.
| | 11:58 |
Another thing I did, if you go over to
the final comp, is on the form layer,
| | 12:03 |
excuse me, not on the form layer.
On the back image layer, I applied the
| | 12:06 |
turbulent disc place effect and 1 of the
things that does is that it displaces the
| | 12:13 |
trees, actually the whole layer.
But that adds kind of like this realism.
| | 12:18 |
So if you just kind of look at the trees
they kinds warp around a little bit.
| | 12:22 |
And the leaves move.
It's easier to see if you take this like
| | 12:25 |
full screen and zoom in a little bit.
So if we play this back, you can see
| | 12:29 |
these trees kind of moving around and
just kind of adds a little bit of.
| | 12:36 |
Motion to everything.
See that?
| | 12:38 |
Those leaves kind of swaying in the
imaginary breeze.
| | 12:41 |
It's always rough when you're taking
still images and bringing them to life,
| | 12:45 |
because in real life there's always tons
of movement everywhere.
| | 12:50 |
And so, turbulant displace, just, you can
see it right there.
| | 12:53 |
(INAUDIBLE) this place just add some of
that movement back in.
| | 12:56 |
I mean, you scroll it really fast, it
looks hokey and cheesy, but I animate it
| | 13:00 |
really slow so it's just really subtle
over time, just, you can kind of feel it
| | 13:04 |
more than you see.
Right here, it's very prevalent, as well.
| | 13:07 |
And so another thing that I did is I, I
added a camera move And the camera.
| | 13:13 |
Actually I'll double click on the camera
here.
| | 13:15 |
I choose a 1 node camera instead of a 2
camera.
| | 13:18 |
The 2 node camera as you adjust position
it pans around and as you pan around it
| | 13:25 |
tends to create kind of like a rounding
and it doesn't look super believable and
| | 13:31 |
I want to kind of like a dolly look.
And so for that, I used a One-Node Camera.
| | 13:38 |
Now it's really cool about form, is that
form is a 3-D effect.
| | 13:41 |
It automatically response to the camera.
So, as I have the camera and I move it
| | 13:46 |
around, I don't have to do anything to
form.
| | 13:49 |
It automatically moves in Z space and it
works with my camera move and it just
| | 13:54 |
adds a lot of parallax here because of
the depth.
| | 13:57 |
The Z depth of those stars.
And that just works out awesome.
| | 14:02 |
So I just animated the camera going from
one position, just animated the x axis
| | 14:07 |
only of the camera, going to the right
and that worked great.
| | 14:11 |
But one of the thing I noticed from from
actually doing camera work is that if we
| | 14:15 |
were going to shoot this for reals, we
would get a dolly track out and we would
| | 14:21 |
lay it on the ground and there would be a
human being Who is susceptibel to flaws
| | 14:25 |
and imperfections pushing this dolly and
it would be irregular, it would not be
| | 14:30 |
smooth no matter how hard you try, no
matter how big the budget is.
| | 14:33 |
This is just not going to be a perfectly
smooth shot.
| | 14:36 |
So I added a very very subtle wiggle
expression to give some randomness to the movement.
| | 14:42 |
As you go through and unless you're
looking for it you probably wouldn't even
| | 14:45 |
see it.
But you kind of, one of those things
| | 14:47 |
again I think you feel more than see.
And the we have a pretty good final shot
| | 14:52 |
thanks to forum.
And you can see again, those little stars
| | 14:56 |
popping out here and there.
And they look really great.
| | 15:00 |
They're not hitting you over the head
with the fact that they're stars.
| | 15:03 |
Just occasionally glowing a little bit
and popping out and you could see the,
| | 15:07 |
the shape of the star and we have a
pretty believable final project.
| | 15:13 |
So as we go through, we're going to learn
a little bit more about using custom
| | 15:17 |
particles and already even just this shot
here, it's so different from already what
| | 15:21 |
we've seen.
With form, and it just gets crazy, as we
| | 15:24 |
start playing with these particles.
So let's learn a little bit more, about,
| | 15:28 |
changing these particles, and what you
can do with that.
| | 15:30 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting other particle settings| 00:00 |
In the last tutorial, we made this cool
day for night project.
| | 00:02 |
And we made these stars in form just by
changing the particle type.
| | 00:06 |
What we're going to do here is add some
fog.
| | 00:08 |
And actually, we're going to add, do this
in a separate comp.
| | 00:12 |
Because it's going to, it's going to slow
things down.
| | 00:14 |
But we're going to tweak some of the
other particle settings to in order to
| | 00:18 |
achieve this effect.
Go over to the other particle settings,
| | 00:21 |
start composition.
And apply the form effect to the form solid.
| | 00:25 |
And I, intentionally made this comp
extremely sparse and bare bones.
| | 00:31 |
Because fog as we're going to make it
here, really slows down at least my computer.
| | 00:37 |
So what I'm going to do is open up Base
Form and I'm going to change the
| | 00:41 |
particles in z to 2, so we have a little
bit of depth here, but not much.
| | 00:47 |
Also going to zoom out, so we can see
everything here and increase size x until
| | 00:52 |
our comp goes to the edges of the screen
lower center xy.
| | 00:56 |
The right side here increase that value
to lower our little fog bank here and
| | 01:02 |
actually I want to increase size y.
So we have a little bit more surface area
| | 01:08 |
to our fog.
I also want to take down particles in x
| | 01:11 |
maybe to about 30 and also particles in y
to about 30 and I realize again that
| | 01:18 |
looks really Spread out but it's not once
we start fiddling with this.
| | 01:21 |
I'm going to close a base form, open up
the particle section.
| | 01:24 |
I'm going to change the particle type to
cloudlet.
| | 01:27 |
And just so you can see this here I'm
gong to increase the size a little bit.
| | 01:31 |
And again the cloudlet makes these random
little cloudy type shapes.
| | 01:35 |
And this is great for making fog, I
realize this looks nothing like fog.
| | 01:39 |
But it will in just a moment.
Now, the thing with fog, here's how we do
| | 01:44 |
it or smoke usually.
But what we do is we increase size to a
| | 01:49 |
ridiculously huge amount, and we take
opacity down to a ridiculously small amount.
| | 01:54 |
So let me show you what I'm talking about
here.
| | 01:55 |
I'm going to increase size getting bigger
here.
| | 02:00 |
And the reason why fog slows down my
machine, at least, is that the size value
| | 02:07 |
seems to, as you increase it, it slows
form down a lot.
| | 02:11 |
So in order to have really good fog, we
need big size.
| | 02:14 |
And again, that tends to increasingly
slow down my machine.
| | 02:19 |
I'm also going to take down the opacity
and as we do, we'll start to see some of
| | 02:25 |
this cloudy, foggy texture showing
through.
| | 02:29 |
You see even just at the top here is just
looking a little bit more cloudy.
| | 02:31 |
Let's go and take that down to like one.
And now we're kind of getting somewhere.
| | 02:36 |
Let's go ahead and increase the opacity
random so that different little puffs of
| | 02:42 |
cloud here take on different levels of
opacity, maybe down to about 75.
| | 02:47 |
Let's go ahead and do this same thing for
size random as we increase that.
| | 02:51 |
We're randomizing the size of those
little cloudlet particles and somewhere
| | 02:56 |
around 75 is good for that as well.
Whoops there we go.
| | 03:00 |
Now, you can see as we start lowering
opacity that it looks foggy but now we
| | 03:04 |
can kind of see the size of these
particles.
| | 03:07 |
So we now need to go back and increase
the size, of, our, Cloudlets here, maybe
| | 03:16 |
even increase the, in the base forum,
this size x, because we're starting to
| | 03:20 |
see a little bit of shading on those
edges.
| | 03:22 |
There we go, close that back up.
And now we can take down the opacity,
| | 03:27 |
even to like 0.8 or something, to kind of
lower that even more.
| | 03:32 |
Now this does look a little too uniform.
It looks like a wall of fog, and we don't
| | 03:36 |
really want that.
We want more randomness, and more size variation.
| | 03:41 |
And we probably want that in different
places as well.
| | 03:43 |
Maybe as like the fog rises, it gets a
little bit thinner.
| | 03:46 |
But we won't know how to do that until we
talk about color maps or quick maps a
| | 03:50 |
little bit later on.
In the training, I'm going to change the
| | 03:53 |
color from white to more of a light
periwinkle.
| | 04:00 |
This will mimic what's going on in our
other shot, here.
| | 04:04 |
Let's go ahead and see what this looks
like.
| | 04:05 |
I'm going to go ahead and select this
entire layer, not the effect, just the
| | 04:08 |
entire layer, and I might need to click
away from that and then click it again to
| | 04:11 |
select it.
Then press Cmd + C on the Mac to copy
| | 04:15 |
your Command, or Ctrl + C on the PC to
copy.
| | 04:18 |
Come over here to press Ctrl + V on the
PC or Cmd + V on the Mac to to paste, and
| | 04:24 |
now we can see that we have that fog
here.
| | 04:26 |
You'll also notice that this slows way
down and it's a little, a little brutal
| | 04:31 |
on the old computer when you make fog.
So I'm going to increase the Y value, the
| | 04:37 |
center X value to lower that even more.
I might also want to have less particles
| | 04:42 |
in X, maybe 25.
So, just kind of make this a little bit
| | 04:47 |
more sparce, we also might want to go to
our disperse and twist and increase
| | 04:54 |
disperse a little bit to kind of move
those particles around a little bit.
| | 05:00 |
And you can see the problem with the
small cloud particles is it does kind of
| | 05:06 |
look more fake.
We really want big areas of fog here.
| | 05:11 |
And so it's just kind of a back-and-forth
playing around with size and opacity,
| | 05:15 |
because as we increase the size, let's
say we increase the size to 100, then we
| | 05:19 |
have way too much in terms of opacity,
and it's, it's a little strong.
| | 05:25 |
So another thing, one thing we could do
Is actually select the form layer, press
| | 05:29 |
the letter T to reveal the opacity
property.
| | 05:32 |
And take down the opacity here.
The downside of that is that we're not
| | 05:36 |
really changing how these cloud particles
interact with each other.
| | 05:41 |
We're just controlling the particles, the
opacity of the entire layer itself.
| | 05:45 |
And in this case, that actually tends to
work pretty good.
| | 05:51 |
And we have what looks like pretty good
fog.
| | 05:53 |
We might want to actually increase the
saturation of this just a little bit.
| | 05:58 |
So we have a little bit more blue in our
fog to match the rest of our background,
| | 06:03 |
maybe that's a little hardcore.
Somewhere in between those two.
| | 06:06 |
There we go and now we have some really
cool fog added.
| | 06:12 |
So here's the before and the after.
And again, it's a little harsh, probably
| | 06:16 |
so you can see it, but it does add a nice
atmosphere.
| | 06:20 |
And later we'll learn about how to add
some kind of turbulence to this and how
| | 06:25 |
to animate it in a way that would be
believable.
| | 06:27 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using custom particles| 00:00 |
Now, we're going to look at how to make
your own custom particles.
| | 00:04 |
So what I have here is this little
stylized underwater scene.
| | 00:08 |
And I have this comp here called fishies.
And there's a bunch of fishies in this comp.
| | 00:16 |
And the way I've set it up is that there
is a different fish on each frame.
| | 00:21 |
So, there are 5 layers and the, the
composition is 5 frames long.
| | 00:25 |
So, there is one on each frame.
So, I could just go frame to frame and
| | 00:28 |
see the different adorable fishies.
I'm going to go back to the custom
| | 00:32 |
particles comp.
Everything's hidden and locked for you
| | 00:35 |
except for the form layer.
Go ahead and turn the visibility of that
| | 00:38 |
layer on.
And apply the form effect to it.
| | 00:42 |
I do, it was the form.
Now what we're going to do is, we're
| | 00:46 |
going to turn these little spheres into
fishies.
| | 00:51 |
So we want to open up the base form.
Let's first set up the particles knowing
| | 00:55 |
that each sphere is going to become a
fish.
| | 00:58 |
Let's go ahead and set this up right,
because right now we have way too many particles.
| | 01:01 |
We don't want to fish for each one of
these particles here.
| | 01:04 |
So, I'm going to increase size X until we
basically fill the frame here and maybe a
| | 01:12 |
little bit more.
Maybe about 1,000 so we could animate in
| | 01:15 |
just a bit.
And size Y it looks Pretty good.
| | 01:20 |
We actually might want to take that down,
a little bit.
| | 01:24 |
An actually, for center XY I'm going to
increase the Y value.
| | 01:29 |
So I could put this about where the the
ol' fishies are going to be.
| | 01:33 |
And we could also increase center Z or
decrease it, until, it's about in the
| | 01:39 |
right spot.
Let's also increase size Z.
| | 01:42 |
We want these fishies to go back pretty
far.
| | 01:46 |
Let's go ahead and take that to 1500.
And, that's looking pretty good,
| | 01:51 |
actually, maybe increase size Y, a little
bit more.
| | 01:57 |
Looks pretty good.
Now, imagine a fish for each one of these dots.
| | 02:01 |
Its way too many, so let's go ahead and
take particles of X down.
| | 02:05 |
to like 4.
And particle in y to about 4.
| | 02:09 |
So now we're having sporadic little
sphere here, which is a lot more realistic.
| | 02:16 |
Now, let's go ahead and open up the
particle section, get to the media
| | 02:19 |
tutorial here, change the particle type
from sphere to well, any of the 6 modes
| | 02:25 |
here, any of the sprite mode or the
texture polygon mode.
| | 02:28 |
We'll replace the, the default particle
types here with a custom layer of your choosing.
| | 02:34 |
But we're actually going to choose
textured polygon.
| | 02:37 |
In our case here, we could very well
choose sprite and that would work as well.
| | 02:41 |
Textured polygons allow you to rotate in
3D space, that's why they call them polygons.
| | 02:47 |
Sprites are basically 2D layers.
And with both sprites and textured
| | 02:52 |
polygons, you can colorize them.
In other words you can add a tint or you
| | 02:56 |
could ple, completely replace them with
fill and just have them be like sillouettes.
| | 03:00 |
So I'm going to choose textured polygon
in this case.
| | 03:03 |
And I'll as I'll, is'll, the case a lot
of times we need to turn up the size.
| | 03:08 |
A lot, and actually I can't turn up the
size yet until I've opened up texture,
| | 03:12 |
and actually chosen the layer.
So we'll get back to size in just a second.
| | 03:15 |
For the under the texture section, now we
can choose the layer, choose our fishies
| | 03:21 |
comp, that's number 3, layer 3.
And here we have the time sampling option.
| | 03:25 |
This is really important.
We don't want this to sample current time.
| | 03:29 |
Because then we'd only see the fish for 5
frames.
| | 03:33 |
And each one would play for a frame and
then switch to the next one.
| | 03:36 |
We don't want that.
We want it to use all of the fish, and by
| | 03:40 |
the way, this could very well be a movie,
if we wanted to, or a still image, but I
| | 03:44 |
just wanted to bring in 5 different
images just to show you what else you can
| | 03:48 |
do besides the standard image or movie
file.
| | 03:52 |
So, in other words, you could go in and
animate the fish and maybe render it out
| | 03:56 |
of After Effects of the fish swimming and
moving around, and then you brought, you
| | 04:00 |
could bring the movie in and use that
movie as a particle if you wanted to.
| | 04:04 |
I'm going to change time sampling from
current time to a random time.
| | 04:08 |
And I just want it to be a still frame.
I don't want anything to loop.
| | 04:12 |
Now we can do down to, go to the particle
section, increase size quite a bit.
| | 04:17 |
Probably to about, well, let's just look
at it and see.
| | 04:24 |
That looks pretty good right about there.
Maybe about 40 or so.
| | 04:27 |
And I actually might want to increase the
size, Z.
| | 04:30 |
And then, push these fish back a little
bit, so that way we have, some fish that
| | 04:39 |
are kind of close, and some fish that are
pretty far away.
| | 04:43 |
I like that.
Now, they do look a little bit too uniform.
| | 04:46 |
So again, let's skip ahead, open up the
disperse and twist section.
| | 04:50 |
And let's increase disperse to about 100.
Let's go back now to our base form and
| | 04:57 |
adjust because of that.
Let's go ahead and raise this up a little bit.
| | 05:02 |
Now you notice that as these little
fishies overlap here, they become like
| | 05:06 |
little ghosts over the other fish.
That's because the default transfer mode
| | 05:11 |
in form is add, and that works really
great with fire and other types of
| | 05:16 |
particle systems, but not too great with
little fishies.
| | 05:19 |
So in the particle section, change the
transfer mode from add to normal.
| | 05:23 |
And now things behave like they normally
would.
| | 05:27 |
And there's no transparency effects here.
Now we can also increase the size random
| | 05:33 |
if we want to add some randomness to the,
the size here.
| | 05:37 |
And that's looking pretty good.
I'm going to go ahead and scroll back up
| | 05:41 |
to the bass form.
I'm going to set a key frame for center XY.
| | 05:47 |
And let's go ahead and click and drag
this to the left.
| | 05:51 |
And I'll go ahead and hit the End key.
Go to the end of the composition.
| | 05:55 |
Click and drag on the x value so the fish
can swim a little bit.
| | 06:01 |
And not too much.
Don't want that.
| | 06:03 |
Make it look like we've ran out of fish
here.
| | 06:06 |
And let's go ahead and Preview that back
and see what we have.
| | 06:10 |
our fish are a little slow.
Lets go back to the home hit the home button.
| | 06:14 |
Go back to the first frame.
We might have to increase the size x to
| | 06:19 |
spread these out a little bit, so that we
can back this up a little bit more.
| | 06:23 |
So maybe that's our new start frame.
And maybe we can go a little bit further
| | 06:27 |
on the end so that there's.
A greater distance these fish are
| | 06:31 |
travelling which will speed them up.
That would be a little bit too fast.
| | 06:36 |
Eh, that works for me but they do look
really mechanical.
| | 06:39 |
So we're going to skip ahead again and
open up the fractal field section.
| | 06:45 |
We're going to be talking in depth about
this fractal field stuff because this is
| | 06:48 |
very powerful but also very complex, as
you can see by all these crazy
| | 06:51 |
parameters, like F scale and Add Subtract
and Gamma and all this kind of crazy stuff.
| | 06:57 |
So what we're going to do is go to the
Displace value and we're going to
| | 07:01 |
increase that just a little bit to 15.
And as we'll see later, and as we'll,
| | 07:05 |
again get into very in depth with the a
fractal field section creates a perlin
| | 07:13 |
noise area and we'll displace objects
based on that fractal field, if that
| | 07:19 |
sounds confusing, again, we'll explain
more later.
| | 07:22 |
But, basically, in lamens terms that adds
a little bit of wiggle to these fishies's
| | 07:27 |
as they travel.
And that's all we have to do, and now as
| | 07:30 |
we play this back.
You can see that our fish move, and
| | 07:35 |
there's a little bit of random wiggle,
and everything looks fantastic, as a very
| | 07:41 |
minimal amount of effort that we had to
do here, and this is just one instance of
| | 07:46 |
form, and all these different fish are
being controlled with this textured
| | 07:51 |
polygon setting and form.
Pretty cool stuff.
| | 07:55 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Using Quick MapsThe Quick Map paradigm| 00:00 |
In this chapter, we're going to look at
something called Quick Maps.
| | 00:03 |
This is where we move from the real
simple basics of form, to the more
| | 00:08 |
advanced and complex features.
If we open up the Quick Maps area here,
| | 00:12 |
and then let's say, we'll open up map
one.
| | 00:14 |
We get this crazy gizmo that trap code
refers to as the curve drawing interface,
| | 00:21 |
and this whole thing can be very, very
confusing.
| | 00:25 |
So we're going to start the very basic
project here, and just explain the
| | 00:30 |
overall concept with Quick Maps.
How to use this curve drawing interface
| | 00:34 |
in this movie.
And then we're going to build on this
| | 00:38 |
with real world examples in the following
movies.
| | 00:40 |
Before we get started, just again so
we're very clear, I'm going to adjust
| | 00:44 |
this form by opening up base form and
we'll take the particles in Z down to one.
| | 00:50 |
So, we're just looking at one simple grid
of particles, close up base form, open particle.
| | 00:56 |
Let's go ahead and increase the size to
two.
| | 00:59 |
And actually let's go back up to base
form, and increase the size X and the
| | 01:05 |
size Y a little bit, just so that we can
see those more clearly.
| | 01:10 |
Now, I am going to close up base form,
and look at just Quick Maps.
| | 01:14 |
Now were not looking at the opacity map
or the color map, which are a little bit unique.
| | 01:18 |
We're going to open up map one and see
this curve drawing interface.
| | 01:21 |
Now these Quick Maps here, there's three
of them.
| | 01:24 |
One, two, and three not counting the
opacity and color maps.
| | 01:28 |
These allow you to map different
properties, these properties here, size,
| | 01:33 |
opacity, etc, over different areas of
your dots or your particles and form.
| | 01:41 |
And this graph represents that stuff.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
| | 01:47 |
change map one to x.
These are the dimensions x, y, z, and radial.
| | 01:52 |
For right now we'll just say x.
So this map right here which again we
| | 01:57 |
haven't drawn anything in it yet.
Is mapping the size over the X dimension.
| | 02:02 |
So, from left to right we're mapping the
size.
| | 02:07 |
So, the way that we adjust this curve
drawing interface is simply click and drag.
| | 02:11 |
So, if I click and I'm dragging here so,
it starts big on the left, and then small
| | 02:18 |
on the right when I let go of my mouse.
We could see that that is exactly what happened.
| | 02:22 |
We've mapped size over the x dimension.
So we've got big on the left, and small
| | 02:28 |
on the right.
Now let's say we change that dimension to y.
| | 02:32 |
We will go from top down, solid or bigger
to smaller at the bottom.
| | 02:39 |
Now we don't have any layers here, so Z
won't do anything but we can choose
| | 02:43 |
radial, if we want to.
And now we have bigger in the center,
| | 02:47 |
towards smaller.
And we can just shave that off a little
| | 02:50 |
bit so that it's more clear and so it
stops earlier.
| | 02:53 |
And now we have this, kind of cool,
regular area of particles.
| | 02:56 |
If we want to, we can use these handy
buttons like Flip, for example, so I can
| | 03:00 |
click Flip.
And now we have a hole in the center, and
| | 03:03 |
we get larger as we go out towards the
edges.
| | 03:06 |
Now I'm just going to click this top
little button here.
| | 03:09 |
Right there, to reset.
And I'm going to go back to size over X.
| | 03:13 |
Now there's a few presets here that are
kind of cool.
| | 03:16 |
Like we mentioned here, this top one
fills up everything maximum, so
| | 03:19 |
everything's kind of like at the, at it's
default setting.
| | 03:22 |
And also if you ever want to turn it off,
you can just change the map one over or
| | 03:27 |
any of these over values to off.
Leave it set to X for now.
| | 03:30 |
But we have these presets here so we can
go from solid on the left to nothing on
| | 03:36 |
the right.
We could have little hill here.
| | 03:39 |
And you can see how there's nothing on
the left and there's a spike, and then it
| | 03:43 |
goes down to the right.
And you can see that mirrored in the size
| | 03:46 |
of the particles.
From left to right here.
| | 03:48 |
We also have a smooth ramp up.
I use this preset very often because it's
| | 03:53 |
got a nice bell curve here.
We also have a tapered effect to where we
| | 03:57 |
are solid, and then we taper off very
quickly so it's kind of like half and half.
| | 04:01 |
And then we have this kind of, solid on
the left with a few random spikes here
| | 04:06 |
which create some interesting
randomization.
| | 04:10 |
Now a few other helpful things here.
We can flip this, the flip button comes
| | 04:13 |
in real handy, we can also choose random
if we want just a random array of particles.
| | 04:19 |
You can see how cool this is, almost like
a background in and of itself right there
| | 04:22 |
instantly just by clicking the random
button.
| | 04:25 |
We can also if we are drawing it
ourselves click it here and drag.
| | 04:29 |
And let's say I want like waves, and that
just looks really terrible.
| | 04:35 |
So what you could do is click the Smooth
button, a bunch of times, and just smooth
| | 04:38 |
those out, so we have a nice more gradual
curve there as we go around.
| | 04:42 |
Now as we'll learn about in the rest of
the movies in this chapter, we can map
| | 04:46 |
other properties in as well.
Let's go over to map two, for example,
| | 04:50 |
we'll open that up.
And lets say we want to mimic the size
| | 04:53 |
changes here with opacity.
So I could change map two, to go over opacity.
| | 05:00 |
Also map two over x and I want it to have
the same curve so, I can click the Copy
| | 05:04 |
button here, and now I can come down to
map two and click the Paste button.
| | 05:11 |
And so now we're having the same curve.
With opacity, now again I realize that we
| | 05:16 |
have not made any great artwork here.
But the concept is really important to
| | 05:24 |
get before moving on, because this is
going to get really advanced really quick.
| | 05:27 |
And if you're not really clear on what's
happening with these curve drawing
| | 05:31 |
interfaces, in the Quick Map section.
And how to map these different values
| | 05:36 |
over different properties.
Then the rest of it won't make sense.
| | 05:40 |
So if you need to watch this movie a
couple of times just to make sure you get
| | 05:43 |
it then, then go for it.
And if you're ready to move on we'll go
| | 05:48 |
and talk about the Opacity map in the
next movie.
| | 05:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting the Opacity Map| 00:00 |
Now, we're going to build on what we just
learned, as we learned how map opacity.
| | 00:05 |
Now, we can use any of the three maps,
the three generate quick maps here.
| | 00:10 |
But there's also a special opacity and
color map, and honestly I don't use this
| | 00:16 |
very often unless I'm mapping
specifically color or specifically
| | 00:19 |
opacity, because it does map this opacity
and color together over a single dimension.
| | 00:26 |
So, if you want to map color and you
don't want to map opacity the same way,
| | 00:31 |
then you might want to just adjust color
which we will look at in the next movie,
| | 00:34 |
and adjust opacity with one of the other
three maps.
| | 00:37 |
But since we're just mapping opacity, we
can use the opacity map.
| | 00:41 |
And again, as we saw in the last movie
this map was exactly like the others.
| | 00:44 |
And so what I want to do in this case, is
I want to make some separation with our
| | 00:50 |
little fishes here.
There are fishes, that are apparently way
| | 00:54 |
back here; and there also fishes that are
very close to the camera, and they look
| | 00:59 |
the same color.
But our water here is very murky, murky
| | 01:03 |
and it gets dark as it goes back.
And so the fish that are super bright and
| | 01:07 |
clear here they look like they don't
belong there.
| | 01:11 |
So what we're going to do is actually
kind of fake the look of adding murkiness
| | 01:16 |
or fog to them by decreasing their
opacity as they go back.
| | 01:21 |
Now, it's not totally perfect, because
they wouldn't fade out as they went back
| | 01:25 |
in the ocean, but it's going to simulate
the kind of look that we're going for.
| | 01:28 |
So I'm going to map opacity and color
over Z.
| | 01:32 |
Now, the closeness to the camera is on
the left side, and the farther away from
| | 01:37 |
the camera is on the right side.
So as we maybe choose this map here.
| | 01:43 |
The ramp from left to right.
We'll see that the fish closest to camera
| | 01:49 |
here are completely opaque and they fade
in opacity as they go back in on the Z axis.
| | 01:56 |
And so now the fish back there, they'll
have lower opacity, which again,
| | 02:01 |
simulates kind of a distance.
In this case, it'd be great if we could
| | 02:06 |
blur them a little bit.
But that's not one of the values on in a
| | 02:08 |
Quick Map.
And now we can adjust our fish and move them.
| | 02:13 |
And they look a little bit more
believable, because we have maps opacity.
| | 02:17 |
So this is just one of the powerful ways
that we can use Quick Maps, to map
| | 02:24 |
different properties.
| | 02:26 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting the Color Map| 00:00 |
Alright folks, we're going to put some
stuff together.
| | 00:02 |
And learn some new tricks on this one.
It's going to be fun.
| | 00:04 |
We're going to start from scratch here.
Go ahead and go over the project panel,
| | 00:07 |
make a new composition.
I'm making mine a 1024 by 540.
| | 00:13 |
I'm using a 29.97 frame rate with five
seconds.
| | 00:16 |
And I'm going to go ahead and click OK.
I'm also going to right click in this
| | 00:21 |
blank area in the timeline panel, create
a new camera, a two node camera.
| | 00:27 |
And I'm going to right click and create a
new solid, and it doesn't matter what
| | 00:33 |
color, click OK.
And go ahead and apply the form effect to
| | 00:37 |
this solid.
Now, let's go ahead and open up the base
| | 00:40 |
form, get this all set up here.
And we're going to increase the size X here.
| | 00:47 |
About 700 is good.
And let's go ahead and increase size Y a
| | 00:51 |
little bit.
Around 450 is good for that.
| | 00:55 |
We'll leave size Z alone.
And I'm going to make this way more dense.
| | 01:00 |
I'm going to increase the particles in X
a lot.
| | 01:03 |
Let's go ahead and take this all the way
up to 500, and the particles in Y up to
| | 01:09 |
300, and add one more to the particles in
Z.
| | 01:14 |
Now all we basically done is added more
particles and extended our grid just a
| | 01:20 |
little bit, and that's all we've done.
And we're going to now open up Quick
| | 01:25 |
Maps, open up Color Map, and let's go
ahead and apply the default Color Map,
| | 01:32 |
Map, Opacity and Color, that's these two
maps.
| | 01:34 |
Let's go ahead and map this over the x
axis.
| | 01:38 |
So now it maps this rainbow over the x
axis.
| | 01:41 |
Now we can also choose one of these
presets, one of these gradient color
| | 01:45 |
presets, like this one that goes yellow
red to pink, and then purple.
| | 01:51 |
And the reason it turns white is because
we have a bright pink right here and in
| | 01:55 |
the add mode, the default add mode of the
particles here, transfer mode, it blends
| | 02:01 |
this pink to white as they overlap these
different sheets of particles.
| | 02:06 |
We do have four particles going back in z
space.
| | 02:08 |
Now, we could choose to map this.
Instead of mapping it over x, we could
| | 02:12 |
make it over y.
Or we could map it over z, which is
| | 02:17 |
really interesting.
Because, what it's doing here is, it's
| | 02:19 |
giving each sheet of particles here, it's
own color.
| | 02:25 |
I'll go ahead and select the Unified
Camera tool, and click and drag around.
| | 02:30 |
Now we can see that we are mapping these
colors over different layers in z space
| | 02:40 |
of these particles.
Now this looks really ugly.
| | 02:42 |
I'm going to go ahead and undo this.
I'm going to hit Cmd+z or Ctrl+z.
| | 02:45 |
We're going to go ahead and skip ahead to
the Fractal Fields really quick.
| | 02:48 |
We're going to talk about this in-depth
later on in the training series.
| | 02:51 |
But, for right now open up Fractal Field.
And, this is how to make form look like
| | 02:57 |
what people expect when they are looking
for form.
| | 02:59 |
We're going to to take this spectral
field.
| | 03:01 |
Increase the displace value, and as we do
you can see a little bit of that fractal
| | 03:07 |
influence coming in, and its warping
these particles.
| | 03:12 |
And we keep going, and going, and going,
and eventually we get this chaotic mess here.
| | 03:19 |
I'm going to take this up to 150, and we
have these beautiful fractals that form
| | 03:25 |
is known for.
And again, now you can see that one of
| | 03:29 |
these sheets is yellow, one of these
sheets is purple, one of them is pink.
| | 03:34 |
And I'll just click, and drag, and
rotate.
| | 03:36 |
It's now a little bit easier to see
because they're broken up a tad, because
| | 03:40 |
of the displacement there.
But now we see the yellow, and then this
| | 03:44 |
red, and the bright pink that's glowing
to white because of the add mode, then we
| | 03:48 |
have the dark purple in the back.
Again I'm going to undo that with Cmd or Ctrl+z.
| | 03:53 |
Let's try mapping the opacity instead of
z over radial.
| | 03:57 |
So now we have this yellow in the center
going out to red, and then the light
| | 04:02 |
pink, and then the purple.
Now just as before, with the other quick
| | 04:05 |
maps, we can flip this if we want.
We can also create a random color scheme,
| | 04:12 |
which actually looks pretty awesome.
And I'm going to go back to here now, to
| | 04:17 |
this yellow, red, pink, purple one that
we were working with.
| | 04:20 |
And I'm going to adjust it, I'm going to
fiddle with it so it looks like fire.
| | 04:22 |
So I'm going to grab the purple swatch
here, I'm going to click on it and I'm
| | 04:26 |
going to pull it down.
Like I'm yanking it down off of the
| | 04:30 |
gradient chart here.
And I'm going to spread these out a
| | 04:34 |
little bit.
And I'm going to add one back here.
| | 04:38 |
I'm just going to click right to add
another gradient stop.
| | 04:41 |
I'm going to double click this.
And drag the color downwards to make this
| | 04:45 |
a little bit darker shade of red.
And go ahead and click OK.
| | 04:50 |
And, let's go ahead and, I'm going to
click one right here.
| | 04:54 |
It's about orange.
I'm going to double click that to make
| | 04:57 |
that a little bit, brighter, and a little
bit warmer.
| | 05:01 |
A little bit more red.
And, then I'm going to double click our
| | 05:06 |
yellow here.
And, I'm going to make this again, a
| | 05:10 |
little warmer.
And a little less saturated.
| | 05:13 |
And click OK.
Now I might want to pull these out a
| | 05:20 |
little bit.
So were basically having more bright
| | 05:24 |
areas in the center.
And that's looking pretty cool.
| | 05:29 |
Now, one of the things that I'm not
liking here is that we have these hard edges.
| | 05:33 |
Around the edges, where we could see the
edges of our form.
| | 05:35 |
I kind of want it just to be kind of like
this cool core that fades out around the edges.
| | 05:41 |
Well, now we know how to do that because
of Quick Maps.
| | 05:43 |
So what I'm going to do, is just use this
opacity map.
| | 05:46 |
Rather than creating a whole new map,
another quick map.
| | 05:49 |
I know that I want to map the color over
the radially.
| | 05:53 |
So it's basically going from the center
outwards.
| | 05:56 |
And that's what I want to do with the
opacity as well.
| | 05:58 |
So I could just this opacity map and then
start big, at 100% and then fade out,
| | 06:04 |
just click this button right here.
And so because we're mapping both the
| | 06:09 |
opacity map and the color map radially,
then we have this gradient with this
| | 06:15 |
degree of opacity.
From completely opaque in the center to
| | 06:19 |
faded out at the edges.
And what's really cool here is that the
| | 06:22 |
color map gives us a read out of our
opacity map and what that looks like
| | 06:28 |
here, and then what the result of the
gradient, of combining the color with
| | 06:31 |
this opacity.
So we have the result in the middle.
| | 06:34 |
Now I actually don't like how this fades
so quickly away, from the center and it
| | 06:39 |
just instantly starts fading.
I actually want a really strong core
| | 06:42 |
here, and I want it to fade out even more
quickly, because I don't want these like
| | 06:47 |
edges being seen at all.
So, I'm just going to click and drag up
| | 06:50 |
at the top here, so we have full opacity
and then I want this to taper off kind of
| | 06:55 |
smooth, and then just be nonexistent at
the edges.
| | 06:58 |
So now we have a stronger core.
It's a brighter core.
| | 07:01 |
And then it tapers off.
And there's nothing around the edges.
| | 07:04 |
I could even add to that a little bit
more if I wanted to.
| | 07:08 |
Shave off a little bit more there.
And again, we see the result not only
| | 07:12 |
here in our composition panel, but we
also see the result here, and the opacity.
| | 07:18 |
And you actually see the little spike of
opacity, because I drew this terribly.
| | 07:22 |
(LAUGH) Go ahead and smooth that so it
looks a little better.
| | 07:25 |
And now we're seeing the results here.
So I could bump up this red a little bit
| | 07:29 |
more, so these colors are being seen, a
bit more.
| | 07:35 |
There we go.
And now we have this beautiful fractal
| | 07:38 |
effect created with this opacity, mapped
radially, and this gradient that we made
| | 07:44 |
by ourselves, mapped radially as well.
And now hopefully you could see why we've
| | 07:49 |
started so slowly in this course.
Learning just real basic things because
| | 07:54 |
to even create a shape like this, I could
have told you to do it in the first
| | 07:57 |
tutorial in two seconds, but then you
wouldn't understand really what's going
| | 08:01 |
on behind it.
So, as we go through this training series
| | 08:04 |
we continue to learn more, we're going to
be able to create more and more complex
| | 08:08 |
things and we're going to know what we're
doing.
| | 08:10 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Particle ContortionDispersing and twisting particles| 00:00 |
In this chapter we are going to start
looking at distorting and playing around
| | 00:04 |
with these particles.
Now this is where form starts getting
| | 00:07 |
really fun.
In this tutorial we are going to look at
| | 00:10 |
this category right here, Disperse and
Twist.
| | 00:13 |
These are two very simple commands that
only have one parameter each, there is
| | 00:17 |
one for disburse and one for twist.
But some of the things you can do with
| | 00:21 |
them is eh, pretty interesting.
So, we have a basic application of form here.
| | 00:25 |
I've made it a little bit bigger but we
can see that there's still just three
| | 00:28 |
layers, going back in z space.
Simple stuff.
| | 00:31 |
These two commands on a very basic level,
disperse particles.
| | 00:35 |
So as I increase Disperse, so I'm
going to start very slowly here.
| | 00:39 |
And these particles just begin to spread
out and disperse.
| | 00:42 |
You're going to undo that.
As we adjust twist, we start from the
| | 00:49 |
ends here, and we start twisting these
particles around.
| | 00:58 |
And the more we twist, the more that that
spiral reaches the center, and then the
| | 01:03 |
ends keep swirling.
It's almost as if you were holding a
| | 01:05 |
rubber band or something and just kept
spinning Each side.
| | 01:09 |
And they just kept twirling and twirling.
Now, this is not super fun to look at.
| | 01:13 |
So, I'm just going to go up to particle,
just change the aesthetics here.
| | 01:17 |
I'm going to change the color up to like
blue or something like that.
| | 01:22 |
Just so it's not just hideous light that
we're looking at.
| | 01:26 |
And I am going to also select the Unified
Camera tool.
| | 01:29 |
If I click and go to the side here.
It's kind of interesting, we kind of get
| | 01:34 |
like this tunnel effect that's, that's
really cool.
| | 01:37 |
And so then as we twist, you know, we
kind of get these really interesting
| | 01:43 |
shapes as it's kind of going around here.
Very cool.
| | 01:48 |
Now another thing that we can do is we
can zoom the camera into this tunnel of
| | 01:54 |
twisted particles.
Ooooo, that's kind of fun.
| | 01:59 |
I'm going to go ahead, undo that camera
move and get back to our regular view
| | 02:03 |
here and I'm going to zero out twist.
Couple things to be aware of, as we
| | 02:08 |
increase disperse to a really high value.
And this is what happened when we looked
| | 02:13 |
at the stars example earlier in this
training series, we start dispersing
| | 02:16 |
these particles and they start going all
over the place.
| | 02:19 |
The problem with that is, or something at
least to be very aware of, is that when
| | 02:23 |
you start using quick maps for example,
the let's go up and up map 1 and we'll
| | 02:30 |
just use a basic map here and we'll just
map let's say, opacity over Y.
| | 02:36 |
The particles remember where they came
from.
| | 02:40 |
So, for example, this should if this
verse was at zero.
| | 02:45 |
This should make the particles completely
opaque at the top and then fade out
| | 02:48 |
towards the bottom because we've mapped
opacity over Y to fade out like this but
| | 02:53 |
because we have dispersed these
particles, these particles that once were
| | 02:58 |
at the top kind of go all over the place,
and they remember where they came from.
| | 03:03 |
So these quick maps no longer deliver
predictable results.
| | 03:07 |
So, if we then wanted to control the
opacity over Y and do crazy tricks like this.
| | 03:14 |
Or we wanted to control some other
property here.
| | 03:16 |
One of the things we need to be aware of,
is that we have to do this some other
| | 03:22 |
way, we have to pre-comp a Luma Matte or
you know, could use any one of a number
| | 03:27 |
of different tools, but we couldn't do
that here, from here with inform.
| | 03:31 |
Now I'm just going to go ahead and zero
out disperse actually I'll take disperse
| | 03:34 |
just up to a little bit here, you know it
really doesn't take that much disperse to
| | 03:39 |
really spread those particles out.
I think really small values like 1 or 2,
| | 03:45 |
sometimes just give a little bit
randomness that's kind of cool.
| | 03:48 |
And just kind of disrupt things just a
little bit.
| | 03:51 |
But once you get beyond say 2, things
start getting kind of wild and more
| | 03:57 |
sporadic there.
One of the things that's kind of fun.
| | 04:00 |
Is that we can actually map Disperse
strength.
| | 04:05 |
So, I'll click Disperse strength below
disperse value and then you could see
| | 04:09 |
that we have a strong Disperse strength
and that's up at the top here and that's
| | 04:13 |
mapped to a low Disperse strength on the
Y axis.
| | 04:18 |
So, we might want a high disperse
strength and then I'll click and drag
| | 04:22 |
down here.
And get at a smoother roll off, or maybe
| | 04:25 |
we don't want any dispersion at the
bottom.
| | 04:27 |
And then it kind of balloons right up at
the top.
| | 04:30 |
And so that's kind of what happens.
Note that we could adjust the map 1 offset.
| | 04:35 |
So we can, kind of, move this map through
the Y axis to whatever access we've
| | 04:40 |
chosen here.
And so, we could use this to kind of
| | 04:44 |
dissolve layers, so we have our disperse
strength up and we can increase this and
| | 04:49 |
it looks like our particles are just kind
of falling apart here.
| | 04:55 |
It's kind of a cool effect.
You'll notice as we increase the disperse
| | 05:00 |
value, it basically gives us more
permission for the maximum disperseness
| | 05:07 |
in our form particles here.
Also note that we can animate map one
| | 05:13 |
offset if we want to and we can also
animate the disperse value.
| | 05:18 |
So this is a really simple, easy way to
kind of dissolve layers over time.
| | 05:22 |
Now let's look at a few other quick
examples here.
| | 05:25 |
I'm going to turn off the basic layer,
turn on the sci fi sphere layer.
| | 05:29 |
Here's a sphere that I've just added some
color to, I'll just zero this out really quick.
| | 05:32 |
You can see that this is a sphere,
apparently it takes a long time, oh, I've
| | 05:38 |
got to select the right layer there Take
our disperse to zero.
| | 05:42 |
Woops, to zero.
This is what that looks like.
| | 05:45 |
I can increase disperse a little bit.
I'm going to go ahead and take down disperse.
| | 05:50 |
Even though this kind of looks like a
cool galaxy look.
| | 05:53 |
I added a custom color map and a custom
opacity map so it fades out around the
| | 05:58 |
edges a little bit.
But I'm going to go ahead and take back
| | 06:01 |
down disperse.
I should actually take it all the way
| | 06:03 |
down to zero.
kind of cool thing, if you have a sphere,
| | 06:07 |
and you twist it, it does look kind off
generic, but as you play around with the
| | 06:12 |
base form, and if I move this around you
will see that we have a little bit of,
| | 06:16 |
kind of like an egg shape, to this form
here.
| | 06:19 |
It is a little bit, squashed, but as we
twist it, we start kind of getting these
| | 06:24 |
really Trippy patterns which are very
interesting.
| | 06:29 |
I really like that.
What I might do is go up to the base form
| | 06:32 |
and increase the particles in x and y to
kind of make it a little bit more dense,
| | 06:38 |
which is kind of cool.
We can also go back to particle and if we
| | 06:42 |
take the size down from 3 to 2, so that
gives us room to make more particles.
| | 06:47 |
And kind of connect these so these are
more like ribbons.
| | 06:51 |
I'm going to go and now pan around as we
did before and now we have this cool
| | 06:56 |
portal thing to go through here as well.
I just love that look and maybe we could
| | 07:02 |
down twist a little bit.
Maybe we could even take down the size of
| | 07:06 |
the particles maybe to 1 A 1.5.
Split the difference between those and we
| | 07:12 |
could you know zoom the camera into this
to create kind of like this cool sci-fi
| | 07:20 |
tunnel effect.
Take that down, take it all the way down
| | 07:25 |
to zero.
Its got kind of this cool Warbly effect,
| | 07:30 |
really there's some things you can do
with this effect as you, as you play
| | 07:32 |
around with Disperse and Twist.
Usually I prefer to use Disperse more
| | 07:37 |
like salt and pepper where we're just
kind of like accenting something that's
| | 07:42 |
already there rather than creating an
entire effect with these two, which is
| | 07:45 |
kind of what this is.
But as, as you can see here sometimes
| | 07:49 |
They can be the main course and not just
salt and pepper.
| | 07:52 |
I'm going to turn off the visibility for
sci-fi sphere.
| | 07:54 |
Look at one more example here with
strings.
| | 07:57 |
I've gone ahead and created this example
with strings.
| | 08:00 |
I need to actually open up the camera and
click the reset button to get back to
| | 08:06 |
square one so we can actually see this
and here we have this cool little Just, I
| | 08:11 |
don't know, geometric patterns.
It's, it's kind of like an interesting look.
| | 08:14 |
I'll take twist down maybe a little bit
to, let's say 12.
| | 08:18 |
And we just see these cool patterns
because they're strings, so they are a
| | 08:22 |
little bit more dense.
It's a really interesting, look.
| | 08:25 |
It's just, kind of like flat vector-ish
art.
| | 08:28 |
And what we can do, too, is increase
Disperse And as these particles disperse,
| | 08:34 |
it's really interesting because they have
this kind of fiber optic look.
| | 08:38 |
Now I'm going to go ahead and spread
these out a little bit more.
| | 08:42 |
Maybe reduce the strings to 4.
There we go, maybe even down to three and Z.
| | 08:49 |
And so we're getting these really
interesting cables, it's really
| | 08:53 |
interesting to look there and really take
up twist back up to 15, so really
| | 09:00 |
interesting to look when you start
playing around with these different base
| | 09:03 |
forms and disperse and twist again.
You might not ever need to create
| | 09:08 |
something like this probably you won't,
but it's good to be aware that you can
| | 09:12 |
create all these different types of
effects using just a little bit of
| | 09:15 |
tweaking with disperse and twist.
Next up, we're going to look at the real
| | 09:19 |
powerhouse of particle distortion and
form, the fractal field.
| | 09:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding Fractal Fields| 00:00 |
And now we're going to look at one of the
most popular and common uses for form particles.
| | 00:07 |
And that is distorting them with a
fractal field.
| | 00:10 |
Now, this is kind of complex so we're
just going to break this down.
| | 00:13 |
I have this almost default setting of
form here.
| | 00:17 |
I'm going to take particles in z down to
one.
| | 00:19 |
So we're just looking at one shade of
particles.
| | 00:21 |
Close up the base form, go to Particle,
I'll make this a little bit cooler
| | 00:25 |
looking by changing the color like a,
kind of a lighter type of blue here.
| | 00:30 |
I'm going to go ahead and click Okay, and
close up Particle.
| | 00:32 |
Now let's go ahead and open up Fractal
Field.
| | 00:35 |
Now, here's what's happening with the
fractal field setting.
| | 00:39 |
Basically, kind of like the fractal noise
effect, fractal field creates an already
| | 00:45 |
animating group of fractal layers of
noise that can be used to adjust your particles.
| | 00:53 |
So say for example I increase effect
size.
| | 00:58 |
So I keeping increasing this, we'll see
what looks like the freckled noise effect
| | 01:01 |
in aftereffects.
And actually I'm just going to go ahead
| | 01:04 |
and close up form and turn it off.
And apply the freckled noise effect so.
| | 01:09 |
Know what we're talking about here.
So this is fractal noise, it's basically
| | 01:13 |
several layers of perlin noise stacked on
top of each other.
| | 01:18 |
And we can adjust the evolution to make
this move around.
| | 01:22 |
We could also adjust the contrast and
other things in here in the fractal noise.
| | 01:26 |
The reason why I'm showing you this is
because this is exactly what' s going on
| | 01:30 |
inside of form.
We'll go ahead and delete that and turn
| | 01:33 |
form back on.
And so it's clear to see here.
| | 01:36 |
But what we're doing is we're using this
fractal field to displace, to move, to
| | 01:43 |
change the size, to change the opacity,
and do a bunch of other stuff to our form particles.
| | 01:48 |
Say for example as we increase the effect
size parameter, then everywhere in the
| | 01:53 |
noise pattern where there is black or
darkness, those particles are getting smaller.
| | 01:58 |
Everywhere where the particle, or the
fractal noise, is bright, those particles
| | 02:03 |
are getting bigger.
And so the more we increase this, the
| | 02:07 |
more the noise map affects the size of
our particles, until the ones in the
| | 02:11 |
black area are super tiny And the one in
the white areas are ginormous.
| | 02:15 |
I'm going to take this down and now lets
go ahead and increase effect opacity.
| | 02:20 |
This is the same type thing except
instead of making the particles bigger
| | 02:25 |
and smaller, we're just adjusting the
opacity.
| | 02:28 |
And until we could create kind of a
posterized look here, where everything
| | 02:31 |
that's even, kind of like bright gray and
above is white and everything that's kind
| | 02:36 |
of a darker gray, and below is just, is
there, and we can also combine these.
| | 02:42 |
We can go ahead and have just a little
bit of opacity, a little bit of size, and
| | 02:49 |
there you see the noise map and we're
actually going to work like this but
| | 02:52 |
before I do this I'm going to take these
back down to a more normal amount here
| | 02:56 |
and really the power here and really what
looks like form.
| | 03:00 |
What we know and love is from track code
form is when we increase the displace
| | 03:05 |
value, and as we do that, then we are
moving these particles in a certain direction.
| | 03:13 |
Again bright particles move one way, dark
particles move the opposite.
| | 03:17 |
As we increase this value, we see these
really cool patterns forming.
| | 03:23 |
We create these 3D fractels.
Again I could select my unified camera
| | 03:26 |
tool and orbit around this.
You could see this is in fact a three
| | 03:31 |
dimensional Form.
These particles are moving and displacing
| | 03:35 |
in 3D space.
And actually just so this is a little bit
| | 03:39 |
more clear, I'll go ahead and go back up
to my particles temporarily and increase
| | 03:43 |
this to maybe three or four.
And then again as I move around it's a
| | 03:48 |
little bit easier to see that this is an
actual 3-dimensional form that were
| | 03:52 |
creating with these particles.
I'm going to go ahead and undo that.
| | 03:55 |
And I'm going to undo that again and undo
that again until we get back to the
| | 04:00 |
basics here.
Now one of the things I want to point out
| | 04:03 |
is that once you adjust any of these
fractal field parameters, effect size,
| | 04:08 |
effect opacity or displace, then the
animated fractal field is set in motion.
| | 04:14 |
And we can see it going through our
particles.
| | 04:16 |
So, I have not set any key frames, not
clicked any stopwatches.
| | 04:19 |
But if I press the space bar to play this
back we can see that this form is in fact moving.
| | 04:25 |
So, again, I'm going to take this place
down to zero and we'll take affect
| | 04:30 |
opacity down to zero.
And actually let me go ahead and open up
| | 04:33 |
the camera and reset that transform.
There we go.
| | 04:36 |
And we'll leave effects size, it's
something really modest, so that's really
| | 04:39 |
the only thing that we've changed here.
And as I press the space bar, we can
| | 04:43 |
still see that that fractal form is
moving.
| | 04:46 |
so it's an auto-animating effect here.
Once we increase one of these values
| | 04:52 |
above zero.
Now, typically when we displace these
| | 04:55 |
values They're kind of moving every which
way.
| | 04:58 |
And the displacement mode, by default, is
xyz linked.
| | 05:02 |
So they're moving in x, y, and z as they
are displaced.
| | 05:06 |
But we could also choose it to be x, y, z
individual so we can displace them along
| | 05:11 |
y more than x, or what have you.
(INAUDIBLE) individual control over how
| | 05:16 |
we want those displaced.
There is Z displace, which, looks a
| | 05:19 |
little better when we have multiple
layers in Z.
| | 05:23 |
But, we don't have that here so that
doesn't really do too much other than
| | 05:26 |
just move them, it doesn't cause them to
overlap.
| | 05:28 |
We can also do this radially so that they
are displaced in a radial way which
| | 05:32 |
creates these really cool kind of flowery
patterns.
| | 05:36 |
I'm going to go ahead and hit Cmd+Z or
Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo that.
| | 05:39 |
Take this back to x y z linked.
And one of the things that's kind of cool
| | 05:43 |
is that we have control over the speed of
the evolution with the Flow Evolution parameter.
| | 05:49 |
If we don't want this fractal field to
animate, we can take fractal, or Flow
| | 05:53 |
Evolution to zero.
And then as we scrub the timeline, you
| | 05:56 |
can see there's no motion there.
And the lower we have it, slower it goes,
| | 06:00 |
and the higher the number the faster it
goes.
| | 06:03 |
One of my favorite things to do is to
take this to like a super low value, like
| | 06:07 |
maybe less than 5.
Lets start with 4 and then as this
| | 06:11 |
fractal field moves around.
It's super elegant, very few things in
| | 06:15 |
life are more beautiful than trapcode
form moving in slow motion with the low
| | 06:20 |
flow evolution value.
Look at that.
| | 06:23 |
That's just awesome.
Now in most cases, if I were doing this
| | 06:26 |
for real, I would get this set up the way
I want, and,as far as the animation goes.
| | 06:30 |
And then I would go back to my base form
and I would increase, for example, the
| | 06:34 |
particles X, the particles in Y.
And that would create this really
| | 06:38 |
beautiful, smooth look.
Probably even go higher than that
| | 06:42 |
actually, so we don't get these.
lines unless that's what I was going for
| | 06:46 |
but then the problem is that as I clear
this back to render it you can see the
| | 06:50 |
frames counting here it's going really
really slowly.
| | 06:55 |
And of course once it's rendered it looks
amazing, but it works really really slow.
| | 07:01 |
So I'm going to go ahead and take those
particles back down to 120 each and go
| | 07:06 |
back to my fractal field settings.
Here also adjust flow X, Y and Z, and
| | 07:10 |
this adjust come like a wind force.
So if I increase flow X, you can see that
| | 07:15 |
moving a little bit.
And then now, when I play this back, you
| | 07:19 |
can see that the fractal fields is kind
of moving from left to right, kind of
| | 07:22 |
blowing it through a little bit.
And you can combine these so we have
| | 07:26 |
overall evolution, and we also have a
little bit of flow along the X axis.
| | 07:32 |
So, it's evolving.
The fractal field, the whole thing is
| | 07:35 |
evolving slowly, and then it's also kind
of flowing along the X axis.
| | 07:41 |
I'll go ahead, right click on that and
reset.
| | 07:43 |
I'll go ahead and right click on Flow
Evolution and reset, and I'll go ahead
| | 07:46 |
and right-click on Displace and click
Reset, so we have just basically our,
| | 07:50 |
our, our basic noise here.
I'm going to increase effect size just a
| | 07:54 |
little bit more, and I know this isn't
super fun stuff, but I want to explain
| | 07:58 |
what some of these fractal terms mean so
you know how to control the displacement
| | 08:03 |
using this noise stuff.
So it's not just a bunch of crazy values.
| | 08:07 |
Now (COUGH) one of the things that's kind
of interesting here is that we have
| | 08:12 |
gamma, which basically as we increase
this it decreases contrast, as we lower
| | 08:18 |
gamma it increases contrast and again as
we have displace going on here if you see
| | 08:25 |
the difference that makes in the
analogous placement added to our form.
| | 08:31 |
So there's a high value with low
contrast, those particles aren't moving
| | 08:35 |
very much.
Low value with a high constrast as
| | 08:38 |
particles move a lot.
So controlling the black and white values
| | 08:43 |
of the fractal field is really how to get
control over the form particles that we need.
| | 08:50 |
I'm going to take Displace back down to
0, and I'll go ahead and right-click on
| | 08:54 |
the Gamma value and reset that.
There's also Add and Subtract.
| | 08:59 |
This essentially is like the brightness
of the pattern, so if we increase this,
| | 09:02 |
we brighten everything.
And you can see that we have more
| | 09:05 |
particles increasing in size, and even
the smaller values get big, we can see
| | 09:10 |
those there.
We can also take this to a negative
| | 09:12 |
number, and subtract it.
So we now we only have abstract little
| | 09:16 |
patches because all the particles are
really small.
| | 09:18 |
I'm going to right click and reset that.
We also have the minimum value which
| | 09:24 |
controls the shadows.
And as we increase this value we could
| | 09:28 |
see that we really don't have too much in
the way of shadows and everything's kind
| | 09:32 |
of, almost looks like a, a lake with
islands or whatever because we really
| | 09:36 |
don't have any pure black any more.
We could also lower the brightest points
| | 09:40 |
by taking down the max value and let me
go into where we have a negative value
| | 09:47 |
there, which is kind of interesting.
I'm going to right-click on all of these,
| | 09:50 |
on Min and Max to reset those.
One of the most powerful values here
| | 09:54 |
folks is the F Scale.
This refers to this size of the entire
| | 09:59 |
noise map.
So as we take this down, you can see that
| | 10:03 |
it's actually getting bigger.
It kind of works in the opposite
| | 10:05 |
direction, which is a little bit
confusing to me, but that's the way it goes.
| | 10:08 |
So if you want a softer map that's
bigger, you should take the f scale down.
| | 10:12 |
And if you increase this, we can see more
noise and that pattern gets smaller.
| | 10:18 |
I'm going to go ahead and increase
displace so you can see what effect that
| | 10:21 |
actually has on the displacement.
If I, I'll go back to f scale and take
| | 10:27 |
that down to a small number Only 5 or so,
and we can take effect size down just a
| | 10:34 |
little bit.
And I actually don't want total black
| | 10:39 |
holes here, so I could increase min, oh
wait, I grabbed As track.
| | 10:44 |
Let me go ahead and right-click on that,
reset that, and there we go.
| | 10:50 |
Increasing men, now we don't have those
areas of black.
| | 10:55 |
So I'll the spacebar to preview that.
And we have kind of like this slow,
| | 11:00 |
undulating, flagged-looking animation,
because we have a lower F scale value.
| | 11:06 |
And we have a bigger Now for that noise,
I could also again increase that so we
| | 11:11 |
have a lot more going on as far as
detail, and now it looks kind of like a
| | 11:16 |
turbulent sea.
Now just really quickly, the two-octave
| | 11:20 |
parameters control the sub-layers of
noise that are happening underneath the
| | 11:26 |
surface here.
I'm going to go ahead and take F scale down.
| | 11:33 |
And I'm going to go ahead and increase
Displace a little bit.
| | 11:38 |
And actually complexity deals with those
sublayers of noise as well.
| | 11:43 |
So by default, we just have this main
layer of noise, and there's a bunch of
| | 11:47 |
layers of noise in the background.
But as we increase the complexity, we are
| | 11:51 |
adding more to the sub layers of noise.
And so you can see more subtle details in
| | 11:59 |
these ridges, as you bring up the
complexity, max value is ten here.
| | 12:03 |
But we can see, again, more of that.
The octave multiplier increases.
| | 12:09 |
All of those things, basically all the
intensity of the sub layer of noise and
| | 12:15 |
the real effect of that is that we just
have more chaos, we have more detailed
| | 12:20 |
bumps in our maps in our, in our map,
more detail.
| | 12:25 |
And then we also have the octave scale,
which basically controls the size of
| | 12:30 |
those sublayers of noise.
So you can see here we can get something
| | 12:33 |
really chaotic, or we could also take
down the complexity and get something
| | 12:38 |
very smooth and elegant.
Now one of the things that's important to
| | 12:41 |
note, and we'll see later on in this
chapter, is that we could also add quick maps.
| | 12:46 |
And I'll go ahead and just make a simple,
you know, all the way to nothing quick
| | 12:49 |
map, we can map fractal strength.
So let's map fractal strength over a y
| | 12:55 |
for example, and now we have the fractal
strength from the top, which again
| | 12:59 |
animates automatically, and then we have
no fractal strength at the bottom or seen
| | 13:03 |
a little bit there.
So we might want to either take down
| | 13:06 |
displace, little bit, or we could, use
the map one offset to push that a little
| | 13:15 |
bit more towards the top.
There we go.
| | 13:17 |
Now these are kind of anchored down at
the bottom.
| | 13:19 |
We're just kind of getting this
interesting, glowing patern at the top.
| | 13:24 |
Really powerful stuff to be able to play
around with.
| | 13:26 |
And when we make fire later on in this
chpater, it will make a little bit more
| | 13:29 |
sense of why these fractal fields are so
important.
| | 13:32 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Distorting with Spherical Fields| 00:00 |
Now before we get to applying all the
cool stuff we've been learning in this
| | 00:03 |
chapter in the next movie, I want to take
one more movie and explain the spherical fields.
| | 00:08 |
It's an additional distortion type that
you can have to displace particles in
| | 00:13 |
addition to the fractal field.
And really quick before we get into that,
| | 00:17 |
I want to show you this about the curve
drawing interface, a really important note.
| | 00:21 |
And we're starting here exactly where we
left off in the last movie, where we have
| | 00:25 |
this curve drawing interface where we
have no fractal field distortion, and
| | 00:28 |
then we have the distortion up here at
the top.
| | 00:32 |
And I want to show you this.
I'm going to go ahead and draw in the
| | 00:34 |
curve drawing interface.
I'm just going to draw like a cool jacket
| | 00:37 |
pattern here, just so you could see.
So that looks pretty cool on it's own, actually.
| | 00:41 |
But if I want to hit Cmd+Z on the Mac or
Ctrl+z to undo that, it does nothing.
| | 00:47 |
So I could goup here then, and reset the
effect.
| | 00:50 |
But when I hit the Reset button, it
resets all either parameters, but the
| | 00:54 |
curve drawing interface still is the
exact same.
| | 00:57 |
So, just be aware as you're dealing with
quick maps or this curve drawing
| | 01:01 |
interface anywhere, the same goes for
trapcode particular also, by the way,
| | 01:05 |
that the curve drawing interface does not
alter from undoing or resetting the effect.
| | 01:11 |
So, what we're going to do for starting
from scratch is select Form, hit Delete,
| | 01:15 |
and then we're just going to apply Form
all over again to this layer.
| | 01:19 |
Now, let's get into talking about this
spherical field.
| | 01:23 |
Now, about a year ago, I did visual
effects on a short film, and I had a ring
| | 01:27 |
in the shot.
And we have create this kind of glow
| | 01:30 |
around, so my first thought was I would
use the form and I would use the sphere
| | 01:37 |
base form and if I increase the size of
this form get it Bigger here, a little
| | 01:48 |
bit wider there.
My first thought was that I would go into
| | 01:51 |
quick maps.
And I'll open up map one here and we'll
| | 01:55 |
create kind of like this bell curve and
I'll map capacity over y.
| | 02:02 |
And let's go ahead and shrink that, so
that's just a small little hoop in the middle.
| | 02:09 |
(SOUND) There we go.
Small little hoop in the middle, and then
| | 02:15 |
we could even go up to Size Y, shrink
that down, and then if I select my
| | 02:18 |
Unified Camera tool, we have kind of like
a ring of particles, a cool ring of particles.
| | 02:25 |
But the problem is that I really want
these to displace, actually, let me take
| | 02:30 |
this down to 1.
I really wanted these to displace, and if
| | 02:36 |
I open up my fractal field and displace
this, it doesn't quite get the results I wanted.
| | 02:44 |
I wanted real, a pronounced ring in the
center and then cut of magic.
| | 02:49 |
And I've glowing around the center.
Well, we could actually do this with the
| | 02:55 |
spherical field, just again, as a
different additional distortion field, in
| | 03:00 |
addition to fractal field.
I'm going to go ahead and reset this
| | 03:04 |
whole effect, and I'm going to go down to
my camera, and I'll reset that.
| | 03:08 |
I'll open that up, click the Reset button
next to Transform there.
| | 03:13 |
And lets go back and give this a prettier
colour, I am going to actually reset
| | 03:17 |
that, Map 1, and I'm going to particle,
click the Colour give.
| | 03:23 |
I give this is a nice little kind of,
kind of we did in the last movie there,
| | 03:27 |
may this a little bit bigger and then x
and y, add a little bit more in the way
| | 03:33 |
of particles.
And let's go to fractal field and
| | 03:38 |
increase the displace value, so we have a
cool foam like distortion area here.
| | 03:47 |
Even effect the size a little bit, a
passy a little bit, if you wanted to just
| | 03:52 |
Kind of enhance that shape a little bit.
Now what I want now is with this form,
| | 03:58 |
it's already animated, already looking
really cool, what I want is kind of a
| | 04:02 |
hole in the middle where the ring would
be, and that's where the spherical field
| | 04:06 |
comes in handy.
So I'm going to close up fractal field
| | 04:08 |
and particle and base form, open up
spherical field and let's open up sphere
| | 04:13 |
one, there's actually two identical
Fields here that we can use.
| | 04:17 |
And I can go ahead and click on visualize
fields so I can see where this is going
| | 04:21 |
to be.
I'll go ahead and select my regular
| | 04:23 |
selection tool here, and we can move
where this is going to be, but I'm just
| | 04:27 |
going to go ahead and increase strength,
and as I do, it distorts those particles
| | 04:34 |
in that center, as if there was a sphere
there.
| | 04:38 |
And now as this moves it's almost like
those particles kind of wrap around that sphere.
| | 04:44 |
Let me increase the radius and make that
a little bit big bigger.
| | 04:48 |
And I'll go ahead and turn off the
visualized field so we could clearly see
| | 04:50 |
what's going on here.
But this is great, this is exactly what I wanted.
| | 04:57 |
We do have a few more particles kind of
wrapping around the front which is a
| | 05:01 |
little bit distracting.
So, what I could do is I could increase
| | 05:04 |
the strength.
And I can also adjust the position Z
| | 05:08 |
which changes distortion, because it
moves the spherical field forward and back.
| | 05:12 |
So, we could even push it back so it's
not affecting the field and then animate
| | 05:16 |
it so it comes into contact.
Like it's like a ghost moving forward
| | 05:21 |
through the fractal field, and that's a
kind of cool there.
| | 05:27 |
Now having a problem getting this sphere
so there no particles in front and behind
| | 05:32 |
it, so what I can do is increase, let's
say for example the scale Z.
| | 05:37 |
So, if I make this really big along Z, it
makes it so that particles can't really
| | 05:42 |
go in front of it there.
It's, or at least the spherical field
| | 05:46 |
that distorts them is getting bigger, and
so they have farther to go, and now we
| | 05:50 |
create this really cool ring of plasma.
Now we get soft in the edge if we don't
| | 05:57 |
have a hard edge there, if you don't
want to have a hard edge we can do that
| | 05:59 |
if you want, although we do have a huge
sphere there so its going to be pretty
| | 06:04 |
obvious either way.
We could also, if we scale this
| | 06:07 |
non-uniformly, which I've done here, we
can rotate this and so we're not rotating
| | 06:13 |
the particle.
We're rotating this spherical distortion field.
| | 06:16 |
Put that back down to zero.
So if you want to create a cool ring, you
| | 06:20 |
often see this a lot of times with, like,
network logos.
| | 06:23 |
They'll put their logo in the middle and
have, kind of have, like, these form
| | 06:27 |
particles around it.
And keep in mind, too, we can always go
| | 06:30 |
back to our base form and we could
increase the particles, and X and Y,
| | 06:36 |
creating something like, you know, a more
dense particles around the edge here.
| | 06:41 |
So we have some really great stuff here.
It with, when we use the fractal field
| | 06:46 |
and the spherical field, fields together
if that's what the situations calls for.
| | 06:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a ball of fire| 00:00 |
All right folks, we've paid our dues, put
in the time, and now it's time to have
| | 00:04 |
some fun with what we've learned and
actually apply it.
| | 00:07 |
So in this tour we're going to be making
this torch.
| | 00:10 |
It's this cool ball of fire, and in mine
here, I had it going a little bit in slow
| | 00:15 |
motion but we don't have to do that for
our example.
| | 00:19 |
We're going to be starting from scratch
here, so let's go over to the ball of
| | 00:21 |
fire Start Comp.
Where I've applied a form and done
| | 00:24 |
nothing to it, so again, we're completely
starting from scratch here.
| | 00:27 |
And let's go to the Base Form and set
this up.
| | 00:30 |
We want this to be a sphere.
And not too much in the way of
| | 00:34 |
modifications here.
I want the size y to be big so I want
| | 00:38 |
this to be tall, and we only need really
one sphere here, so just a sphere of particles.
| | 00:45 |
And I might want that a little bit
higher.
| | 00:47 |
And I want more to raise that up in the
center xy.
| | 00:52 |
We can fool with that more later if we
need.
| | 00:54 |
But this bottom here is going to be kind
of like, the base of our, our torch.
| | 00:58 |
We're going to want some more particles
here.
| | 01:00 |
We might go back and fool with this
later.
| | 01:03 |
Always reserve the right to go back and
add more particles if needed.
| | 01:08 |
But about 400-ish, somewhere in that neck
of the woods.
| | 01:11 |
It doesn't have to be exact.
And then something really dense, like
| | 01:15 |
around the 800 mark.
Again you can see I'm not exact, and
| | 01:18 |
that's totally fine.
I'm going to close up Base Form.
| | 01:21 |
And really, the magic here happens by
going to the Fractal Fields, so even
| | 01:26 |
before going and adjusting the particle
and setting color, we kind of want to
| | 01:29 |
start getting the Fractal Field set up,
and as you'll see and as you work with
| | 01:33 |
form you'll see, at least from my
experience, it's really a back and forth.
| | 01:37 |
So you might get, the Base Form where you
want it, maybe just a particle, the
| | 01:42 |
fractal field.
Then go back to the Base Form.
| | 01:44 |
Back to the particle.
You just gotta keep going back and forth
| | 01:47 |
until you get what you want.
Now, I want to just affect the size a
| | 01:51 |
little bit.
Let's take that to a one.
| | 01:53 |
You kind of see where that Fractal Map
is.
| | 01:55 |
And let's take Opacity up to only about
four or so.
| | 02:00 |
Just a little bit.
Four, five is fine, and let's really add
| | 02:04 |
some displacement here.
I'll Increase Displace, a lot here.
| | 02:09 |
There we go.
We start to see that fiery type texture.
| | 02:13 |
I'm going to take this to about 120 or
so.
| | 02:16 |
That looks good.
The other thing I want to do is I want to
| | 02:19 |
add some flow here, because if you had a
torch or flame, it would start from where
| | 02:25 |
it's being fueled from, and it would
typically rise.
| | 02:28 |
It wouldn't just kind of oscillate in, in
that in place.
| | 02:31 |
So, if I increase the Flow y value,
you'll see that the texture is going
| | 02:38 |
down, we can see this kind of the texture
is going downwards, so we actually want a
| | 02:42 |
negative value for Flow y.
So I'm going to take this to about
| | 02:48 |
negative 130, negative 131 works fine.
And as we scrub this, we can see, just
| | 02:55 |
play it back for a quick second, you can
see now these flames rising in addition
| | 03:02 |
to displacing with the Fractal Map there.
Pretty cool.
| | 03:07 |
We could scrub those rendered frames.
And it's startin' to show some semblance
| | 03:13 |
to fire.
Let's go ahead and go up to the Particle
| | 03:16 |
Section and, fiddle.
Sometimes, I like to add color.
| | 03:20 |
This is probably not the right thing to
do, like the technically right thing to
| | 03:23 |
do, but I like to add the color kind of
soon, so that way you can kind of like
| | 03:27 |
envision it a little bit better.
It's really hard for my eyes to say that
| | 03:30 |
looks like fire.
When it's just kind of white on top of
| | 03:34 |
white, so we Click in the Color Swatch
here.
| | 03:37 |
And I'm going to go to, like an orangey
color, and somewhere in this neck of the
| | 03:45 |
woods, kind of like a darker brownish and
then Click OK.
| | 03:48 |
And then I could sort of see a little bit
more what looks like fire and what doesn't.
| | 03:54 |
I'm actually going to increase the size
to about three, although you'll find that
| | 03:58 |
its kind of a constant push pull back and
forth between the size of particles and
| | 04:03 |
the number of particles.
Increasing either will significantly
| | 04:06 |
increase your render time so just be
aware of that.
| | 04:09 |
Now this is a little bit too much, so I'm
going to take down the opacity a little bit.
| | 04:14 |
Lets actually take that down to about 30.
And that's looking somewhat okay.
| | 04:20 |
We again, might have to go back and
fiddle with this some more.
| | 04:23 |
But really to get this great, we've go to
play with Quick Map.
| | 04:26 |
So you can see we're kind of combining
everything we're learning so far with the
| | 04:30 |
fractal field, but now we gotta tone down
our fractal field, limited with our Quick Maps.
| | 04:35 |
I'm going to open up map one.
And our first map is going to be the size.
| | 04:40 |
So, we don't want super huge particles
the whole way.
| | 04:43 |
We want big particles at the bottom, and
then we want the particles to kind of get
| | 04:46 |
lighter as the fire kind of fades up a
little bit.
| | 04:49 |
Now, when we're dealing with Quick Maps
with this sphere here, the left side is
| | 04:53 |
going to represent the top of the flame,
the right side of the graph, the quick
| | 04:59 |
drawing interface here, the curve drawing
interface, excuse me, is representing the
| | 05:02 |
bottom of the fire.
So, we're going to Map this over y, and I
| | 05:08 |
want this to be small at the top, so I'm
going to Drag at the bottom here.
| | 05:14 |
And then I want it to be kind of regular
sized at the bottom.
| | 05:18 |
I let go of that, and we start to see
that exact thing here.
| | 05:22 |
We have big particles at the bottom, they
kind of fade up to tinier particles.
| | 05:27 |
I'm going to add to that obviously, that
was fairly poorly drawn.
| | 05:32 |
And have a little bit more there.
Okay, and I'm going to go ahead smooth
| | 05:37 |
this out a little bit, couple times.
That looks good.
| | 05:40 |
We might go back to that, but looks good
for right now.
| | 05:42 |
Let's go back to, or go over to Map Two.
And this time, and this is the key, this
| | 05:47 |
is where the magic happens.
We're going to change magic, or Map
| | 05:49 |
number 2, to Fractal Strength, and we're
going to Map this over Y.
| | 05:54 |
So what we're going to do, is we're going
to use the Curve Drawing Interface to
| | 05:59 |
control what particles, or what area of
particles, are displaced with the Fractal
| | 06:05 |
Field, and which are not displaced.
So again, we want our, the top of our
| | 06:10 |
torch to be displaced with Fractal
Flames, so we're going to leave this side high.
| | 06:16 |
And then we want the bottom to not be
displaced with the Fractal Field.
| | 06:21 |
So, I'm going to Drag like this, which
will again shrink the amount or limit the
| | 06:28 |
amount of fractal strength from top to
bottom.
| | 06:31 |
And so now we have, not really much in
the way of fractal strength happening on
| | 06:36 |
the bottom, and we have the fractal going
upwards.
| | 06:40 |
Of course we could tweak this.
We actually might not want the very top
| | 06:44 |
flames, still that distorts, we might
want to smooth out the top so we can make
| | 06:47 |
this maybe more of a little mountain.
That's probably being affected so much
| | 06:53 |
because we have the size.
Adjustment there, and one of the things
| | 06:57 |
that's kind of interesting about the
Curve Drawing Interface, especially with
| | 07:00 |
fractal strength ,is that with fractal
strength it's very particular about these
| | 07:04 |
little jagged edges as you're drawing.
So you notice as I make kind of more of a
| | 07:08 |
jagged edge here you could really see
that, even though it's really a subtle
| | 07:13 |
change here, you might not even be able
to see that on your monitor, very subtle
| | 07:16 |
jaggies, but they are jaggies none the
less.
| | 07:18 |
And those do show up here very
conspicuously in our torch.
| | 07:23 |
So what I can do is click the Smooth
button over and over, until the smooth
| | 07:27 |
out to my desired smoothness level.
And we could really play with this.
| | 07:31 |
If we want absolutely no fractal strength
on the right, we can, or at the bottom of
| | 07:36 |
the torch we can just make a more gradual
ramp, so that there's nothing happening
| | 07:40 |
here, completely smooth, and then all of
a sudden there's you know, fractal
| | 07:45 |
tendrils of the fire.
I actually like it back like it was with
| | 07:49 |
a little bit of displacement towards the
bottom.
| | 07:52 |
And then we could smooth that out if
we're getting some kind of weird stuff
| | 07:57 |
from the jaggies.
Looking good.
| | 07:58 |
Okay, lets close up map two, go to map
three, lets do the same thing that we did
| | 08:02 |
with size, but with opacity, so that
these particles fade up as they go up as well.
| | 08:08 |
So again, the top here, the left side
represents the top of the torch.
| | 08:13 |
And the bottom part here represents the
bottom of the torch.
| | 08:16 |
So we want the particles to be
transparent at the top.
| | 08:22 |
And then, be, more opaque at the bottom.
And, that's not really showing up, so we
| | 08:29 |
need to maybe cut into that a little bit
more.
| | 08:31 |
Oh, it's not showing up because I didn't
map, map three over it.
| | 08:38 |
So map this over y, ooh, there we go.
So now we can go back and add some more
| | 08:43 |
opacity, here we go, a little bit more
there.
| | 08:52 |
Alright.
This is looking like pretty, pretty
| | 08:54 |
decent fire now.
Pretty believable, stylized fire.
| | 08:59 |
Yeah.
I like that.
| | 09:00 |
Let's go ahead until we get a little bit
more.
| | 09:04 |
We'll go back to the Fractal Field.
Now that we kind of are in the ballpark
| | 09:07 |
with our fire, we can go over to our
Fractal Settings and tweak these just a
| | 09:12 |
little bit.
I might want a little more contrast so I
| | 09:15 |
can take down the gamma maybe to point
eight, and you can see that we have a
| | 09:19 |
little bit more intensity in the tangeles
of the flame.
| | 09:22 |
We can also smooth out the whole thing by
going to Complexity and maybe taking that
| | 09:26 |
down to two.
So now we have a, kind of a really smooth
| | 09:30 |
fire, add some nice believability.
And one of the things I think adds a lot
| | 09:34 |
here is increasing the F scale, which
shrinks down that map and makes
| | 09:39 |
everything more fiery.
We go the opposite way and have smoother
| | 09:42 |
flames, like maybe more of like a match,
if we take this down to like a low F
| | 09:47 |
scale value, look at that.
and we can increase this, maybe to about
| | 09:54 |
thirteen or whatever.
So we have a little bit more intensity
| | 09:58 |
and detail in our fire here.
That's looking pretty great, let's go
| | 10:03 |
ahead and preview that and see what it
looks like.
| | 10:04 |
So now as we see this, it looks pretty
good.
| | 10:10 |
And you really gotta play it back to get
a feel for how things are.
| | 10:13 |
I do like how this kind of dissipates up
here at the top.
| | 10:17 |
But maybe it's a little bit too bright.
So we might want to get rid of some of
| | 10:20 |
the opacity there.
And I'm also thinking that the source is
| | 10:27 |
a little bit too short.
Like, we need.
| | 10:29 |
Maybe a little bit more here.
So if you're interested, I'm going to go
| | 10:34 |
ahead and fine-tune this just a little
bit.
| | 10:36 |
This tutorial's basically over, so if you
want to get to the next movie, totally cool.
| | 10:38 |
But I'm just going to go ahead and
fine-tune this.
| | 10:41 |
So I'm going to go in to Fractal
Strength, and I'm going to, make it so
| | 10:47 |
that there's a little bit less Fractal
Strength.
| | 10:50 |
At the bottom, there we go, yeah, kind of
like that, and smooth that out.
| | 10:57 |
But I do want a little bit more
turbulence actually here, but I want it
| | 11:00 |
to be very subtle.
So I want the base that is getting burned
| | 11:04 |
to be a little bit bigger, but I also
want a little bit more here.
| | 11:09 |
So I'm going to go ahead and do that.
So that we have, we have a little bit of
| | 11:15 |
turbulence at the bottom, but that little
bit of turbulence lasts longer, if that
| | 11:22 |
makes more sense.
The bigger part of the torch.
| | 11:25 |
So I'll Click Smooth.
There we go, that's what I'm talking about.
| | 11:28 |
And I also think that we need to maybe
add some more size here towards the bottom.
| | 11:33 |
Maybe a little bit more opacity.
So we can maybe increase the opacity a
| | 11:38 |
little bit right here.
That looks good, and lets go over to the
| | 11:42 |
Size Map, and we'll add more to the size
of the base.
| | 11:46 |
Yeah.
There we go.
| | 11:48 |
Exactly what I wanted to do.
And there you have it folks.
| | 11:53 |
It's a pretty believable fire from
Tracker Form /g.
| | 11:56 |
Pretty easily done, and now that we've
explained and gone through Quick Maps and
| | 12:02 |
Fractal Fields, this should all make a
lot of sense of how to get this on your own.
| | 12:06 |
And if you'd like to tweak it to your own
liking.
| | 12:09 |
Lets say for example, you wanted to make
it go faster or slower, we know to go to
| | 12:14 |
Fractal Field and change Flow Evolution.
If we wanted this to be super slow-mo, we
| | 12:18 |
could take Flow Evolution down to lets
say five and then as this renders, its
| | 12:23 |
going to be like way slower than it was
before.
| | 12:27 |
So now I'll preview that, I could even
take this down even smaller, maybe take
| | 12:31 |
it down to, to get a one or something.
And now we have like this super slow, we
| | 12:37 |
could also adjust Flow Y, too.
So the Flow Y is very solid, here.
| | 12:42 |
So, we might want to take this down to
like, negative 60, or negative, even
| | 12:46 |
negative 30, and as we preview this,
we'll have again, much slower kind of
| | 12:55 |
slow-mo flames here, which is pretty
cool.
| | 12:59 |
But anyway, my point is, that you now
know what you need to know to customize
| | 13:03 |
this, build it from scratch and make the
fire that you want, or make this blue and
| | 13:10 |
make it the plasma that you want, or
whatever.
| | 13:12 |
Look at that slow motion.
Form fire,
| | 13:15 |
I want to, take it home with me.
Love it.
| | 13:19 |
it's beautiful.
So that's how we make fire in Form.
| | 13:22 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Using Layer MapsAbout Layer Maps| 00:00 |
In this chapter we're going to look at
using your own custom maps, to control form.
| | 00:06 |
And, just like we've been doing
throughout this whole training series.
| | 00:09 |
In this tutorial we're just going to keep
things very simply we're not out to make
| | 00:12 |
things look good here we're just out to
explain the concept and then we're going
| | 00:16 |
to apply what we've learned to something
actually really cool, you actually want
| | 00:19 |
to make, in the next movie.
So let's first look at the layer that
| | 00:24 |
I've created here.
It's actually several layers of particles
| | 00:28 |
and fractal noise.
Again, nothing spectacular to write your
| | 00:32 |
parents about.
But just something that we can see what's
| | 00:35 |
going on here.
We have the fractal noise on the size of
| | 00:38 |
the edges here that doesn't move and then
we also have these particles in the
| | 00:42 |
center that kind of pop like bubbles.
And the reason why it's not super
| | 00:47 |
spectacular is because I want to be very
clear what's happening.
| | 00:50 |
Also if we go to the channel drop down
here we'll just look at the outfit
| | 00:55 |
channel we have solid pixels here.
On the corners and then we have
| | 01:01 |
transparency in this middle section
underneath the particles that's important
| | 01:06 |
to remember.
We're going to go back to RGB, go over to
| | 01:08 |
layer mat basics where I have this map
composition in as a pre-composed layer.
| | 01:14 |
Now we have this form solids let's go
ahead and apply the form effect to the
| | 01:20 |
form solid.
We have good old form there and let's go
| | 01:25 |
ahead and open up size x or increase size
x size y until it kind of fills the
| | 01:33 |
screen a little bit and let's go ahead
and increase the number of particles in x
| | 01:37 |
and increase the number of particles in
y.
| | 01:39 |
Until we have something a little bit
more, solid.
| | 01:45 |
Now let's go down to the layer map
section.
| | 01:47 |
Open up color and alpha.
And, in the layer drop downs, here, we
| | 01:53 |
can actually map several things.
We're going to be using this map here, to
| | 01:58 |
control the color of our particles, and
also the alpha channel of our particles.
| | 02:01 |
But you can map several things, and as
we'll see in this movie, we can actually
| | 02:06 |
map franc, fractal strength, their size,
displacement the dispersal of pixels,
| | 02:11 |
whatever we want.
Or dispersal of particles, excuse me.
| | 02:13 |
And, in each of these we have a layer
drop down where I'm going to choose Map.
| | 02:19 |
And we also have the Map Over drop down,
this is just as important.
| | 02:23 |
Because the layer drop down says which
layer to use for the layer map.
| | 02:27 |
And the Map Over tells it how to apply
the map.
| | 02:32 |
So I'm going to say Map Over xy, which
will generally just kind of paste the
| | 02:39 |
pixels as you might exact them.
X over X and Y over Y.
| | 02:42 |
And so now we could see that our
particles are taking on the form of our map.
| | 02:48 |
And even the animation.
Now what's interesting here is the
| | 02:53 |
functionality, is we have the RGB values
over the RGB values, but we could also
| | 02:58 |
use the alpha channel here.
So we could use the RGB alpha to RGB
| | 03:02 |
alpha and now if we go down to our alpha
drop down again, we could see that we
| | 03:07 |
have the same alpha channel over each of
the sheets.
| | 03:11 |
Of form particles.
So that can be handy.
| | 03:16 |
I'm just going to go back and maybe go
over the particle.
| | 03:18 |
And increase the particle size to 2.
So you could see what's going on a little
| | 03:22 |
bit more clearly.
Now, another thing that's kind of cool,
| | 03:25 |
is that you can, we can use a map in the
color and office section.
| | 03:28 |
Not just for the colors, which are not
really that spectacular here, but we
| | 03:32 |
could also.
Map the alpha channel, to the alpha
| | 03:36 |
channel or we can create a luminance mask
by mapping the lightness to the alpha.
| | 03:43 |
So, say for example we want to mask the
alpha to the alpha, so the only thing
| | 03:46 |
that we want from this map comp is its
alpha channel.
| | 03:51 |
So, now we can open up particle and maybe
change the color here to not like one of
| | 03:57 |
those, like, fiery type dailies.
And we could add particles and adjust
| | 04:04 |
them as necessary, and we're just using
the alpha channel.
| | 04:07 |
So, if you wanted to, let's say you had
logo or a text, text or something, that
| | 04:12 |
you wanted to just use the alpha channel.
For particles this is the way to do it.
| | 04:17 |
Now we're going to come back here in just
a quick second, but I want to go back to
| | 04:20 |
RGB to RGB for a second and then let's go
over to fractal strength.
| | 04:24 |
And look at mapping fractal strength, so
we're going to use this same map for
| | 04:26 |
fractal strength, so the brighter the
pixels are in our map, the more they're
| | 04:34 |
going to be displaced.
Now watch this.
| | 04:38 |
We have the map, and even if we choose x,
map over x, y, nothing happens.
| | 04:44 |
And the reason, and we'll see this with
disperse in just a moment as well, is
| | 04:48 |
that you actually have to have some
displacement for the fractal field to work.
| | 04:53 |
Same thing with disperse and twist.
So, now as I displace this, they are
| | 04:58 |
displaced based on what's happening
luminance wise in the map there.
| | 05:06 |
So, as I increase this, then the brighter
the pixels the more they are getting displaced.
| | 05:13 |
Kind of an interesting effect, especially
because our particles are kind of
| | 05:17 |
animating here.
And you kind a can't tell that they're
| | 05:19 |
particles anymore.
They kind of just look like this really
| | 05:21 |
interesting sea of stuff shooting out.
Almost kind of like bio medical or
| | 05:26 |
something, good fun.
Now just so this is more clear, I'm
| | 05:31 |
going to go back up to my color and
alpha, I'm going to turn off the layer maps.
| | 05:36 |
I'm going to choose None, we still have
this like interesting fiery orange color,
| | 05:41 |
maybe darken that a little bit, warm it
up a little bit.
| | 05:44 |
Make it look like more scientific,
surface of the sun.
| | 05:48 |
We could make this green too, that's kind
of interesting.
| | 05:53 |
Maybe dark green there.
Now some kind of scientist slide
| | 06:00 |
microscopic organism or something.
And so now we're just mapping the fractal
| | 06:05 |
strength and that's the only thing we're
using the layer map for.
| | 06:08 |
So we just have regular form particles
otherwise.
| | 06:10 |
And then these particles are being
displaced based on their luminance
| | 06:16 |
values, which creates this really
interesting look.
| | 06:19 |
Now, let's add some dispersion to this.
And again, if we change the layer to the
| | 06:23 |
map, and we map over XY, nothing happens.
These particles don't disperse at all
| | 06:28 |
because we have not adjusted any kind of
dispersion here.
| | 06:31 |
So let's increase disperse to something
really subtle, like maybe two.
| | 06:36 |
And now we've added some interesting kind
of life to this.
| | 06:40 |
It looks like almost like a, like an
x-ray or something.
| | 06:41 |
It adds like a nice little bit of grain,
but only to the objects that are moving.
| | 06:51 |
So with this, we've kind of created.
A really interesting biomedical looking
| | 06:59 |
animation with these particles here and
we started with this.
| | 07:06 |
Pretty interesting stuff here but again
the point here is not to make something
| | 07:09 |
that looks cool.
You probably would never want to actually
| | 07:12 |
use this for anything.
But the point is, is to understand really
| | 07:16 |
what's happening and that we can have
complete control over all of these
| | 07:20 |
attributes, over the dispersion of
particles, fractal strength, size,
| | 07:24 |
displacement, color and alpha and the
rotation just by using a separate map.
| | 07:30 |
In the next movie we're going to take
this to the next level and actually apply
| | 07:32 |
this to making something cool in the form
of a hologram.
| | 07:36 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating holograms| 00:00 |
In this tutorial we're going to create a
hologram out of this footage right here.
| | 00:05 |
Woman on the phone, she gets some scary
news.
| | 00:08 |
And, she looks away.
She's scared.
| | 00:14 |
So that's going to be our hologram.
Now, thing to know about this clip is
| | 00:18 |
that it's a 4k clip.
And this is at 12 1/2%.
| | 00:23 |
In our composition if we turn on this
layer we could see that it's at 100% and
| | 00:27 |
this is all that we're seeing here.
But it doesn't matter for Form, Form is
| | 00:33 |
not going to see the what we're seeing
there with just the lips.
| | 00:38 |
It's seeing the entire image.
I'll go ahead and apply Form to the form
| | 00:43 |
layer, not to the map layer with the,
footage with the woman on it.
| | 00:49 |
I go to Form.
Let's go ahead and setup our Base Form.
| | 00:51 |
Open up Base Form.
Size X, about the same size as composition.
| | 00:55 |
Size Y about the same.
Let's go ahead and make that a little bit
| | 00:58 |
more dense.
Increase the particles in X.
| | 01:01 |
And Y, and again there's no specific
numbers here, just until it's a little
| | 01:05 |
bit more dense, we'll probably end up
fiddling with this in just a bit.
| | 01:08 |
Now we can close up Base Form, open up
Layer Maps, and we have all these
| | 01:14 |
different properties to map with our
layer map.
| | 01:17 |
Now, you might think we could map this
over Color and Alpha.
| | 01:20 |
If I choose this map, the A024 clip and
map it over XY.
| | 01:26 |
We get that clip for sure but it maps RGB
over RGB so it's using the original
| | 01:32 |
colors which doesn't make it look too
much like a hologram.
| | 01:34 |
So we could also map alpha options but
that's not going to help us here at all
| | 01:39 |
because there's no alpha channel in this.
So what I actually want to do is I want
| | 01:42 |
to turn this layer to none.
Map over off, close up color and alpha.
| | 01:47 |
I actually want to use size for this.
So I'm going to open up Size > Map, then Clip.
| | 01:50 |
Over XY and now we have just a black and
white version.
| | 01:55 |
We can go into the particle section, open
up color, change this to a hologrammy blue.
| | 02:05 |
Get a little bit more green than that.
And maybe increase particle size to about three.
| | 02:12 |
And there we have a nice rudimentary
hologram.
| | 02:17 |
Now, the first thing I'm noticing is that
there is some ghosting here.
| | 02:21 |
Because we have three particles in Z.
So we're seeing all three copies here.
| | 02:25 |
Now I'm, I believe in a little ghosting.
I think that helps the hologram a lot but
| | 02:30 |
it's really busy when they're all the
same value as far as opacity is concerned.
| | 02:34 |
So what we can do here is go to Quick
Maps.
| | 02:37 |
Open up map one.
And I actually want to change the mapping
| | 02:42 |
of the opacity of these, so that they get
progressively more faint, or more transparent.
| | 02:48 |
So I'm going to map number one, over
opacity.
| | 02:52 |
I'm going to map number one over the
Z-axis.
| | 02:55 |
And, I'm just going to go ahead and click
this, ramp right here from normal to more faint.
| | 03:03 |
And actually, as I even flip this, it's
kind of hard to tell which layer is
| | 03:10 |
completely opaque, and which one kind of
fades out, because they kind of overlap
| | 03:15 |
each other a little bit.
But, that being said, this cool ghosting
| | 03:19 |
right here, the sleeve, around the edges
of her shoulder.
| | 03:22 |
This looks great, and I'm happy with
that.
| | 03:24 |
So I'm going to go ahead and close that
up.
| | 03:26 |
Now of course we could play with this a
little bit.
| | 03:28 |
I might want to increase size random a
little bit, maybe even opacity random.
| | 03:34 |
And we could go up to base form.
And play with this to taste.
| | 03:38 |
You know, we could increase particles at
X and if we wanted more of a broken up
| | 03:42 |
hologram, we could decrease particles in
Y so that they're just kind of like lines.
| | 03:47 |
We could also strings instead if we
wanted to go that route.
| | 03:51 |
That looks very hologrammy.
I'm going to go back to grid for the time
| | 03:55 |
being and I'll bump this up.
The way to make your hologram appear more
| | 04:01 |
visible is to add more particles and also
to increase the particle size, that helps.
| | 04:06 |
And my ghosting is still kind of
bothering me a little bit even though I
| | 04:09 |
like its opacity.
I don't like it offset so much.
| | 04:12 |
So I'm going to decrease the size Z to
bring those sheets of particles a little
| | 04:17 |
bit closer together.
That looks great.
| | 04:21 |
I also might want to brighten my color a
little bit.
| | 04:25 |
There we go.
And another thing that I can do is I can
| | 04:30 |
kind of make this look like it's kind of
being disrupted a little bit, like
| | 04:34 |
there's a little bit more damage or some
interference in the transmission.
| | 04:37 |
And so let's go ahead and go to map two
and we'll map map two over or map two to
| | 04:44 |
disperse strength and for that we'll need
to open up disperse and twist and
| | 04:49 |
actually have some dispersion.
So I might take this to two and let's see
| | 04:54 |
how that looks.
I'm going to map map two over Y so we
| | 04:57 |
have a vertical transmission problem.
And you'll notice as I take like a chunk
| | 05:02 |
out of this here, that we have a big
dispersion up top and then none at the bottom.
| | 05:07 |
Well, I actually want there to be little
bits of lines of dispersion like there's
| | 05:14 |
again transmission problem.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
| | 05:16 |
manually drag and draw little areas,
little spikes here, holding the mouse
| | 05:25 |
down the whole time, just drawing little
spikes.
| | 05:29 |
Dispersion strength, and now we're
getting all these little problems here.
| | 05:32 |
And we're getting all of, all of them to
be, you know, I'm going to add some
| | 05:35 |
irregularity here, so it's not just some
of these really obvious bursts of dispersion.
| | 05:42 |
Just let me add a few little random bits
here and there and then maybe little
| | 05:47 |
holes and stuff, maybe not all the way to
the top on some of them.
| | 05:52 |
There you go, now you have some good
dispersion there.
| | 05:55 |
Don't like the one on her nose so I'm
going to actually take this down right here.
| | 06:00 |
And level this off right there.
(NOISE) Looks like it fixed it.
| | 06:04 |
Now, we could also do the same thing to
size.
| | 06:06 |
I can map size over Y, let's open up the
number three quick map here.
| | 06:11 |
And I don't really want to mess with this
too much.
| | 06:13 |
I don't want there to be, maybe
occasionally, like, gaps, and size is a
| | 06:18 |
perfect way to do that.
And so again, I could just take a chunk
| | 06:22 |
out of the right side and that minimizes
all those particles but I just want like
| | 06:25 |
little tiny, so I'm going to just click
at the bottom, little tiny holes.
| | 06:30 |
And maybe even just click and drag a
little bit.
| | 06:31 |
And there we go.
Maybe that's just too much here.
| | 06:37 |
Bring that back and so as we click and
drag these little tiny holes here we're
| | 06:42 |
making gaps.
And we're actually not really making
| | 06:44 |
gaps, we're just shrinking the size of
the particles along these lines here.
| | 06:50 |
Probably don't want, again, any holes in
her eyes so we'll just fill that back in.
| | 06:53 |
The bottom is a great spot, so on the
right side, the right side controls the
| | 06:58 |
size of the bottom, so we can have extra
noise down there at the bottom.
| | 07:02 |
Now one of the things you'll notice here
is that we actually created this image,
| | 07:07 |
this hologram, by using a layer map over
the size value.
| | 07:13 |
And this quick map that we just added
with these gaps has overridden the size
| | 07:20 |
that we specified in the layer maps.
So that's really good to be aware of.
| | 07:24 |
Now let's go ahead and preview this back.
I'm actually going to extend my work area
| | 07:28 |
a little bit and let's preview this back
a little bit.
| | 07:31 |
Now as we play this back you'll notice a
few things.
| | 07:35 |
Number one, our disperse strength and our
little holes with size don't change which
| | 07:42 |
makes this look really fake.
If our, we really were having a
| | 07:46 |
transmission problem, then the lines
would go in and out, and there, it would
| | 07:51 |
be a mess.
And it would be random, be moving, and
| | 07:53 |
it's not.
And I don't know of any way to move the
| | 07:55 |
particles of form without moving the
layer map.
| | 08:04 |
So in other words if we went back up here
and adjusted the center XY value and
| | 08:08 |
moved it we would be moving the entire
image and not moving the image through or
| | 08:15 |
moving the particles through the layer
map which is really what we would need to
| | 08:18 |
do to do this well.
So we could fake this by playing around
| | 08:23 |
with the map two offset.
We could kind of make these come on and
| | 08:28 |
off as we, decrease that and increase
that.
| | 08:31 |
We could also, and if we did that for
both the size, and, the disperse
| | 08:38 |
strength, maybe added a wiggle expression
or something like that, like that would help.
| | 08:42 |
And we could also add a fractal field and
make noise kind of going through this.
| | 08:46 |
There are a few things we could do but
it's not going to be perfect.
| | 08:50 |
Another thing to point out is that as we
rendered this, you'll notice that as soon
| | 08:55 |
as the layer map went out even though
Form was still here, the form layer still
| | 09:00 |
has footage in this section.
When our layer map runs out of space,
| | 09:05 |
then Form no longer has anything to use
for a layer map, and it just dies.
| | 09:10 |
So that's also important to be aware of.
So as you can see, it's great making a
| | 09:15 |
hologram with Form.
It's almost one of the things that Form
| | 09:18 |
was kind of built for.
It's just so easy to do.
| | 09:20 |
And as we adjust these particles a number
of particles.
| | 09:23 |
We have so much control over what we're
doing here.
| | 09:27 |
Again, we can play with the size X and Y
and add more interest to what's going on
| | 09:34 |
here, and more randomness.
Really cool stuff to play around with.
| | 09:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Integrating with After EffectsLighting particles| 00:00 |
This chapter's going to be all about
using After Effects 3D tools like lights
| | 00:05 |
and cameras in Form.
In this one we're going to be looking at
| | 00:09 |
lighting to create this project.
It's kind of like this ad for a generic
| | 00:17 |
web company.
That probably has a name something like
| | 00:21 |
global solutions management, or something
(LAUGH) really generic like that.
| | 00:27 |
So we're going to add lighting to these
particles, notice how like these
| | 00:30 |
particles kind of roll around here.
They kind of come into the light a little bit.
| | 00:35 |
And there's also some ambient light going
on in the other particles.
| | 00:38 |
And we're actually going to build this
globe out of particles that we make.
| | 00:43 |
So let's go look at how That works.
We're actually going to go over the
| | 00:46 |
lighting particles, start comp where we
have the basics here.
| | 00:49 |
We just have this globe spinning with
basic particles.
| | 00:52 |
And we need to add these particles to the
sphere.
| | 00:57 |
Now, what we're going to do is go to the
icon Start Composition.
| | 01:01 |
This is basically, I'll go ahead and turn
on the transparency, this is a series of stills.
| | 01:07 |
Of graphics, brought in from Adobe
Illustrator.
| | 01:09 |
So, Solo for example, there's the Chat,
and there's the Movie, and so all
| | 01:14 |
different icons.
What we need to do, is make it so that
| | 01:17 |
each one of these many, many icons,
there's 24 icons here, takes up one frame.
| | 01:22 |
But when you import them from
Illustrator, they by, by default, take up
| | 01:26 |
the full length of the composition that
After Effects creates for you.
| | 01:29 |
So here's how I fix that problem.
I'm just going to select the top layer,
| | 01:34 |
hold the Shift key and click the bottom
layer, and that selects all the layers.
| | 01:38 |
And I'm going to use Option Right Bracket
on the Mac, or Alt Right Bracket on the
| | 01:44 |
PC, and that will make it so that the,
that trims the endpoint of each of the layers.
| | 01:51 |
And because we're at the beginning frame,
it basically makes it so that each of
| | 01:55 |
these graphics is a single frame.
So if I go to the next frame, there's
| | 01:59 |
nothing there.
So, with these layers still selected,
| | 02:02 |
and, and being only one frame long in
duration, we're going to go to the
| | 02:06 |
Animation menu > Key Frame Assistant >
Sequence Layers, make sure Overlap is
| | 02:11 |
turned off and click OK.
And now, each one of these frames is a
| | 02:17 |
different object.
That will allow form to go in and look at
| | 02:21 |
these and use each one as a particle.
Now, I'm going to click in the blank
| | 02:24 |
space in the timeline panel, click the
Clock layer.
| | 02:28 |
Press the letter O on the keyboard to get
to the out point of that layer.
| | 02:31 |
Press the letter N on your keyboard to
make the work area as big as the the
| | 02:38 |
layer here.
The work area as big as all of these layers.
| | 02:42 |
Right-click on the work area bar and
trim, choose Trim Comp to Work Area.
| | 02:45 |
And now, our entire comp is just these
still images.
| | 02:51 |
Now, then what I did, and we won't go
through this, I will just show you what I did.
| | 02:54 |
I created another composition and I just
duplicated the whole composition.
| | 03:02 |
Then just did the same thing where I made
seven duplicates, and I went up to
| | 03:06 |
Animation and I sequenced the layers
again, putting them in an order, one
| | 03:11 |
after another.
Now, let's go to Main Form here.
| | 03:14 |
I've already imported this, or brought in
this Precomp icons map into this composition.
| | 03:19 |
I'm going to select the Main Form layer.
And we're going to make custom particles.
| | 03:23 |
We're going to go up to the particles
section, go to particle type.
| | 03:26 |
And before we chose Particle, or Textured
Polygon.
| | 03:29 |
I'm going to go ahead and increase the
size of this.
| | 03:31 |
And actually, they're black, so we're not
going to see anything.
| | 03:33 |
So we need to choose Textured Polygon
Fill, so this color completely replaces
| | 03:39 |
the color of the object.
I'm going to Increase that.
| | 03:43 |
And we're getting this lightness here,
because of the Transfer Mode add,
| | 03:48 |
they're, blending these together.
So I'm going to change this to normal.
| | 03:51 |
So that behaves as we would expect.
Now, I mentioned this briefly in passing
| | 03:55 |
but we didn't demonstrate so I'm going to
show you how this works.
| | 03:57 |
When we have a camera and we have the
Unified Camera tool selected we're, we're
| | 04:01 |
moving around here with a textured
polygon we're allowed to see the back of objects.
| | 04:07 |
Its almost like they are 3D and they're
allowed to exist in 3D space and so as we
| | 04:12 |
rotate this around, we are seeing again
the very thin sides.
| | 04:15 |
Of these polygons that's actually not
what we want.
| | 04:18 |
We always want this icons to be facing
the camera so then what we're going to do
| | 04:23 |
is go to main form and we're gong to go
back to the particle type drop down and
| | 04:27 |
change this from textured polygon fill to
sprite fill.
| | 04:30 |
Remember that sprites are 2D versions of
these particles that looks identical.
| | 04:35 |
But now, as I move around with the
camera, these icons are always going to
| | 04:41 |
face the camera, and in this case, that's
what I want.
| | 04:45 |
So I'm going to Undo that and now, we can
add some lighting.
| | 04:48 |
So I'm going to right-click in my
Timeline panel here, choose New > Light
| | 04:53 |
and I'm going to create point light, kind
of like a light bulb that emanates light
| | 04:57 |
in every direction.
And I'll increase my intensity to about
| | 05:02 |
100 or so and click OK.
Now, as I select my Selection tool and
| | 05:09 |
move this light around, you notice that
nothing happens.
| | 05:12 |
That's because you have to tell form to
interact with lights or else it won't.
| | 05:17 |
So I'm going to go back to Main Form.
Close up the Particle section.
| | 05:20 |
Open up the Shading section right below
it, and change shading from off, to on.
| | 05:27 |
Now, as we go back to our light, and move
this around, you can see that this, these
| | 05:32 |
particles are being lit by, this light.
We could back light it, front light it,
| | 05:39 |
just bring it closer.
Really cool stuff here and it really adds
| | 05:43 |
a lot of realism and depth to these
otherwise flat particles that have no
| | 05:49 |
life to them.
Now, what I wanted here is, I wanted kind
| | 05:53 |
of like a burst of a hot spot.
Yeah, kind of like something like that,
| | 05:57 |
but then I also wanted some of the other
particles to show as well.
| | 06:01 |
So some of the ones right here, I want
just a little bit of ambient light.
| | 06:05 |
So I'm going to right-click again the
Timeline panel, chose New > Light, and
| | 06:09 |
this time, I'm going to change the light
type to Ambient and click OK.
| | 06:14 |
Now, by default ambient light type like
the light to impress T, by default it's
| | 06:20 |
set at 100%.
And usually, I like to dial that down a
| | 06:24 |
little bit.
I don't think I use that much in the
| | 06:26 |
main, main comp here.
But we can overdo it, and that really
| | 06:30 |
just kills the main light.
I just want a little bit of fill here so
| | 06:35 |
that those particles still exist.
And that gives a lot more flexibility to
| | 06:40 |
put other of, of these lights and
shadows, or these particles in shadow.
| | 06:45 |
That's kind of fun.
Now, one other thing that I did here, is
| | 06:48 |
I made another layer with form, of these
kind of cool rings here.
| | 06:52 |
And they're recently just little spheres
and in the sphere base form shape, and
| | 06:57 |
also the sphere particles.
And there's also two instances of Form.
| | 07:01 |
So I have the form spheres and I then I
have the form strings.
| | 07:04 |
But they're on the same layer.
I find myself doing that a lot, when
| | 07:08 |
you're having Form create little accents
like this and you just kind of want to
| | 07:12 |
add some more form to that, like this.
Then you need to go into the Rendering
| | 07:15 |
section and change the transfer mode of
form to blend in with the layer.
| | 07:20 |
So, as we change this back to normal,
then we don't see this layer was at none.
| | 07:26 |
That's the original default way, so you
won't see other duplicates.
| | 07:30 |
But if I choose Add here, it will blend
into different dots and it's connected
| | 07:37 |
together with an expression.
So these all rotate together and without
| | 07:41 |
these lights it just looks what's the
term I'm looking for really off.
| | 07:50 |
It just looks really plain and flat.
So again that lighting does a lot to make
| | 07:55 |
this see much more real and professional,
gives it personality.
| | 07:59 |
And we also have these other options as
well.
| | 08:01 |
Where we can adjust the ambient light
from right here inside form, if you'd
| | 08:05 |
rather go that direction.You could also
change the diffusion and the specularity.
| | 08:11 |
So you could more of a metallic feel.
Or more of a plastic feel, if you wanted
| | 08:17 |
to go in that direction.
So, a lot of control from playing with
| | 08:20 |
the material of the lights with the
Shading settings.
| | 08:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Casting shadows from particles| 00:00 |
In this movie, we're going to increase
the realism that we get by lighting form
| | 00:05 |
particles with After Effects Light by
casting shadows.
| | 00:09 |
Now, the way that we do this is kind of
interesting.
| | 00:10 |
I'm going to go to form here.
I have a mess of particles.
| | 00:12 |
And I'm going to go to shading and turn
shading on.
| | 00:15 |
And we can see particular results here we
have now these particles being lit and
| | 00:18 |
then we have kind of like a vignette as
these particles, sort of the light kind
| | 00:22 |
of falls off and these particles sort of
fall off into darkness.
| | 00:26 |
But the thing is that the particles going
back here behind the front particles
| | 00:30 |
would have shadows cast on them in real
life.
| | 00:34 |
So what we need to do to cast those
shadows and add even more realism to this
| | 00:37 |
is to add something called a shadow lit.
But the thing is in order for a light to
| | 00:43 |
be use to create cast shadows on
particles we need to first change its name.
| | 00:50 |
If you go up to the top of form click the
Options button it says Shadow Light,
| | 00:55 |
Shadow Lit Light Name and by default its
set to shadow.
| | 00:58 |
Now of course you can change this to
whatever you want.
| | 01:00 |
But then your light name has to match.
So, as you can see, my light just has a
| | 01:05 |
generic light name and we need to change
it to shadow to be recognized at a, as a
| | 01:09 |
shadow light.
So I'm going to select it, press Enter or
| | 01:11 |
Return, rename this to Shadow, go back to
form, change the Shadow Lit to on.
| | 01:19 |
And now we have these cool cast shadows.
Now we could go and change these parameters.
| | 01:24 |
We can, let's say for example open up the
shadow lit settings here, we can change
| | 01:28 |
the color of the shadow, the strength of
the, the color and we could also increase
| | 01:34 |
the opacity if we want to.
The size of the shadow, take that size
| | 01:38 |
down to about 50 or so, spread that out a
little bit.
| | 01:41 |
And also adjust the distance.
Maybe take that down to 50.
| | 01:46 |
Maybe 20, and so now we have a much more
realistic rendering of these particles.
| | 01:54 |
A much more believable rendering of these
particles than we did initially.
| | 01:58 |
Certainly without the light on at all.
But even with the light on, with the
| | 02:01 |
shadow lit, having these cast shadows
back behind here.
| | 02:04 |
And it's not like really hard edge
shadows, it's just kind of like a faint
| | 02:08 |
shadow, which again, just adds more
believability.
| | 02:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Achieving a shallow depth of field| 00:00 |
In this tutorial we're going to be
revisiting some of the projects from this
| | 00:03 |
chapter, to beautify them with the
shallow depth of field from an After
| | 00:07 |
Effects camera..
So you remember this earlier in the
| | 00:10 |
chapter when we're looking at lighting,
we have this globe of particles that goes
| | 00:15 |
around, and it says some cheesy, generic
slogan.
| | 00:19 |
So what we're going to do is, we're
going to open this up.
| | 00:22 |
Open up the camera setting here, and what
we're going to do is turn on Shadow Depth
| | 00:27 |
of Field, which enables us to specify a
range of focus for the camera.
| | 00:33 |
By default, depth of field is off.
That just means everything, by default,
| | 00:37 |
is in focus.
So if I click the Off button, it turns on
| | 00:41 |
Depth Of Field.
Usually the set, default settings are
| | 00:44 |
such, that you won't notice too much of a
difference in most cases.
| | 00:48 |
We really need to specify here, in order
to get our, a custom look here at the
| | 00:53 |
Shallow Depth Of Field.
These three settings.
| | 00:55 |
Focus Distance, Aperture, and Blur Level.
Focus Distance refers to the area, the
| | 01:01 |
distance from the camera, in which
subject is in focus.
| | 01:05 |
So I'm going to take this actually to
1300.
| | 01:09 |
And that means that pixels 1,300 or,
stuff 1,300 pixels away from the camera,
| | 01:14 |
is going to be sharpened and focused.
And that equates to this line right
| | 01:19 |
around the edge of this globe right here,
and we can see a little bit, of blur on
| | 01:24 |
these objects here.
Its very subtle and not super great.
| | 01:28 |
So lets enhance this a little bit.
Now your tendency might be to be jump to
| | 01:32 |
the Blur Level value.
The Blur Level controls the amount of
| | 01:36 |
blur, but that's just going to make all
this stuff kind of blurry.
| | 01:41 |
It's not going to be what we want.
So what we actually want to do is adjust
| | 01:44 |
the Aperture.
And in a real world camera, the more you
| | 01:48 |
open up the aperture, the more you thin
the area that is in focus.
| | 01:54 |
And so the same thing is here in after
effects.
| | 01:57 |
So as we increase this Aperture, what
we're going to do is we're going to be
| | 02:02 |
limiting the amount of stuff that's in
focus.
| | 02:05 |
So right now we have all of this stuff
that's kind of in focus, as well as this
| | 02:10 |
stuff is right along the edge.
And you can see these dots right here.
| | 02:13 |
This is a good indicator of what's in the
focus.
| | 02:16 |
All these dots are pretty sharp, so we
have a big area that's in focus.
| | 02:21 |
The more we raise the Aperture Setting,
the more that the area of in focus stuff
| | 02:27 |
gets narrow.
So I'm going to actually click here, and
| | 02:30 |
I'm type in 250 to make the area that's
in focus much more shallow.
| | 02:35 |
And you can see here, we have a lot of
dots and they are almost all blurry now.
| | 02:39 |
So we have a very thin line of stuff
that's in focus.
| | 02:43 |
And when you do that, we basically take
the viewer's attention off of all the
| | 02:47 |
garbage here in the corner, and even some
of these dots and stuff like that here on
| | 02:51 |
the sides.
We really just focus people's attention
| | 02:54 |
right here on the text, and the very edge
of these icons which just really
| | 02:58 |
beautifies this effect.
And you see as we click through random
| | 03:02 |
frames here, and actually let's go ahead
and hit the Home key and preview this.
| | 03:08 |
So, now you can see as we play this back,
that we have a much more beautiful,
| | 03:12 |
elegant and professional little video
clip here.
| | 03:16 |
And that's because our eyes naturally go
to areas of focus and sharpness.
| | 03:21 |
And when you're creating something
professional, you want to have areas of focus.
| | 03:25 |
Amateur stuff, kind of like what this
project was, honestly, before we added
| | 03:29 |
this Depth Of Field, it's just, there's
stuff everywhere to look at.
| | 03:33 |
And so when you really look at
professional stuff it's clean, elegant
| | 03:38 |
and simple, and there's less for your eye
to focus on.
| | 03:41 |
You really want to draw your attention to
right where it's important, where
| | 03:44 |
everything's in focus, and that's what
we've done here by creating a Shallow
| | 03:47 |
Depth Of Field.
This globe it's, it's beautiful, but we
| | 03:51 |
don't want people looking at these icons
right here because this is not what's important.
| | 03:55 |
Our message right here, our super cheesy
(LAUGH) generic slogan.
| | 03:59 |
That's what's important.
And that's what we want people looking at.
| | 04:02 |
So go ahead and pause that.
Look at another example.
| | 04:04 |
Go back to our shadows from the previous
example here.
| | 04:07 |
I went ahead and added some animation to
this.
| | 04:11 |
And by the way, you'll notice that as you
play around with this Shallow Depth Of
| | 04:15 |
Field stuff, that it slows down your
system a lot.
| | 04:18 |
So, we have in this example, we have not
only a light, but we have a light casting
| | 04:23 |
shadows on tons of not just regular
particles but custom particles.
| | 04:27 |
And in a moment we're going to add some
Shadow Depth of Field, and it should run
| | 04:31 |
very slowly.
So, something, something to be aware of.
| | 04:34 |
if you plan on doing this a lot in your
work, you might want to think about
| | 04:39 |
passing that cost onto clients, because
it's really going to slow your work flow down.
| | 04:43 |
So again, we have these particles as we
saw in the last movie, but this time they
| | 04:47 |
are assembling together.
And I'll I've done is just animated a
| | 04:51 |
very simple camera pan, and I've also
animated the Dispersed value of these
| | 04:55 |
particles to be even larger, back down to
something simple like 30.
| | 05:00 |
So that way they kind of gather together,
and it looks way cool.
| | 05:03 |
We have our shadows, like we put in the
last movie, and we now have this cool
| | 05:08 |
animation these, these particles kind of
gather, but there, it's still lacking something.
| | 05:12 |
So lets add some Shadow Depth Of Field,
especially right here, look at that,
| | 05:15 |
nobody wants to see that what is this
garbage.
| | 05:17 |
So let's go open up the camera here.
And close up the Champs Form Section, and
| | 05:21 |
go over to the Camera Options.
And we want to turn On Depth Of Field,
| | 05:26 |
and you see already, that takes just a
second, even just to register this.
| | 05:30 |
So, you know, that we, put in this
information actually render this animation.
| | 05:35 |
It's going to go pretty slow.
But let's go ahead and change the Focus
| | 05:39 |
Distance here.
I already calculated this, so we don't
| | 05:41 |
have to scrub through.
But I figured the Focus Distance I
| | 05:45 |
wanted, and probably about 1300 here.
Now, you'll notice that we're going in
| | 05:49 |
this order.
We're setting the Focus Distance, so we
| | 05:51 |
know what's in focus, and then we are
adjusting the Aperture to control how
| | 05:55 |
much of that stuff is in focus.
But honestly, one of the things that I
| | 05:59 |
like to do is, let me, I should
right-click on focus, and reset that for
| | 06:03 |
just a quick second.
Here's a trick that I use to figure out
| | 06:05 |
what's in focus.
I'm going to change the Aperture really
| | 06:08 |
high, to something like 500.
And actually that's the Aperture value
| | 06:11 |
we're going to use anyway, so leave it
set at 500.
| | 06:14 |
That way the stuff that's in focus is
very clearly in focus, and the stuff
| | 06:18 |
that's out of focus is very blurry.
And so, we have a very thin focus plane.
| | 06:22 |
And that allows us to set the Focus
Distance then so, we could really see
| | 06:28 |
what's in focus and what isn't in focus,
as we adjust that Focus Distance value.
| | 06:32 |
It's almost like in a camera when you
push that button to zoom in to pull focus.
| | 06:36 |
That's kind of what I do here.
So, I turn up the Aperture so it's
| | 06:40 |
really, really sharp.
I get my Focus Distance, and then I go
| | 06:43 |
back to my Aperture and I can set it to
what I want.
| | 06:45 |
So I'm going to set this Focus Distance
to 1300.
| | 06:49 |
Actually think I'm going to leave my
Aperture value at 500, and I'm going to
| | 06:53 |
hit the End key to jump to that last
frame to see what that looks like.
| | 06:58 |
Pretty good, but another thing that we
can do here, is increased the blur amount
| | 07:03 |
of these other particles.
So if I increase the Blur Level to 150,
| | 07:09 |
then that's going to make the blurry
stuff even blurrier.
| | 07:13 |
Now again, we only have a thin area of
stuff in focus here.
| | 07:17 |
A very narrow area that's in focus,
because our Aperture Values so high.
| | 07:20 |
So if we wanted more in focus, we could
take this down to like, let's just say
| | 07:25 |
150, for example.
And we still get a really beautiful
| | 07:29 |
effect, and it's much more subtle.
See we just have the soft focus here, but
| | 07:34 |
our eyes are still drawn here.
But it's, you know, we got more stuff in focus.
| | 07:39 |
And that's what happens when you lower
the Aperture Value.
| | 07:41 |
Now, just as a side note, one, I'm
going to take this back up to 500.
| | 07:44 |
One of the things that happens just by
default, when you create a really Shallow
| | 07:48 |
Depth Of Field with a really high
Aperture Value, and that's even enhanced
| | 07:52 |
by adding more blur to this, is that this
things smaller.
| | 07:56 |
They look like miniatures.
Have you ever seen those photos or
| | 07:59 |
videos, somewhere on-line or whatever,
where it looks like a whole city is just
| | 08:05 |
like a miniature.
This is the way they do it, is they
| | 08:07 |
create get big areas of blur, and it just
makes the stuff that's in focus look smaller.
| | 08:12 |
So if you are having a big, you know,
let's say this is corporate logos or
| | 08:17 |
something like that, that's really
important, and we don't want to diminish
| | 08:20 |
them or make them look small.
So you might actually want to take down
| | 08:23 |
the Aperture Value and take down the Blur
Level a little bit, so these particles
| | 08:27 |
don't look like miniatures.
In my case, I actually kind of like the
| | 08:30 |
way this looks.
So I am going to hit the Home Key and
| | 08:33 |
preview this animation, with our new
super Shallow Depth Of Field.
| | 08:36 |
Baaaa, particles assembling together, and
I just love the way that looks.
| | 08:45 |
And you know with these particles,
imagine if we didn't have lights.
| | 08:49 |
Imagine if we didn't have shadows.
Imagine if we didn't have this Shallow
| | 08:51 |
Depth Of Field.
It would just be like a big bundle of
| | 08:54 |
solid red.
And now we have these very cinematic,
| | 08:57 |
almost life-like particles that just look
so much cooler than default generic
| | 09:04 |
non-lighted, non-shadowed, non-shallow
Depth Of Fielded particles.
| | 09:08 |
I just invented like six words right
there.
| | 09:11 |
But you get the, the point here.
that we have created some of these great
| | 09:15 |
cinematic tools or use these great
cinematic tools in after effects to
| | 09:18 |
create a much more polish final result
| | 09:20 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Using Audio in FormGetting Form to react to audio| 00:00 |
In this chapter, we're going to look at
controlling form particles with audio.
| | 00:05 |
And I will tell you up front that this is
one of the most challenging, complex, and
| | 00:09 |
powerful features of form.
So as we tend to do in this training
| | 00:15 |
series, we're going to start out with a
very simple basic shape here with form.
| | 00:21 |
And we're just going to start very slow
and then we're going to get into cool
| | 00:24 |
stuff in the next couple of movies.
But let's first look at or listen to
| | 00:28 |
rather, our audio track in our
composition here.
| | 00:32 |
(MUSIC) Okay, and then just basically
breaks into a beat there.
| | 00:43 |
And so again, we're going to use this
audio to control form.
| | 00:48 |
Now let's set form up.
As I mentioned, we're not out to make
| | 00:51 |
this look good here, but we do want to
make it look as good as possible, so that
| | 00:56 |
we can understand what's going on and not
have just garbage to look at.
| | 01:00 |
Now I'm going to have my grid fill the
screen here, decrease y a little bit, and
| | 01:07 |
let's go ahead and take the particles in
x and y down.
| | 01:10 |
I'm going to take the particles in x to
six, the particles in y to eight, and I'm
| | 01:16 |
also going to take the particles in z
just to one.
| | 01:18 |
So we have a very simple grid here.
And now let's close up base form, open up
| | 01:22 |
particle, and we'll increase the size of
the particles.
| | 01:27 |
A lot, maybe 22 or so.
Now, just so we're not looking at ugly
| | 01:32 |
white dots, let's go ahead and just
change the color really quick.
| | 01:34 |
I'm going to go into Quick Maps, open up
the color map, and we'll go ahead and map
| | 01:39 |
opacity and color over x, and we'll go
ahead and click Random until we get a
| | 01:43 |
cool color scheme that we like.
And that looks somewhat decent.
| | 01:48 |
We're just going to keep fooling around
here, and I Iike that.
| | 01:51 |
So I'm going to go ahead and close up
Quick Maps.
| | 01:53 |
I'm going to open up the Audio React
section.
| | 01:55 |
And I'm going to change the audio layer
from none to formbeat1.aif.
| | 01:59 |
That's our audio file in our composition.
I'm going to go ahead and click that.
| | 02:05 |
To accept that.
And now, in our audio react session, we
| | 02:08 |
have five different reactors.
They all have identical properties that
| | 02:12 |
we can set, and we could use these to use
some aspect of our audio.
| | 02:17 |
Whether it's different frequencies, or
whatever, to control different properties
| | 02:22 |
of our particles.
So, what we're going to do is, we're
| | 02:26 |
going to use the high pitched.
High hats, here, to control the size of
| | 02:33 |
the particles.
Now, the default frequency, the default
| | 02:37 |
audio frequency for these audio reactors
is 100 Hertz, which is very low, that's
| | 02:41 |
like a bass drum.
And I want to use about 7,000 Hertz,
| | 02:44 |
that's about 7 kiloHertz.
Which is where the high hats live, that
| | 02:48 |
frequency range where the high hats live.
And I want to map this to the size,
| | 02:53 |
particle size, right there at the top.
So now when I play this back, and by the
| | 02:58 |
way I'm going to pay this back with a RAM
preview using the zero numeric keypad.
| | 03:03 |
When I play this back with the RAM
preview we'll see the size change based
| | 03:07 |
on the volume or intensity of this
frequency range.
| | 03:12 |
(MUSIC) Pretty cool!
Let's have a more dramatic effect though.
| | 03:24 |
When these, the size of these particles
are triggered by this frequency range.
| | 03:29 |
I want there to be a bigger reaction, so
I'm going to increase this strength value
| | 03:34 |
a lot, maybe to let's say 1500.
Now when I back this up in preview we'll
| | 03:41 |
see something completely different.
(MUSIC) Pretty cool stuff, now let's make
| | 03:50 |
another reaction.
For those low frequency nodes, like when
| | 03:55 |
the bass drum hits, like right here.
Let's cause the bass drum to do something
| | 04:00 |
completely different.
Make another audio reactor.
| | 04:02 |
Go to reactor two.
We'll leave the frequency set at 100, we
| | 04:05 |
can actually take this to 150, that's a
little bit more acurate.
| | 04:09 |
We can map this to, let's say, disperse.
And in order to do that we actually need
| | 04:13 |
some level of disperse, so we'll go to
disperse and twist, and increase this to
| | 04:18 |
about 30.
And, let's go ahead and preview this back
| | 04:23 |
and see what we have.
(MUSIC) So you can see, as our high hats
| | 04:27 |
hit we have the size increasing on these
particles.
| | 04:32 |
And then as we move in time and the base
drum heads, they go all crazy from the
| | 04:39 |
beat of that base drum, (LAUGH) and it
looks really cool.
| | 04:43 |
Especially when kick into the beat, now
we have the combination of high hats, and
| | 04:50 |
bass drum, looks really cool.
Now as we scrub this we'll notice that
| | 04:57 |
when the open high hat hits the particles
disperse a little bit.
| | 05:02 |
It's kind of hard to see, but they are
dispersing a little bit.
| | 05:08 |
So what we can do is we can increase the
threshold, up to say, 15 of the reactor
| | 05:16 |
two, and that limits how much the the
reaction is triggered by extra frequencies.
| | 05:24 |
So let's hit the home key and preview
what we have.
| | 05:26 |
(MUSIC) So again, this is a very, very
simple example.
| | 05:40 |
But hopefully it's clear from this what's
happening with the different frequencies,
| | 05:44 |
and how you can really specify form.
To react in different ways to different
| | 05:50 |
frequencies, and how much power there is
in that.
| | 05:53 |
We've already created essentially so much
animation and we haven't set a single key frame.
| | 05:58 |
Now, as I've mentioned before one of the
most powerful aspects of form is this
| | 06:03 |
audio stuff, and it definitely gets a lot
more complex than what we've seen already.
| | 06:08 |
And most of that power and complexity
comes from these delay parameters.
| | 06:14 |
And so that we can accurately understand
them I need to change these particles
| | 06:18 |
really quick.
I'm going to go to base form I'm going to
| | 06:20 |
increase the particles and why a lot.
Lets actually go all the way up to 60,
| | 06:26 |
and then I'm going to into the particle
section.
| | 06:29 |
Take down the size of the particles to
12.
| | 06:31 |
We'll close up particle, go back to audio
react, and here is how this works.
| | 06:37 |
There is these delay, there are these
delay parameters, and basically what that
| | 06:42 |
allows you to do and, and I don't know if
I call them delay.
| | 06:45 |
If I, If was up to me to rename this, I
might refer this parameter as 'linger'
| | 06:50 |
because what it's going to do is it's
going to set the duration for how long
| | 06:57 |
this adjustment is going to be on screen.
This reaction.
| | 07:02 |
So by default the delay max, or in other
words in my term is the linger setting,
| | 07:07 |
is set to zero.
So then when the, the note hits and
| | 07:11 |
triggers a reaction we see it happening
to all particles simultaneously.
| | 07:16 |
Well if we want to ripple this through
the particles then that's when we adjust
| | 07:22 |
the delay direction and delay max
setting.
| | 07:23 |
So what I'm going to leave delay
direction set to x left to right.
| | 07:25 |
But as you can see every imaginable
direction you can think of is here.
| | 07:30 |
So I'm going to choose x left to right,
but this delay direction is only
| | 07:36 |
triggered when you increase the delay max
up from zero.
| | 07:41 |
So make this one second, and now what
that's going to do, its going to make
| | 07:45 |
this size linger, and its going to be
triggered on the left of on the x axis
| | 07:52 |
from left to right.
So let's see what that looks like.
| | 07:56 |
(MUSIC) So you could see the closed high
hats the little (NOISE), the little noises.
| | 08:06 |
They create these little tiny bumps, and
now the particles are moving left to
| | 08:10 |
right as this reaction goes and the open
high hats are a little bit louder.
| | 08:14 |
The (NOISE), so (LAUGH) and those look a
little bit bigger because they're a
| | 08:17 |
little bit louder.
They create a bigger reaction in the
| | 08:21 |
audio reaction.
There we go.
| | 08:25 |
Now, you'll notice that the particles
disperse all at once, because again, we
| | 08:28 |
have not choose, we have not increased
the delay max setting.
| | 08:32 |
So I'm going to change the delay
direction of the reactor two to x right
| | 08:37 |
to left, to have it go the opposite
direction.
| | 08:39 |
And we can increase that, let's say, to
half a sec.
| | 08:42 |
I'm going to take that to 0.5.
And so now I'll just scrub this through
| | 08:46 |
instead of rendering it.
But now as that bass drum hits the
| | 08:49 |
particles disperse from right to left.
You can see those two bass drum hits,
| | 08:54 |
there's one bass drum hit and then
there's a pause and another bass drum
| | 08:58 |
hit, going from right to left.
We can also make this go, outwards if we
| | 09:02 |
want to so it kind of ripples from the
center.
| | 09:05 |
That's interesting.
So you can imagine how much you can play
| | 09:11 |
with these particles by using these audio
controllers.
| | 09:16 |
You might not even have audio in your
project, or you might want to use a different.
| | 09:19 |
Audio track, then you might have as a
soundtrack in your actual project.
| | 09:23 |
And you might want to use audio just to
create these amazing animations.
| | 09:28 |
And keep in mind too folks, that these
particles are not circles.
| | 09:31 |
They are spheres.
This is 3D stuff happening.
| | 09:34 |
So if I go to my camera tool And I rotate
around this.
| | 09:37 |
We can see that these glows are happening
in 3D.
| | 09:40 |
So we can zoom in close to that and
really get upfront, close and personal
| | 09:46 |
with these really cool reactions here.
I love it.
| | 09:52 |
Let's just preview one more time and see
what we have.
| | 10:07 |
(MUSIC) Super cool stuff folks.
Love it.
| | 10:10 |
Again this is just the basics, and we
didn't even really set anything to
| | 10:14 |
control the snare drum so that when the
snare drum hits there's like a tiny
| | 10:18 |
little ripple there, but that's pretty
much it.
| | 10:22 |
So we could have also added a third
reactor for the snare drum, or we could
| | 10:25 |
have added multiple reactors for the high
hat or the base drum.
| | 10:29 |
So again, now that we really understand
the basics here, let's actually look at
| | 10:32 |
making something really beautiful in the
next movie.
| | 10:34 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tweaking audio reaction parameters| 00:00 |
In this tutorial, we're going to be
building upon what we learned in the last
| | 00:04 |
movie about having Form react to audio.
And we're actually going to be making
| | 00:08 |
that looks halfway decent, and we're
going to be adding to it learning a
| | 00:10 |
little bit more.
So here's what we're going to be doing.
| | 00:13 |
And we're going to be taking this little
piano and creating this animation.
| | 00:17 |
(MUSIC) Okay, so kind of cool right?
So we have basically these bass notes
| | 00:42 |
that go and when I record this piano
track I made sure that it's basically only.
| | 00:48 |
Really low tones and also really high
pitch frequencies.
| | 00:52 |
So they're really separated.
So when the base tones come in here, we
| | 00:55 |
get this cool and across ripple effect.
We have three different forces acting on
| | 01:00 |
each other, and kind of combining in the
middle, which is interesting.
| | 01:03 |
And then, when the high pitch frequencies
go, we have a fractal ripple as well as a
| | 01:08 |
displacement or disperse ripple going
from the bottom of the animation to the top.
| | 01:13 |
With the press of each node, it's very
cool.
| | 01:17 |
And you can see that as the nodes are
soft there's not too much of a
| | 01:22 |
displacement and a dispersal of the
pixels.
| | 01:24 |
of the particles.
And then as the nodes get louder those
| | 01:29 |
get more substantial.
You can see that note is louder because
| | 01:31 |
the particles are more disbursed.
So, let's set this up from total scratch
| | 01:36 |
in the tweaking audio parameters start
compositions.
| | 01:39 |
Like the piano test layer, that's where
form is.
| | 01:41 |
Open up Base form.
Change the size.
| | 01:44 |
300 in x, 700 in y And then we'll go to
particle count here.
| | 01:50 |
We'll change particles and x to 340.
Particles in y to 300.
| | 01:56 |
And particles in z to 1.
Also going to change the center z.
| | 02:02 |
We're going to bring this a little bit
closer to us.
| | 02:03 |
So take this value to about negative 160.
Close up Base Form, open up Particle, and
| | 02:11 |
we're going to take the size here to 1.3,
and take down the opacity to 50.
| | 02:18 |
Now, I have an exact color for you here.
Of course, you can change these settings
| | 02:21 |
however you want, but just, in order to
create this exact thing.
| | 02:25 |
'Cuz we have so many parameters going on
here, everything has to be kind of precise.
| | 02:28 |
So I'm going to change the color here
from reds can stay at 255.
| | 02:34 |
Green should be 60 and blue should be 6,
creating this kind of orange color.
| | 02:40 |
Now, a couple other bells and whistles
here folks, I'm going to go down to World
| | 02:43 |
Transform, which we haven't talked about
yet, but it's basically Transform
| | 02:46 |
controls for everything.
And we'll talk about the difference
| | 02:48 |
between these Transform controls and the
Base form apparent transform controls a
| | 02:53 |
little bit later on in this training
series.
| | 02:55 |
For now, take x offset to negative 130.
And close that back up.
| | 03:01 |
Go up to Quick Maps.
Open up Map 1.
| | 03:05 |
And we'll just kind of create this nice
little soft map here.
| | 03:08 |
And use this little, this preset.
Change the Map 1 to opacity.
| | 03:13 |
And what we want to do here is we want to
have these edges soft.
| | 03:17 |
So we want to fade in from the left, and
then fade out on the right.
| | 03:20 |
And so we'll map this over X.
And that's kind of what we want, but even
| | 03:24 |
a greater effect, so we want it, to, fade
out even longer.
| | 03:29 |
Even smoother of a fade out there.
Looking pretty good.
| | 03:32 |
Let's smooth that a little bit.
And, that looks good.
| | 03:36 |
Now let's go ahead and open up the auto
reacted.
| | 03:39 |
We're going to actually use all five
audio reactors here.
| | 03:43 |
And we're going to map the first three,
excuse me, the first two to the high
| | 03:48 |
pitches of the piano melody thing,nd then
the next three to the lower bass notes.
| | 03:54 |
So we've got to first change the audio
layer to the form piano.aif file in this composition.
| | 03:59 |
Let's open up Reactor 1, and we want to
change the frequency to 1700.
| | 04:05 |
That's about where the frequencies of the
high pitches live.
| | 04:08 |
Now, let's go ahead and map this to
fractal and remember for the high pitches
| | 04:14 |
we want to fractal displacement to go
from the bottom to the top.
| | 04:17 |
And we also want the particles to
disperse from the bottom to the top, so
| | 04:21 |
we'll get to that in a second.
So we want to change the Delay Direction
| | 04:24 |
to y bottom to top.
Let's go ahead and make the Delay Max 1 second.
| | 04:30 |
Now, nothing's happening here because we
need to adjust the fractal.
| | 04:32 |
So if there's nothing going on with any
of these parameters here, then a lot of
| | 04:37 |
times there's nothing, you want see any
result.
| | 04:39 |
So with fractal selected, I'm going to go
to Fractal Field and I'm going to
| | 04:43 |
increase displace to 90, I'm going to
change flow x to 2.
| | 04:49 |
That will cause a little bit flow from
left to right flow y will change this to
| | 04:54 |
negative 2 and we'll change flow
evolution to just 1 so it will be very slow.
| | 05:00 |
Let's also change the way this fractal
looks by taking down F scale to 6 so it's
| | 05:06 |
a bit smoother, and complexity down to 2
so it's even smoother still.
| | 05:11 |
Now, if we close up Fractal Field and
scrub in time to where there's these
| | 05:16 |
high-pitched notes, you can see the
fractal rippling up now from y bottom to
| | 05:21 |
top along the y axis, going from the
bottom to the top.
| | 05:24 |
This is just what we wanted, very cool.
Now, you notice here also that in the
| | 05:29 |
beginning when the bass notes hit that
we're still seeing some ripple and we
| | 05:33 |
don't want, we don't want that.
We want to isolate this so that the bass
| | 05:37 |
notes specifically do one thing and that
the high pitches do specifically
| | 05:41 |
something else.
So we can limit the frequencies and the
| | 05:45 |
adjustments here.
They're happening to our particles by
| | 05:48 |
adjusting the width and threshold.
And that flattens things very nicely here.
| | 05:53 |
Width refers to the frequency in it.
So it's going to adjust these particles
| | 06:05 |
are distorted of form these particles.
Just hits that 1700 hertz frequency it's,
| | 06:11 |
going to give us a wider range of
frequencies as well.
| | 06:16 |
But as we take this down then we limit
the range of frequencies that will
| | 06:22 |
trigger a reaction so let's take the
width value down to 5, which grossly
| | 06:28 |
limits, significantly limits, the control
of the reaction of the audio here.
| | 06:34 |
Very cool.
I'm going to go over to a frame, just
| | 06:37 |
grabbing a frame where we can see a
distortion here, so when we go to our
| | 06:40 |
next reactor here.
Close up reactor 1 go to reactor 2.
| | 06:43 |
We can see it as well.
This one we want to map to disperse, so
| | 06:47 |
I'm going to change the frequency to 1700
again for this.
| | 06:51 |
We'll go to disperse and twist, and let's
give it about maybe 210 for disperse there.
| | 06:57 |
And again, it's dispersing every particle
as it hits this frequency range because
| | 07:02 |
we have not select set a delay max value.
So I want to change this to one.
| | 07:08 |
But again, that disperses particles on
the x axis from left to right and I want
| | 07:13 |
y from bottom to top.
Let's limit the width to 25.
| | 07:18 |
And lets also take the threshold up to 7,
and this is still too much dispersing of particle.
| | 07:25 |
So let's take the down the strength to
about 10 which limits that dispersion and
| | 07:31 |
now we have this nice fractal
displacement.
| | 07:36 |
That seems to be moving in tandem with
the dispersion of particles.
| | 07:42 |
And then now as the particles move they
are dispersed and they have this fractal
| | 07:47 |
though them, it just looks really
beautiful, very fluid and organic.
| | 07:52 |
Just beautiful.
Now, I'm going to close up reactor 2 and
| | 07:55 |
go to reactor 3.
Let's work on what's going to happen when
| | 07:57 |
those base notes trigger in the
beginning.
| | 07:59 |
I'm going to take the frequency to 180,
that's about where the base ranges live.
| | 08:05 |
And we're going to have Reactor 3 Control
Sphere 1.
| | 08:09 |
So we're going to open up the Spherical
Field, open up Sphere 1 and we're going
| | 08:13 |
to add a sphere to distort these
particles.
| | 08:16 |
Just so we can see doing I'm going to
turn on visualize field, I'm going to
| | 08:19 |
increase the strength to about 40, and I
have some exact x, y coordinates for you.
| | 08:24 |
We're going to make this 245 in the x,
and 0 in the y and negative 170 for the z.
| | 08:31 |
And I realize that probably looks crazy
because our sphere is way over here in
| | 08:35 |
our upper left.
But now, what I'm going to do is take
| | 08:37 |
this radius to 500.
So, now we have this really soft
| | 08:42 |
distortion or bend of our pixels over
here in the upper left.
| | 08:46 |
So I will turn off the visualization of
our particles, close spherical field.
| | 08:51 |
Go back to reactor three, we'll map this
to Sphere 1 size so that as the notes
| | 08:58 |
trigger sphere one size will increase
based on the volume of these frequencies.
| | 09:04 |
Let's go ahead and limit this by taking
the width down to ten and you can see it
| | 09:08 |
completely destroys our entire.
form here.
| | 09:12 |
So let's go ahead and take the string
down to 10 to limit that.
| | 09:16 |
Let's go ahead and change the delay max
to 1 so this ripples straight through.
| | 09:21 |
And we actually want this to go from y
bottom to top.
| | 09:26 |
Actually not bottom to top, excuse me, I
want to go y top to bottom.
| | 09:29 |
So we're going to have the Sphere One
size ripple downwards through from top to
| | 09:35 |
bottom, like that.
Just a nice subtle ripple from top to
| | 09:39 |
bottom when those base notes hit.
Now, lets close up Reactor 3.
| | 09:42 |
Go to Reactor 4, and what we're going to
do is we're going to map this to sphere
| | 09:47 |
two size.
So now, we need to go setup Sphere 2.
| | 09:50 |
So in my Spherical Field, close up Sphere
1.
| | 09:52 |
Open up sphere, whoa, where did I go
there we go Sphere 2.
| | 09:56 |
turn on Visualized Field.
Let's go ahead and crank up the strength
| | 09:59 |
to 44.
The x, y coordinates we want are 735.
| | 10:05 |
And the x and 400 in the y.
And for position z, we want to do
| | 10:10 |
negative 190.
And for radius, we want 400.
| | 10:15 |
So now we have this opposite effect,
where we are now.
| | 10:18 |
have a, this spherical displacement on
the bottom right.
| | 10:21 |
Shoving the pixels towards the left.
I turn off visualize field.
| | 10:26 |
Close up spherical field, let's customize
reactor for here.
| | 10:30 |
We want to take the frequency to 180.
We want to tone the width down a little
| | 10:34 |
bit to 10.
And we want to also tone the strength
| | 10:37 |
down to 10.
And for the delay direction for sphere
| | 10:42 |
two we actually do want to go y bottom to
top.
| | 10:45 |
With the delay of 1 second.
So now it's going to happen is that we
| | 10:50 |
have sphere one displacing downwards at
the same exact moment the sphere two on
| | 10:56 |
the right side is displacing upwards and
creates its beautiful cross ripple action
| | 11:03 |
super cool.
Let's close up Reactor 4, open up Reactor
| | 11:06 |
5 and let's set the frequency to 180.
Let's go ahead and map this to displace x.
| | 11:14 |
That's going to displace from left to
right.
| | 11:17 |
Let's limit, the frequency range here by
taking width to 10.
| | 11:21 |
And let's take down the strength from a
hundred to ten so we're no it blowin' 'em
| | 11:25 |
all over the whole comp here.
And, we're going to leave this set from x
| | 11:30 |
left to right, but we're going to delay
max 1 second.
| | 11:34 |
So now, we have three forces operating on
this fractal, or on these, this form
| | 11:39 |
where the base notes hit.
We have Sphere 1 going down, Sphere 2
| | 11:43 |
going up.
And we have particle, or the, fractal
| | 11:47 |
going left, displacing from left to
right.
| | 11:50 |
All at the same time, those base notes.
it's very cool.
| | 11:55 |
Now, lets go ahead and we can see those
other those treble notes and you'll too
| | 12:00 |
it renders really slow there's a lot
going on here.
| | 12:02 |
Let's go ahead and I'm going to go out to
about 6 seconds press N on my keyboard to
| | 12:08 |
create a work area.
And I'm going to preview this to see what
| | 12:11 |
we got.
(MUSIC) Okay, very cool.
| | 12:19 |
It's really a beautiful animation, very
elegant.
| | 12:22 |
I like what's going on there.
And I like these little changes.
| | 12:26 |
I like how the fractal goes along with
the dispersed particles.
| | 12:29 |
It's really a beautiful look.
But the problem with this here is that
| | 12:34 |
when these little tiny notes are
triggered right here, the little bing,
| | 12:38 |
bing, bing, bing, those (LAUGH) those
notes.
| | 12:41 |
then they are triggered right here.
But I actually kind of want them to be
| | 12:45 |
triggered right in the center.
Like I want them to hit right there in
| | 12:49 |
the center when, when they get triggered
and the reaction starts.
| | 12:53 |
So what I'm going to do is go to Reactors
1 and 2, and I want to actually change
| | 12:59 |
the time offset, to, negative 10.
This basically looks in the cop at the,
| | 13:08 |
the audio and it can either take stuff
from before or after.
| | 13:14 |
The audio file so that you can trigger
reactions to happen sooner or later
| | 13:18 |
regardless of what the audio is actually
doing at that particular frame.
| | 13:22 |
So I'm going to take this again to
negative 10 or 0.10 and before we preview
| | 13:30 |
that and see what it looks like there's
one other thing I want to do here.
| | 13:32 |
I'm going to right click and create a new
solid layer and I'm going to create kind
| | 13:38 |
of a purple, purple solid, something like
that.
| | 13:44 |
Click OK.
Click OK.
| | 13:45 |
And I'm just going to select the Pen tool
with RotoBezier checked, and I'm just
| | 13:49 |
going to click in random spots here.
Making kind of like a little object there.
| | 13:57 |
I'll go ahead and select the selection
tool.
| | 13:59 |
don't want to, want to double-click on
the mask itself move this over and click
| | 14:07 |
these points.
We have just a few overlapping points
| | 14:09 |
here doesn't have to be great or
statistically placed or anything like
| | 14:16 |
that, just a really rough outline where
some of the stuff is covered by the
| | 14:20 |
purple solid, some of it isn't.
And then I'm going to go and press the
| | 14:24 |
letter F for feather, feather this a lot.
And I'm going to change the blend mode
| | 14:29 |
from normal to add.
And that what kind of creates this cool,
| | 14:33 |
sometimes warm, sometimes cold effect.
And I actually don't like that, I'm going
| | 14:39 |
to move that so there's a little bit of
more original orange.
| | 14:42 |
(BLANK_AUDIO) So little bit of,
randomness here, we can't really get this
| | 14:52 |
with the form settings because we're
having huge chunks of purple and huge
| | 14:56 |
chunks of orange that always stay purple
or orange.
| | 15:00 |
But, but I like that.
So now let's preview the final results.
| | 15:04 |
Or at least the first half of the final
results.
| | 15:06 |
(MUSIC) And there you have it folks.
Really cool animation created from scratch.
| | 15:17 |
Really easily because of this cool form
reaction.
| | 15:21 |
You'll notice that as we adjusted that
time delay.
| | 15:24 |
That time, time change parameter.
Now that with that, these reactions
| | 15:30 |
happened when these high notes were hit.
It happened right there in the center
| | 15:33 |
where our focus is.
It's just a really beautiful, elegant solution.
| | 15:38 |
Really cool stuff you can do with this.
And the next week, we're going to look at
| | 15:41 |
how you can use Quick Maps to map audio
reactions.
| | 15:45 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Mapping audio reaction| 00:00 |
In this tutorial we're going to look at
this sweet example here.
| | 00:03 |
(MUSIC) Now, aside from being
aesthetically kind of different than what
| | 00:14 |
we've been working with was form which
was kind of fun.
| | 00:16 |
This also shows that we are seeing
something that we haven't done before,
| | 00:21 |
which is actually mapping the audio
frequency reactions to different sides or
| | 00:27 |
different areas of form.
So we have the bass drum creating these
| | 00:32 |
waves on the left and they stop in the
middle here.
| | 00:35 |
And on the right, we have all the
particles dispersing and displacing as
| | 00:40 |
the snare drum hits.
Now, as I scrub through here, this will
| | 00:44 |
be a little bit easier to see.
So we have the bass drum, and when the
| | 00:48 |
bass drum hits we have just like a little
mountain happening there.
| | 00:53 |
Only when the bass drum hits and then it
fades when it gets to the center.
| | 00:56 |
And then the right side represents the
snare drum.
| | 00:59 |
The way that we do this, is by using
quick maps to control the audio reaction.
| | 01:05 |
Now, we are going to ignore all of the
retro stylings, the noise, and the junk
| | 01:09 |
that I added here.
We're just going to start from scratch in
| | 01:11 |
the mapping audio reaction start comp
with a comp that's much cleaner and
| | 01:16 |
easier to see what's going on.
Let's go ahead and with the Form layer
| | 01:20 |
selected, open up Base form.
Let's change the box grid to box strings.
| | 01:25 |
And then we'll change the size x to 1100,
so that they fill the screen there.
| | 01:30 |
Now, we just want a handful of strings,
so I'm going to take the strings in y
| | 01:34 |
down to 13.
And the strings in z down to just 1.
| | 01:39 |
So it's just several strings here.
And just renders a little faster when I
| | 01:43 |
take my resolution dropdown to automatic.
And just resize this so we can see a
| | 01:48 |
little better.
And then I'm going to close up Base form,
| | 01:51 |
open Particle, let's take the particle
size to 6 so that those lines are a
| | 01:55 |
little bit thicker.
And lets go ahead open up Quick Maps and
| | 01:58 |
give this thing some color.
Open up Color Map, I'm just going to
| | 02:00 |
click on Random.
I'll put this over x, and that looks
| | 02:05 |
great first chance.
This Random button makes surprisingly
| | 02:09 |
good gradients, (LAUGH) great, great
color schemes, right off the bat.
| | 02:12 |
Now, we can't map anything in Quick Maps
yet because we haven't set up any audio
| | 02:17 |
reactions, so what we're going to do
eventually It's changed this to use Audio
| | 02:22 |
Reactive one, two or three.
But we need to set up the Audio Reactions first.
| | 02:26 |
So, I am going to go ahead and close up
everything.
| | 02:28 |
Open up Audio React, change the audio
layer to the formretrodrumloop.aif layer.
| | 02:35 |
Let's open up Reactor 1.
The first two reactors are going to deal
| | 02:39 |
with the snare drum hit.
So we want the frequency to be 300 on the
| | 02:44 |
first one here, and we want this to be
very specific because there's not too
| | 02:48 |
much difference between a bass drum and a
snare drum.
| | 02:51 |
So we're going to take the width down to
0.5, oops, 0.5.
| | 02:55 |
We're going to take the threshold up to
45, and let's go ahead and map this to fractal.
| | 03:03 |
Of course, we know that we have to open
up the fractal field and actually change
| | 03:07 |
this for that to work.
Let's take the displaced value to 170,
| | 03:10 |
and let's take the F scale value to 15.
And take the complexity down to 2.
| | 03:20 |
And that's a little intense (LAUGH), to
put it mildly, so let's take the strength
| | 03:25 |
down to 15.
So now, as the snare drum hits, we get
| | 03:30 |
this cool reaction there, pretty sweet.
I really do like the way that this looks
| | 03:36 |
in Ad mode.
It kind of looks like jelly, or something.
| | 03:39 |
It's a very cool look.
I decided to go back to a Particle at
| | 03:43 |
this point, and change the transfer mode
to lighten the screen also looks really cool.
| | 03:48 |
It's kind of like the Jelly effect, but a
little bit more subdued.
| | 03:51 |
And Lighten creates these, kind of, bars
that we saw in the original here.
| | 03:57 |
We kind of have, like, these outlined
bars.
| | 03:59 |
Lets go back to mapping audio reaction
start.
| | 04:02 |
Close up particle and now, let's go ahead
and close up Reactor one and open up
| | 04:07 |
Reactor two.
And we want to do now is have these
| | 04:10 |
particles disperse a little bit when this
snare drum hits.
| | 04:13 |
So again we're going to be using the
snare drum to control this which is about
| | 04:17 |
300 hertz.
Go ahead and set that there.
| | 04:20 |
Also take the frequency to 0.5 and the
threshold, again to 45.
| | 04:26 |
And we're going to map this to disperse.
And again we need to add some dis,
| | 04:30 |
dispersion for that to work, so just go
ahead and take the disbursed value to 100.
| | 04:35 |
And that went all over the place.
A little intense again so lets go ahead
| | 04:39 |
and take the strength down to 15 in this
case as well.
| | 04:43 |
So now, lets go ahead and preview what we
have.
| | 04:45 |
(MUSIC) So there you go and its also
you'll notice for the first notes that
| | 04:53 |
hit are the bass drum and these are
reacting to the bass drum and that was a
| | 04:57 |
conscious choice on my part.
I actually kind of wanted these to feel a
| | 05:01 |
little bit more alive.
The, the beat is actually really laid back.
| | 05:05 |
There's kind of like a lot going on.
It's just intense, sloppy, and that's
| | 05:08 |
kind of fun, and I wanted to have that
sloppiness show up in the particles.
| | 05:14 |
It looked really mechanical and robotic
when this read to just to the snare drum.
| | 05:19 |
It just doesn't go with the feel of the
music.
| | 05:21 |
So now, let's go ahead and change the
bass drum.
| | 05:24 |
Notice again before I do that though,
that all of the strings across the whole
| | 05:30 |
image here, they're are all reacting to
the, the music here.
| | 05:35 |
And there's really no room for the bass
drum to do anything.
| | 05:38 |
So keep that in mind.
Now, let's go ahead and change the
| | 05:42 |
frequency to 70 here.
And we'll take the width to 3, and we'll
| | 05:47 |
go ahead and increase the threshold all
the way up to 100.
| | 05:51 |
Let's go ahead and map this to displace
z.
| | 05:55 |
So what we want to do is as that, the
bass drum hits, the particle moves back.
| | 06:01 |
Now, as we, adjust this here.
All the particles move back, and we don't
| | 06:07 |
want to do that, we want kind of like a
little, like a graph, like a little wave
| | 06:11 |
of those base notes, instead of all the
particles.
| | 06:14 |
And so, of course, what we do, is we
change the delay direction.
| | 06:17 |
So, we're going to increase the delay max
to 2 seconds.
| | 06:20 |
That leaves each of these displacements,
these little waves, on the screen for 2 seconds.
| | 06:26 |
Now, it's really messy with all this
stuff going on at the same time, so its
| | 06:29 |
kind of cool though.
So it looks kind of cool, but it's a
| | 06:32 |
little messy.
So what we're going to do now is we're
| | 06:34 |
going to use quick map to control, which
particles are getting effected or rather
| | 06:39 |
more specifically what reactor is
effecting which area of the particles.
| | 06:45 |
Again, remember that I want the snare
drum to affect the right side, that's
| | 06:48 |
Reactor one and Reactor two.
And I want the bass drum that's
| | 06:52 |
controlling Reactor three to react on the
left side.
| | 06:55 |
So I'll open up Quick Maps.
I'l open up Map one.
| | 06:58 |
And again, I want to map this to Audio
React 1.
| | 07:02 |
And we only want this to be on the right
side so I can make this nothing And then
| | 07:08 |
gradually ramp up there.
And now, when the snare drum hits, it's
| | 07:12 |
only going to displace particles on oops,
I need to change, map this.
| | 07:17 |
I'm going to map this over x.
So now, it's only going to affect the
| | 07:22 |
right side.
We still have to worry about disperse
| | 07:25 |
though, the particles still dispersing
all over the place.
| | 07:27 |
So what you do, is now change Audio React
2 because remember, we set up an Audio
| | 07:32 |
React 2 that the particles would be
dispersed when our drum hits.
| | 07:35 |
So we need the same thing, map 2 over x
and we'll draw a similar graph for the
| | 07:40 |
dispersed particles.
And this is all just going to sloppy in
| | 07:47 |
general here but we fine tune this as you
please.
| | 07:51 |
Now, the snare drum is only hitting on
the right side of the image.
| | 07:55 |
See how the bass drum is on the left
there?
| | 07:58 |
And the only thing on the left side of
the image is just the bass drum.
| | 08:02 |
The snare drum stuff is all happening on
the right side.
| | 08:04 |
And of course, it looks sloppy because
the bass drum waves are going through the
| | 08:09 |
whole particles here, the whole x axis.
So lets go ahead and open up Map 3 and
| | 08:15 |
limit this to the left side.
We'll do that and then we'll change Map 3
| | 08:21 |
to Audio React 3.
And then this over x.
| | 08:25 |
So now, bass drums on the left side.
Snare drums on the right side.
| | 08:30 |
All is well in the universe.
That's kind of a cool effect.
| | 08:35 |
We've specified exactly where on the
particles we want the audio reactions to
| | 08:40 |
take place.
So you can see that we have infinite
| | 08:42 |
control over how we play with audio in
regards to causing reactions in our particles.
| | 08:49 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Creating 3D Form ObjectsCreating 3D Form objects| 00:00 |
In this chapter, we're going to look at
using a 3D object as the base form.
| | 00:05 |
Now we're going to go ahead and start
from scratch here, so we're just going to
| | 00:08 |
go ahead and import this file.
This is the skull.obj file.
| | 00:13 |
You'll find this inside the Exercise
Files folder.
| | 00:17 |
Go to the Media folder inside the 3D
Objects folder and there you'll find it.
| | 00:22 |
Go ahead and open that up.
And After Effects won't be able to use
| | 00:26 |
the file so we'll get this thumbnail that
say OBJ to be used in Trapcode Form.
| | 00:31 |
And I'm going to go ahead and make a new
composition.
| | 00:33 |
And I'm using 1024 by 540 at 29.97 frames
per second.
| | 00:37 |
I'm going to go ahead and click OK.
I'm going to right-click and make a new
| | 00:43 |
solid upon which we will apply form.
There we go.
| | 00:50 |
And now let's go ahead and bring in the
skull.obj file.
| | 00:55 |
Now, as you can see here, it says OBJ FOR
USE WITH TRAPCODE FORM.
| | 01:01 |
That's just kind of like the placeholder
for the OBJ.
| | 01:05 |
I'm going to go ahead and just turn off
the visibility of the form the skull.obj file.
| | 01:11 |
And go back to form and in the Base Form
we'll open that up, and we'll change the
| | 01:17 |
Base Form to OBJ model.
This, again, allows you to use a 3D
| | 01:23 |
object to generate Particles from.
The same way we've used the cube or a
| | 01:27 |
sphere, we could use a 3D object.
We opened up OBJ settings and we just
| | 01:31 |
choose the 3D Model from this dropdown.
And there we have it, there's our skull.
| | 01:37 |
I'm going to go ahead and create a new
camera.
| | 01:40 |
I'll right-click in my timeline, choose
New > Camera.
| | 01:45 |
Click OK.
And, I could go ahead and choose the
| | 01:48 |
Unified Camera tool.
Right-click and drag upwards to zoom in.
| | 01:52 |
Now we can move that around.
Let's go ahead and change the color.
| | 01:56 |
If I go back to Form up the form, open up
Particle settings and if we could change
| | 02:01 |
the Color to, like, a cool blue here.
Here we have this awesome 3D skull.
| | 02:07 |
And this is where Form really starts
getting exciting because there's just so
| | 02:11 |
much you can do with it.
And not only is it a 3D object, but it
| | 02:16 |
also responds in the same way to fractal
displacement or we could disburse the particles.
| | 02:23 |
So we could disperse them and have them
gather into a skull if we want to.
| | 02:27 |
And we could also, again, go into fractal
field and displace this.
| | 02:32 |
we could have it affect size.
And maybe the Opacity, and then it's auto-animating.
| | 02:39 |
So this head now has this cool ghostly
warble.
| | 02:42 |
And all of this stuff is possible because
of the ability to use OBJ files as a base
| | 02:48 |
form here.
I take this Displacement down to zero.
| | 02:53 |
Now, another thing to be aware of is that
when you install form, it automatically,
| | 02:58 |
inside of your After Effects folder, it
will install a folder called OBJ files.
| | 03:05 |
This comes as a huge library of really
basic OBJ files from geometric objects to
| | 03:10 |
actually a city, which is very cool.
So, and there is a light bulb and there's
| | 03:16 |
blobs and all kinds of basic primatives.
Even in OBJ sequence, which is how you
| | 03:22 |
can import an animated 3D object.
You import an OBJ sequence.
| | 03:26 |
Now, to do that, all you have to do is
import from the OBJ files folder.
| | 03:33 |
We'll go to the OBJ Sequences folder, and
we'll say cylinder wobble.
| | 03:38 |
I think it's misspelled here.
This looks like cyclinder, but it's
| | 03:40 |
supposed to be cylinder I think.
Click the first one, and we'll choose
| | 03:44 |
Form 2 OBJ file sequence.
Click Open.
| | 03:47 |
We'll drag this image sequence down to
the bottom.
| | 03:51 |
Turn it off, go back to Form.
And we'll simply change the 3D model from
| | 03:57 |
the skull to the cylinder wobble and now
we have an animated 3D sequence.
| | 04:04 |
Just going to go back to the skull here,
the power again of these 3D objects is
| | 04:07 |
that we could then apply not only
disperse and fractal but also we can
| | 04:11 |
cause audio reactions to this.
And everything that we've seen so far
| | 04:16 |
with Form quick maps and the like, we can
apply to 3D objects of particles.
| | 04:21 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Skipping vertices| 00:00 |
Before we get started, one thing to be
aware of with this exercise file.
| | 00:03 |
I'm using two 3D objects in this project
file City and Tube Long.
| | 00:09 |
And these are both found inside of the
OBJ files folder that comes with form.
| | 00:14 |
So it's very probable that you will get
an error with the exercise files saying
| | 00:19 |
After Effects cannot locate these two OBJ
files.
| | 00:22 |
You'll need to get them from again the
directory we talked about in the last movie.
| | 00:27 |
In this tutorial we're going to look a
little more closely at some of the cool
| | 00:30 |
things you can do with 3D objects and
form.
| | 00:32 |
Namely making holograms and another
option that we're going to look at called
| | 00:35 |
skipping vertices.
So, here's just a little hologram here.
| | 00:39 |
Just some stuff you can do with 3D
objects.
| | 00:43 |
This is also formative background, by the
way, with some fake bouquet, it's
| | 00:47 |
basically just dispersed form particles
with some random size and some pretty
| | 00:53 |
colors with the, quick map, color map
thing, pretty cool stuff.
| | 00:58 |
Let's go ahead and go to Skipping
Vertices One, where we have a basic
| | 01:01 |
Default Form with our cool little
background here and we'll go to our Form.
| | 01:06 |
Open up Form.
Open up Base Form.
| | 01:08 |
We'll change the Base Form to OBJ Model.
We'll change the, I'll open up the OBJ
| | 01:15 |
setting change 3D Model to City.obj and
there's our city.
| | 01:21 |
Lets go ahead and adjust center z.
We want to decrease that to bring that closer.
| | 01:27 |
This is based on a city model.
Now, what I didn't talk about last time
| | 01:32 |
is that when you actually bring a 3D
object into Form, what it does is that it
| | 01:37 |
places a particle upon each vertex in the
3D object.
| | 01:42 |
Now, so we can see this a little bit more
clearly, I'm going to open up the
| | 01:44 |
particle section, open up color, change
this to that cool blue look.
| | 01:50 |
Let's actually make this darker and let's
take the opacity down quite a bit here.
| | 01:55 |
Just so we could see more of this city
and what's going on.
| | 02:02 |
That's an opacity random there.
And if it helps, keep fiddling until get
| | 02:07 |
something where I can kind of see the
whole city but it still looks cool.
| | 02:10 |
If it helps I'm going to right click in
the timeline panel, you don't have to
| | 02:12 |
follow along if you don't want to.I'm
just going to create a new camera, click
| | 02:16 |
OK, and that might mess us up a little
bit since we adjusted the Z, so I might
| | 02:20 |
have to use my right click button and
drag down.
| | 02:25 |
And, now as I move this around, you can
see a little bit more of what's going on.
| | 02:30 |
We can kind of orbit this around.
I want to look down on the city a little bit.
| | 02:35 |
Go back to the form city layer And one of
the things that helps us have more
| | 02:40 |
control, because, really because it
creates a particle at every vertex,
| | 02:44 |
you're kind of limited by the time you're
in After Effects.
| | 02:46 |
You really have to set this up correctly
in your 3D application in order so that
| | 02:50 |
after you bring it into After Effects,
you get the particles where you want them
| | 02:53 |
to be.
So for example, in, in my case, with this
| | 02:55 |
city, I think it would have been way
cooler if there had been more vertices In
| | 02:59 |
the buildings and less vertices on the
ground, but that's not the way it was set up.
| | 03:05 |
So one of the things we could do to get
control over this is to adjust the Skip
| | 03:09 |
Vertex parameter.
So I could increase this, and as we do,
| | 03:13 |
we are creating particles at less and
less of the vertices of the whole model.
| | 03:19 |
And so you might find, as you keep
increasing this, that you can get closer
| | 03:23 |
to what you're looking for.
Now, this doesn't change the ratio of
| | 03:27 |
vertices in the buildings to the ground.
But it does make it so that there are
| | 03:32 |
less of each.
So then I could go back around again, and
| | 03:35 |
play more with opacity and bring some of
that back in.
| | 03:38 |
Note that if you do go back into your 3D
application and adjust your OBJ after
| | 03:43 |
bringing it into After Effects here you
can open up the refresh button and hit
| | 03:47 |
Refresh here which will of course force
after effects to relook at that file and
| | 03:53 |
use the appropriate amount of vertices or
whatever other changes you made to it.
| | 03:56 |
Also note the speed parameter.
This refers to the speed at which the
| | 04:00 |
animation sequence is played back.
Now one other quick creative example
| | 04:05 |
here, I'm going to Skipping Vertices two
where we have this tubelong.obj file
| | 04:10 |
brought in here.
I'll go to Form and we can just rotate
| | 04:15 |
this down so we're looking down the
barrel of it here and zoom in.
| | 04:18 |
That looks pretty sweet.
We can also skip vertices here if we want to.
| | 04:24 |
But one of the cool things is that some
models especially a lot of these really
| | 04:26 |
basic geometric models that you ship with
Form when you skip vertices you get some
| | 04:31 |
interesting artifacts sometimes.
So if I took this for example to 17, we
| | 04:35 |
just happened to get these dual rings.
This is a really cool look, that could be
| | 04:42 |
great as just a background element or
some other kind of accent there.
| | 04:47 |
And of course as we look down the barrel
of it, we have this really cool tunnel
| | 04:51 |
effect again.
And, you know, we have this kind of blur
| | 04:54 |
here which looks like it's some kind of
depth of field and it's not.
| | 04:57 |
It's actually being created by the sphere
feather.
| | 05:00 |
So, if we want to take off the
feathering, we could take Sphere Feather
| | 05:04 |
down to let's say zero.
And now we just have these kind of like
| | 05:07 |
again, these bouquet patterns, just
little flat circles which can be really beautiful.
| | 05:12 |
Now, I'm going to tilt this up, the
camera up, so we can see these rings again.
| | 05:16 |
Now I'm going to skip even more vertices
so I can take this up to let's say 25.
| | 05:20 |
And sometimes you just hit this sweet
spot.
| | 05:23 |
So if I went to 24, it just really kind
of random and garbled but you hit 25 and
| | 05:30 |
you get these really cool like almost
like DNA strands or something like that.
| | 05:34 |
At this point we can go back to our
particle settings, maybe increase the
| | 05:39 |
size a little bit, maybe add a little
randomness, a little randomness to that side.
| | 05:43 |
Take down the opacity.
More size.
| | 05:46 |
We just kind of play with this a little
bit until we get some other really cool
| | 05:51 |
setting here.
And this is a really beautiful series of
| | 05:54 |
strands that I don't know how you would
come up with this otherwise but using a
| | 05:59 |
3D object, a very simple, primitive 3D
object and just skipping some vertices
| | 06:04 |
allows you to create cool shapes like
this.
| | 06:06 |
So don't let your creativity be limited
by what you have on hand don't just
| | 06:11 |
immediately be dismissive of a shape
because it is so rudimentary and simple
| | 06:15 |
because again you can create some really
great stuff from it.
| | 06:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Additional Parameters in FormUsing Kaleidospace| 00:00 |
In this chapter we're going to look at a
couple other really cool features in Form
| | 00:04 |
and one of them is called Kaleidoscope or
Kaleidospace and that's what we're going
| | 00:08 |
to look at in this tutorial.
Now I have here this basic form that's
| | 00:12 |
moving around here and it kind of looks
like Trapcode Form, it's like the same
| | 00:16 |
kind of rectangular shape that we're kind
of used to seeing.
| | 00:19 |
It's beautiful, and I, and I love it,
it's amazing.
| | 00:22 |
But Kaleidospace is going to help us to
kind of give us some more randomness.
| | 00:26 |
So I'm going to open up Kaleidospace, and
what it does, is that it splits the image
| | 00:32 |
into quarters here, and allows you to
mirror what's happening.
| | 00:37 |
So I'm going to change the mirror mode
from off to horizontal.
| | 00:40 |
And what that does, it draws a horizontal
line, by default, right down the middle
| | 00:45 |
of the, the comp, or through the middle
of the, the comp here.
| | 00:48 |
And it's, the layer, I should say.
And it duplicates what's on the top half
| | 00:54 |
and shows it on the bottom.
So, again, here's off and so, here's that
| | 00:58 |
top half shape.
And we say horizontal, by default it
| | 01:02 |
removes the bottom half and replaces it
with the top half.
| | 01:07 |
And so now as we play this back.
We have this really interesting mirrored
| | 01:12 |
effect here, very beautiful and this
shape here, the geometry, is very unconventional.
| | 01:18 |
We could also mirror this vertically so
it draws a line vertically through the
| | 01:24 |
top and bottom of the middle of the comp,
or the layer again.
| | 01:28 |
And duplicates that as well.
Also a beautiful effect.
| | 01:33 |
We could also do horizontal and vertical
at the same time.
| | 01:36 |
That's what the H plus V is.
That creates kind of like a quadrant, so
| | 01:39 |
it'll take the upper left-hand quadrant
and basically mirror it to all the
| | 01:44 |
different sides there.
It's a really kind of weird effect but
| | 01:48 |
for logos it looks really organized and
stylized.
| | 01:53 |
So again, it looks unlike anything you
would normally create with Form.
| | 01:57 |
But, also, very cool, I like that.
Now I'm going to take this back to horizontal.
| | 02:04 |
Just so we can see what's going on here.
And again here's it off, so it's taking
| | 02:08 |
the top half and mirroring it on the
bottom.
| | 02:11 |
Now by default, the behavior is mirror
and remove.
| | 02:13 |
In other words it splits it in half and
then copies and pastes it on the other
| | 02:18 |
side like a reflection.
But you could also choose to mirror everything.
| | 02:22 |
So instead of taking just one half and
splitting it, it's going to take both
| | 02:27 |
halves and mirror to each side.
So now, both halves have both halves.
| | 02:33 |
And so again, it creates this really
beautiful, elegant reflection.
| | 02:40 |
Very cool pattern.
Now, another thing you could do.
| | 02:43 |
I'm just going to take this back to
mirror and remove so that it renders a
| | 02:46 |
little faster.
But another thing that you could do is
| | 02:48 |
adjust the center x y.
So by default we have the split happening
| | 02:53 |
at this line here, but if we moved this
effect control point, so that the center
| | 02:59 |
x y.
Actually that's not the center x y.
| | 03:00 |
Let me undo that.
I'll move the center x y here so that we
| | 03:03 |
get access to that effect control point
and now you can see that we're changing
| | 03:09 |
the area this is duplicated from.
Doesn't really have any difference if we
| | 03:13 |
go left or right if we're mirroring
horizontally.
| | 03:16 |
We can see that we can chose where we
want that split to be.
| | 03:24 |
Interesting stuff.
Let's say we chose a horizontal and vertical.
| | 03:27 |
Then we have access to horizontal and
vertical axis and that makes a difference.
| | 03:32 |
So it's basically around what axis or
where is the axis that the mirroring is happening.
| | 03:40 |
Honestly, Kaleidospace is not the best
feature in Form.
| | 03:44 |
But it can take a standard Form shape,
the regular rectangular shape, and make
| | 03:49 |
something really unconventional and
unique.
| | 03:52 |
I mean, imagine again if you were to
combine Kaleidospace with other Form
| | 03:57 |
features like Audio React in QuickMap or
even the 3D Form objects we just looked
| | 04:02 |
at in the last chapter.
I mean the possibilities really are
| | 04:05 |
endless with this tool, so it's a great
one to experiment with.
| | 04:08 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using World Transform| 00:00 |
On its surface the World Transform
controls might not seem very helpful.
| | 00:04 |
If we open World Transform with Form here
we see we just have the basic XYZ
| | 00:10 |
rotation, XYZ offset, basically position,
and we also have scale.
| | 00:14 |
Now you might at first glance look at
this and think, why would I even care
| | 00:18 |
about that, because in the Base Form
section I have size and I have rotation
| | 00:23 |
and I have position?
I have everything that I need, why do I
| | 00:25 |
need this?
Well, now that I have this shape that we
| | 00:29 |
were looking at in the last movie, with
kaleidoscope, or Kaleidospace.
| | 00:32 |
Now that I have this animated and set up,
we can really see the difference when we
| | 00:37 |
go back to Base Form and let's say we
decide to move it.
| | 00:40 |
I'll go to Center XY and move the X axis.
Now, this is absolutely stunningly
| | 00:47 |
beautiful effect as this moves from left
to right.
| | 00:52 |
It actually passes through the fractal
field as it moves.
| | 00:57 |
So let's say, I'm going to undo that,
let's say I want to move this whole shape
| | 01:01 |
over to the left, or over to the right.
If I use center xy the shape doesn't
| | 01:06 |
move, it passes through the fractal.
That's where World Transform comes in.
| | 01:10 |
It moves the entire world, fractal field
and all.
| | 01:14 |
So I can go to my X offset, move this
over to the left, and you can see that
| | 01:18 |
the shape is maintained.
Same thing here if we went to try to
| | 01:23 |
increase size X, Y, and Z, it's going to
screw up the ratio of the, of different
| | 01:30 |
sizes and the particles and everything.
But we could also just go to the scale of
| | 01:34 |
World Transform and just scale this whole
thing up or down.
| | 01:37 |
We could rotate the whole thing around
different axes, the X or Y or Z axis.
| | 01:44 |
And again we have the X, Y, and Z offset.
And again, that moves everything, all the
| | 01:50 |
quick maps, the fractal fields and
everything, so that the shape is maintained.
| | 01:54 |
It doesn't sound like a life saver, and
you might not use it every time you use
| | 01:57 |
Form, but trust me folks, this is a very
important feature to know about.
| | 02:01 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
11. Sample ProjectsDissolving a logo| 00:00 |
In this chapter, we're just going to take
a look at using Form in more practical ways.
| | 00:04 |
In this movie, we're going to look at
dissolving this standard Corporate Logo
| | 00:08 |
here using Form.
Now what I'm going to do, is I'm going to
| | 00:12 |
turn off the Layer, that Precomp Logo
Layer with the logo, and turn on the Form Solid.
| | 00:18 |
Apply Form to it.
And let's go ahead and set up the Base
| | 00:22 |
Form, by opening base form here.
We'll leave it set to Grid.
| | 00:25 |
And let's make the size in the X and the
Y the same as the comp, which is the
| | 00:30 |
1,024, oops.
1024 by 540.
| | 00:33 |
And let's not worry about size Z, but
let's make the particles in X 1024 by
| | 00:40 |
540, and we only want one particle in Z.
Basically gives us one particle for every pixel.
| | 00:47 |
That's going to make the logo be a little
bit more clear.
| | 00:50 |
So lets go ahead and now close up Base
Form.
| | 00:54 |
Go into the Particle section.
Actually before you do anything else,
| | 00:57 |
lets go ahead and open up Layer Maps,
Color and Alpha.
| | 01:00 |
We'll change the layer to the Precomp
Logo Layer.
| | 01:04 |
Change the functionality to the RGBA, to
RGBA.
| | 01:07 |
And we'll go ahead and map this over X Y.
And close that up.
| | 01:11 |
And now we have a pretty close
approximation of the logo.
| | 01:14 |
It's not as sharp, not as clear, so you
might want to, as these, the logo kind of
| | 01:19 |
gathers together, you might want to maybe
cross dissolve fade out to the real logo.
| | 01:23 |
And maybe use a mass to bring that in, or
what have you.
| | 01:26 |
But, we're not going to fiddle with that
stuff, just Form in this tutorial.
| | 01:29 |
And I'm going to change the Transfer Mode
from Add to Screen.
| | 01:34 |
That's looking a little better but still
kind of faded.
| | 01:37 |
If we take it to Normal that's something
else we can do.
| | 01:41 |
That makes that look a little bit better.
we could also take them to size.
| | 01:44 |
To maybe something a little bit stronger
like 1.2, and then we have a pretty good logo.
| | 01:49 |
If we A B these the original looks a lot
sharper, but this still looks pretty good.
| | 01:55 |
We could try taking this size up a little
higher, maybe to 1.5, it actually looks
| | 01:59 |
pretty good.
If we take it too high, let's say we take
| | 02:01 |
it to 5, it starts getting a little bit
more blurry.
| | 02:05 |
So we start getting the opposite result.
So let's actually go to back to 1.5, I
| | 02:11 |
think that'll, that'll work for us.
Now, let's go ahead and close up particle.
| | 02:15 |
We'll open up Disperse and Twist, and
we'll disperse this a lot.
| | 02:20 |
I'm just going to take this to 200.
So now all those particles are just
| | 02:24 |
dispersed and going all over the place.
And the way that we can control this is
| | 02:27 |
with Quick Maps.
So I'm going to open up MAP1, and we want
| | 02:31 |
some of these to be completely dispersed,
and some of them not to disperse over time.
| | 02:37 |
And even though, let's change MAP1 to X
here.
| | 02:41 |
And even though we don't actually want
the particles to disperse from right to
| | 02:48 |
left, this is actually going to help us
when these particles gather together.
| | 02:52 |
So I map one to Disperse strength, and
you'll notice that I have particles
| | 02:58 |
completely dispersed in the left, towards
the right they don't disperse at all.
| | 03:03 |
Well this is where we can use and
actually animate Map number one offset.
| | 03:08 |
Because this is basically the strength of
this map on the image, so as we take this
| | 03:13 |
down, we're actually just taking away the
power of this Quick Map.
| | 03:20 |
So now, at 0, it has no effect
whatsoever, and we'll take it back to 100.
| | 03:26 |
If we increase this, it has even more
effect, so that the particles even on the
| | 03:30 |
right are dispersed.
So if we then animate this, from 0 up to
| | 03:37 |
200, we dissolve the logo.
Cool stuff!
| | 03:43 |
Now of course, the opposite is also true.
We could start with these particles
| | 03:45 |
dispersed, and animate the MAP1 offset
value to 0, so that it gathers.
| | 03:52 |
Also kind of a cool look.
Now what if you wanted to gather from the
| | 03:58 |
other side?
Just flip the Quick Map.
| | 04:00 |
Click the Flip button, and now as the
particles are dispersed, we animate this
| | 04:06 |
getting, becoming a lower value, the
particles gather from left to right.
| | 04:10 |
And again, as the particles gather we may
want to go in and animate a mask going
| | 04:18 |
across the bottom layer here, so that we
actually have the Sharp Layer that we're
| | 04:23 |
looking at.
And we'll also need to mask out the Form
| | 04:26 |
Layer as well.
But for our purposes here, this is a
| | 04:30 |
really cool trick.
Note that if desired, you could also go
| | 04:34 |
in to the fractal fields, or the
spherical fields and add some
| | 04:38 |
displacement there, or whatever you want
to do.
| | 04:40 |
I chose not to do that here, because as
you increase any of these values again,
| | 04:44 |
the fractal field starts acting on the
final result, and I didn't want my final
| | 04:49 |
result to be wavy like that.
So I chose to leave that off, but again,
| | 04:53 |
that is an option.
| | 04:54 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a light wall| 00:00 |
In this tutorial we're going to build
this cool kind of light wall effect, that
| | 00:05 |
you see a lot of times in music videos
and what not.
| | 00:08 |
To really do this effect right you need a
flare plugin like Knoll Light Factory or
| | 00:14 |
Video Copilots optical flairs, because
you really want light flairs coming off
| | 00:18 |
here that's really the coolest thing.
But, in lieu of having those things we're
| | 00:21 |
going to still build this and we're
going to learn some new tricks we haven't
| | 00:25 |
covered yet in form along the way as we
go.
| | 00:28 |
Okay, so what I'm going to do is get out
of this and I'm going to first go and
| | 00:32 |
Option click on the MAC or Alt click on
the PC.
| | 00:37 |
This 32 BPC thing, at the bottom of the
project panel.
| | 00:40 |
We want to go back to 8 BPC or 8 bits per
channel.
| | 00:44 |
You see the difference that makes here.
You'll see the difference that makes in
| | 00:48 |
our wall as we build it.
Now in the light wall start com I've gone
| | 00:52 |
ahead and done some of the boring base
form stuff that we do every video.
| | 00:57 |
I figured we pretty much can get here by
now.
| | 01:00 |
But one of the things that I didn't do is
I want to also take down the size z to zero.
| | 01:08 |
because what I want to do is I want these
circles to be exactly on top of each other.
| | 01:14 |
That way I can kind of oscillate and play
with the different opacities by using the
| | 01:19 |
effect opacity in the fractal field area.
So that we can kind of have these random
| | 01:24 |
flickering of light.
So let's actually see what I mean here,
| | 01:28 |
we'll go down to Fractal Field and take
effect opacity up to 50.
| | 01:35 |
And how to strong effect, and that
completely knocked out all of these
| | 01:39 |
particles in Z.
So we'll go back and forth and show you
| | 01:43 |
another trick on how to.
Maybe make these kind of semi transparent.
| | 01:47 |
for now though, let's just go ahead and
take Flow Evolution down to 20 so this is
| | 01:51 |
a little bit more slow and fluid.
And let's go ahead and drag the form
| | 01:54 |
layer behind the layers with the model on
it.
| | 01:59 |
Now, of course, we have to play with the
color here.
| | 02:02 |
But, in order to play with the color, in
order to make real light, we have to be
| | 02:06 |
back in 32 bits per channel mode.
because right now this just doesn't look
| | 02:12 |
all that great.
So, I am going to Option or Alt click
| | 02:15 |
this again to get back to 32 bits per
channel, and now with that I can go back
| | 02:21 |
to the particle settings here and change
the color and now I could change the
| | 02:24 |
color to a super light value.
So I want the red value of 3 a green
| | 02:31 |
value of 2 and will leave blue at 1 and I
will go ahead and hit OK.
| | 02:35 |
Now, you can start to see a little bit
what's happening here is that as some of
| | 02:39 |
these fade out, it's much more like the
way lights would fade out.
| | 02:43 |
And even in this little remnant right
here, as we wait for it to render, this
| | 02:50 |
little thing how it's like partially
transparent, this is not the way that
| | 02:54 |
light works.
This is the way that light works as these
| | 02:56 |
super bright lights fade out, there still
is a little bit of a glow here.
| | 03:00 |
And that's what we bring out by using the
32 bits per channel mode.
| | 03:05 |
To enhance this, I'm going to right click
and in the Timeline panel, I'm going to
| | 03:09 |
create a new adjustment layer, drag this
down directly over the form layer.
| | 03:13 |
So we're not glowing the woman as well.
And let's go ahead and Apply the Fast
| | 03:18 |
Blur effect which is also a 32 per bit
channel effect.
| | 03:24 |
And now as we increase the blurriness, we
get a much more realistic glow.
| | 03:28 |
Now we could go back to form and increase
the exposure so that we could blur this
| | 03:33 |
more and still have these lights be
really bright.
| | 03:36 |
But you get the idea.
This looks very cool and it looks very
| | 03:41 |
much like the way lights would act in the
real world.
| | 03:44 |
One of the things that I did is I
adjusted the blur dimensions.
| | 03:47 |
We can choose to adjust this horizontally
as I did.
| | 03:50 |
It kind of creates this anamorphic look
or maybe this kind of like interesting
| | 03:54 |
light wall going on in the background.
A lot you can do with that.
| | 03:58 |
Or, we could change this to Vertical, if
you want to, and make these lights streaks.
| | 04:03 |
Totally your call.
Very cool effect, though.
| | 04:06 |
I'm going to go and just leave this set
to Horizontal, to match what I had in my
| | 04:10 |
initial look there.
Now, another thing that I did in my
| | 04:14 |
original example, and I'm not going to
take the time to do here.
| | 04:16 |
As I create another adjustment layer with
a mask that went on the inside, and I did
| | 04:22 |
that so that I can apply glow.
And when I apply glow I applied the glow
| | 04:26 |
to the woman and the background, this
creates kind of a light lake on her
| | 04:30 |
shoulder which it adds a lot to our
composite.
| | 04:34 |
If we take that off you could see that
the woman's shoulder is completely dark.
| | 04:38 |
And if the lights are really this bright
there's going to be a little bit of spill
| | 04:42 |
on her, at least she's going to be
influenced in the camera lens by the
| | 04:45 |
light behind her.
So, by doing that, you can see that glow
| | 04:49 |
on her shoulders, and it just kind of
brings her into that scene.
| | 04:52 |
The reason why I made a mask is if I took
this to none then her forehead gets glow
| | 04:57 |
applied to it and I, I didn't want that
so I used Subtract mode to get rid of that.
| | 05:03 |
Now, one other tip here, I'm going to go
back to the light wall starts.
| | 05:06 |
You'll notice that glow also kind of
really enhanced these lights and made
| | 05:10 |
them more pronounced as well.
Anyways, go back to light wall start.
| | 05:13 |
One other trick here if you go back to
form, I'm going to close up everything else.
| | 05:17 |
Open up Quick Maps.
And one of the things that we can do is
| | 05:20 |
we can up, have these lights flicker in a
more realistic way.
| | 05:25 |
And what I did for that is I opened up
Map 1.
| | 05:28 |
And I use the basic map that fades out
from right to left.
| | 05:33 |
And I map this over the Fractal Strength,
but I want to map this over the Z axis.
| | 05:40 |
So that will add the fractal strength in
varying degrees from the foreground to
| | 05:45 |
the background.
That also makes it so that as opacity is
| | 05:50 |
affected we are not having these
particles completely fade out, although
| | 05:55 |
they are still significantly being
affected by the opacity in the fractal
| | 06:01 |
field section.
So there you have it, folks.
| | 06:03 |
Just a quick little tip on how to use HDR
colors when working and building lights
| | 06:08 |
with form.
| | 06:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the fairy orb| 00:00 |
In this tutorial we're going to take
things to the next level and create this
| | 00:03 |
Form Orb.
This is kind of a, a derived example from
| | 00:09 |
this scene from this iPad app that I've
been making.
| | 00:12 |
And so basically this fairy is in this
girl's hands, and she's jumping around.
| | 00:17 |
And so this ball that we are going to
make out of form.
| | 00:20 |
kind of spins around and sparkles and
it's kind of cool.
| | 00:25 |
So we get to channel our inner fairy
princesses on this one, folks.
| | 00:30 |
(LAUGH) So go over to the fairy orb start
comp and go ahead and select the Form layer.
| | 00:37 |
Oop, there's CC Radial Fast Blur there.
Let's go ahead and delete that.
| | 00:40 |
And let's go ahead and apply the Form
effect, to this layer.
| | 00:46 |
Now I've gone ahead and, tracked the
fairy, and the camera, so, we really
| | 00:52 |
don't have to do anything other than just
get form in the right spot, and the
| | 00:56 |
camera will do the rest as far as
movement's concerned.
| | 00:59 |
So we can go ahead and open up Base form.
And we actually want this to be a sphere
| | 01:03 |
of course.
And lets go ahead and click on that
| | 01:06 |
effect control point.
Just move that in the center of the
| | 01:09 |
fairy's torso there.
Let's go ahead and make this sphere a
| | 01:12 |
little bit bigger.
300 in each of x y and z for the size.
| | 01:16 |
And let's take particles down
significantly.
| | 01:20 |
To 20 in the X and Y, and just one sphere
layer, just one ball of particles going
| | 01:26 |
around the outside.
We're going to come back to rotation in
| | 01:29 |
just a second.
For now, close up Base Form, open up the
| | 01:32 |
Particle settings and let's go ahead and
make these particles really big.
| | 01:36 |
Take up the size up to seven so that we
can really see them.
| | 01:39 |
We actually don't want these foggy
particles, we want solid circles, so
| | 01:43 |
we're going to take fear sphere feather
which is kind of a tongue twister for me,
| | 01:47 |
down to zero.
And we'll go ahead and give some
| | 01:50 |
randomness to the size and the opacity.
How about 70 for size random and then 70
| | 01:54 |
for our opacity random too.
This really cool mix of cool looking
| | 02:01 |
circles here.
Now of course, as my three-year old
| | 02:03 |
daughter would tell you.
White is not the color of princesses.
| | 02:06 |
Pink is the color of princesses.
So we've got to open up Quick Maps, and
| | 02:10 |
let's go ahead and open up the Color Map.
And I'm going to go ahead and click this
| | 02:16 |
yellow to purple gray, and this will be a
great jumping off point.
| | 02:18 |
I don't want red in here.
I'm going to double-click the yellow
| | 02:23 |
color stop and add a very pale green, a
very light green and lets go ahead and
| | 02:30 |
move this pink one over.
Double-click that.
| | 02:32 |
Let's go ahead and add a nice baby blue
and looks pretty good.
| | 02:39 |
Let me take this purple and make it a
little more red and a little lighter.
| | 02:45 |
And there we have a nice princessy
gradient, we might go back and change that.
| | 02:50 |
Let's go ahead and map this.
I, I found that if you map it over x, it
| | 02:54 |
looks too hokey.
That looks kind of fake.
| | 02:56 |
Same thing with y.
You could really tell what's going on.
| | 02:59 |
And radially, it doesn't really give you
a big color spread.
| | 03:02 |
So I found that z actually gives you a
nice bit of randomness all throughout the
| | 03:08 |
sphere, which is exactly what I wanted.
Now, one of the problems here is that the
| | 03:12 |
particles are on one layer, and these
particles do not go behind the fairy,
| | 03:18 |
which is on a different layer.
So we can fake that by changing the opacity.
| | 03:23 |
And what works perfectly is that the
color map works best over Z.
| | 03:27 |
And we can actually use the opacity map
over Z to fade out the particles behind her.
| | 03:32 |
So we can go ahead and drag and draw
something that looks like this so the
| | 03:39 |
left side represents the particles in the
front of the sphere and the right side of
| | 03:44 |
the graphs represents the particles in
the back so we can just go ahead and
| | 03:48 |
taper that off.
Now you can see particles back here.
| | 03:51 |
Right, they're like those pink and purple
ones back there.
| | 03:54 |
They look like they are going behind her
and they're really going in front of her.
| | 03:57 |
But the ones in the back are fading out,
which creates that illusion.
| | 04:02 |
Very cool stuff.
Let's go ahead and close up Quick Maps.
| | 04:05 |
Adjust the Fractal field.
Let's go ahead and take Effects size to
| | 04:10 |
two, so a little bit more randomness and
we want the Fractal field to kind of
| | 04:15 |
warble and randomize this sphere and give
it some movement.
| | 04:17 |
Let's go ahead and Effect opacity, take
that up to ten.
| | 04:21 |
And we'll also displace this just a wee
bit, just of, just about 15 there.
| | 04:27 |
Now if we preview this, we have the
sphere.
| | 04:31 |
And the particles are moving around,
which is great.
| | 04:34 |
But we really want this to kind of spin
around her.
| | 04:36 |
I love that look.
So we're going to close up Fractal field.
| | 04:39 |
Go back to Base Form.
Go back to the first frame of the composition.
| | 04:43 |
I will go ahead and set a stopwatch,
because stopwatch for a Y rotation.
| | 04:47 |
Hit the End key to jump to the end of the
composition, and we're going to go ahead
| | 04:52 |
and, I actually want this to go around
her that way.
| | 04:56 |
So I'm going to that this to about
negative 50 degrees.
| | 05:00 |
So now as we preview this back this kind
of rotates around there.
| | 05:05 |
It's nice and slow and subtle, but it
still gives some nice movement there.
| | 05:09 |
Another thing that I did is I wanted to,
animate X rotation as well, I just wanted
| | 05:15 |
a little bit of, I want the particles to
be just a little bit going downwards.
| | 05:21 |
So it's kind of like going this direction
as opposed to just left or right.
| | 05:27 |
So it's going from the upper left to the
bottom right from where we're seeing it
| | 05:32 |
with that little extra help of the x
rotation.
| | 05:36 |
Very cool.
Alright, let's add some polish.
| | 05:38 |
Let's go ahead and I'm going to deselect
the entire layer and then reselect the
| | 05:43 |
entire layer.
So that I may press Cmnd + D on the Mac
| | 05:47 |
or Ctrl + D on the PC to duplicate this
entire layer.
| | 05:51 |
And we're going to go back to the
original form layer, and we're going to
| | 05:56 |
apply the CC Radial Fast Blur effect that
I neglected to delete in the beginning of
| | 06:02 |
the tutorial.
And we'll go ahead and click the effect
| | 06:05 |
control point for the center value.
Stick it right in the middle of the
| | 06:09 |
fairy's gut there, and we'll leave the
amount at 50.
| | 06:13 |
We could take that down a little bit if
you want to, but I think it looks good
| | 06:17 |
right about there, maybe 40.
And let's take the zoom to brightest.
| | 06:21 |
So now we have these cool rays shooting
out there.
| | 06:25 |
But if it's just raised, it doesn't look
all that great.
| | 06:27 |
So let's go back to the Duplicate Form
layer on top now and play with this a
| | 06:31 |
little bit.
Let's go ahead and we'll select Form, and
| | 06:36 |
let's press Cmd+D again with the effect
selected, not the layer selected, the
| | 06:41 |
effect on the duplicate form, the
top-layer of form.
| | 06:44 |
Select this, press Cmd+D on the Mac or
Ctrl+D on the PC.
| | 06:47 |
So, we have two instances of form.
I'm going to select the top one, I'm
| | 06:52 |
going to press Enter, and I'm going to
add the appendix star and then I'm going
| | 06:59 |
to go back to the form to the duplicate
and add another dash, a little appendix,
| | 07:05 |
and call it spheres.
So let's go up to Form Star and let's
| | 07:10 |
open up Particle and we'll change this to
Stars.
| | 07:14 |
Actually what I want to do before I do
this is just turn off the Form Spheres
| | 07:18 |
Layer so we could see our stars.
We'll talk about how to blend these two
| | 07:22 |
together in just a minute.
Go back to Form Star and then let's go
| | 07:25 |
ahead and take that size down quite a
bit.
| | 07:27 |
Let's say to four.
And, it's kind of cool that now, just
| | 07:32 |
because we made a duplicate, that we have
stars exactly where those circles are.
| | 07:37 |
Sometimes I like that effect.
In this case I'm going to give some
| | 07:39 |
randomness to the stars so that they're
in different places.
| | 07:42 |
Same movement, same animation, same
everything from the original, but I
| | 07:46 |
kind of want there just to be just random
stars that don't line up exactly.
| | 07:50 |
So I'm going to do that by just changing
the number of particles.
| | 07:53 |
and change this to 16X and Y.
And now it just seems we have random
| | 07:58 |
stars that just kind of rotate around
like our regular particles.
| | 08:03 |
I also might want to increase the size
random a bit more.
| | 08:08 |
Just a wee bit.
Well, was already pretty high anyway, let
| | 08:11 |
me just go take it up to 100.
Now let's go ahead and close up Form Star.
| | 08:14 |
Open up Form Spheres.
We'll turn that on, which gets rid of the stars.
| | 08:20 |
So, what we need to do is go down to
Rendering, and then change the transfer
| | 08:25 |
mode from None to something else.
I'm going to choose Add so that now our
| | 08:30 |
new little spheres are added to the
stars.
| | 08:34 |
It's looking a little cluttered, let's go
ahead and change this and I'm going to
| | 08:39 |
open up particle and I want these
particles to be glow spheres.
| | 08:44 |
In this case, I do want the sphere
feather to be 100 because I want these
| | 08:49 |
big, soft glowing spheres.
And I want to also change the particles
| | 08:52 |
so they're also random like the stars.
So I'm going to take the particles in x
| | 08:56 |
and y to 22 each.
This adds just a nice extra little bit a
| | 09:01 |
glow and few extra random particles.
So here's before.
| | 09:04 |
And after.
So here's before without it with just the
| | 09:07 |
original layer and the stars and then the
glow spheres.
| | 09:10 |
Just add these just random dots.
And the dots themselves aren't that
| | 09:13 |
great, but as they bundle up around the
edges there it creates this really great
| | 09:18 |
like halo effect almost because of that
Add Blend mode.
| | 09:24 |
Now we can hit the Home key and go back
and render that.
| | 09:29 |
And actually, you know what?
I don't like this green.
| | 09:31 |
I'm going to go back to the original Form
layer, open up Form, and I'm going to
| | 09:34 |
open up Quick Maps and I'm just going to
remove green.
| | 09:38 |
I like that there's green in some of the
other particles, just not in the main one.
| | 09:42 |
Matter of fact I'm going to get another
pink one in there.
| | 09:43 |
So I'm going to just click a stop
somewhere in there to add another stop
| | 09:46 |
that's kind of this neck of the woods
bring that over there and move that over
| | 09:52 |
until we get something we like and there
we have it folks.
| | 09:58 |
We can preview this now and see what we
have.
| | 10:03 |
And there you have it.
There is our form.
| | 10:05 |
And folks, this is really what form was
created for.
| | 10:09 |
For using almost any other particle
system, particles would be born and then
| | 10:13 |
dying and then adding duplicate particles
would not be this easy.
| | 10:17 |
We'd have to regulate that and animate
the birth of the particles and the death
| | 10:21 |
of the particles and fake it.
But with form these particles just exist.
| | 10:25 |
Again, this is the type of thing that
Form is made for.
| | 10:27 |
To make an object out of particles that
stays there, just like this glowing fairy orb.
| | 10:34 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 |
Well folks, the training series is
officially over, but I wanted to give you
| | 00:03 |
one last little bonus tip.
There's this new product out, it's
| | 00:06 |
semi-new I guess, called trap code
mirror.
| | 00:08 |
It's kind of like form, except it's not
about individual particles so much.
| | 00:14 |
It kind of creates a whole object.
And a lot of people were complaining with
| | 00:18 |
form that if you want to make kind of
like a thick object, that it's kind of
| | 00:20 |
challenging, and it doesn't render as
quickly.
| | 00:23 |
So this renders really fast, you can up
the frequency there and you can see how
| | 00:27 |
insanely responsive that is.
We could also adjust the evolution.
| | 00:33 |
A lot of perimeters here are very similar
to form, it's basically particles
| | 00:36 |
disrupted by a fractal field, and you
have total control over all that stuff of course.
| | 00:42 |
We could also scroll through this, which
looks really awesome.
| | 00:46 |
One of the benefits of mirrors is that it
has these shaders.
| | 00:49 |
So now it has long shader on it, which
makes it like this, you know, chocolatey
| | 00:53 |
look to it.
there's also density, which is a little
| | 00:57 |
bit more like form, and if we could go
back to evolution and evolve that.
| | 01:02 |
Lot of this stuff like complexity, you'll
be familiar with from, from form.
| | 01:07 |
So a very similar, I do think that it's
kind of not ready for prime time yet,
| | 01:10 |
even though it renders really fast and
there's some amazing tools here.
| | 01:15 |
As you start really bumping up the
settings you'll notice a lot of times
| | 01:19 |
there's just a lot of artifacts, and its
really dependent on your GPU.
| | 01:23 |
It's hardware dependent.
So, if you want to smooth this out and
| | 01:27 |
make it look better you really can't.
So, I don't think it's ready prime time
| | 01:31 |
yet, but it's definitely at a really
interesting piece of software to keep
| | 01:35 |
your eyes on.
So, again, I am Chad Perkins, thank you
| | 01:38 |
so much for watching this training series
I hope you learned something, I had a
| | 01:42 |
blast making it, on behalf of lynda.com,
thank you so much take care.
| | 01:46 |
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