Introduction| Welcome | Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a premium member of the
Online Training Library at lynda.com or if
| | 00:06 | you purchase this training on a disc,
then you'll have access to these sweet
| | 00:10 | exercise files, and you
can play around with them;
| | 00:15 | follow along with me if you choose to.
| | 00:17 | Note that the project files for
each chapter are here in the different
| | 00:22 | folders, so in Chapter 10, for
example, there are the projects we use in
| | 00:26 | Chapter 10, and the media that these
projects refer to is in the media folder
| | 00:31 | organized by category here.
| | 00:34 | Now it's important to note that you will
need Trapcode Particular on your system
| | 00:38 | in order to use these exercise files,
because this is a course on Particular
| | 00:43 | which is not shipped with After Effects.
| | 00:44 | You will need on your system to open
almost every After Effects project included
| | 00:49 | with this training series.
| | 00:50 | Now if you don't have Trapcode
Particular you can go over to
| | 00:54 | redgiantsoftware.com and here you can
pick up a free 30-day trial of Particular
| | 01:01 | and that will help you to be able to follow
along with all the exercise files in the course.
| | 01:06 | Now if you are a monthly or an annual
member of the lynda.com Online Training
| | 01:10 | Library, then you won't have access
to these exercise files, but you could
| | 01:14 | still follow along and use your own
projects or just kick back and watch the
| | 01:18 | magic happen.
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| The prerequisites to this course| 00:00 | Trapcode Particular is a fairly complex
little tool there, there is a lot going
| | 00:06 | on, and so this training series
might not be for the faint of heart.
| | 00:10 | It might not be for the
brand-new After Effects user.
| | 00:13 | I am going to expect you to know what
solids are and how to make them, as well
| | 00:18 | as lights and cameras.
| | 00:19 | How to precompose and what that's all
about and I won't be explaining too many
| | 00:23 | if any at all After Effects tools and basics.
| | 00:27 | So be prepared that you need to know
a little bit in After Effects before
| | 00:31 | jumping into this or you might get
lost a little bit, but if you even have a
| | 00:36 | basic understanding of After Effects,
if you've gone through an essential
| | 00:39 | training title on lynda.com
I think it will be just fine.
| | 00:42 | Just remember that the purpose of the
course is to teach Trapcode Particular
| | 00:46 | and not After Effects.
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| Using Trapcode Particular vs. Trapcode Form| 00:00 | One of the questions that people often
have is what's the difference between
| | 00:03 | Trapcode Form and Trapcode Particular,
on the surface they seem very similar and
| | 00:09 | here we are in Form and if you open up
the particles section, which looks just
| | 00:13 | like it does in Particular, there is a
particle type drop-down and all these
| | 00:16 | particle types are exactly
like they are in Particular.
| | 00:19 | So again on the surface they seem very
comparable and they are very similar in
| | 00:23 | lot of ways, but the big difference
is that Form is meant to stay put.
| | 00:28 | I mean animates you can move it around,
but it doesn't generate new particles
| | 00:32 | by default, I mean of course you could
animate these things, but it basically
| | 00:36 | is meant to be a form, it's meant to be
an object and the object can move, but
| | 00:41 | by default again there is not an increase
in the number of particles, they just are.
| | 00:46 | And so if we turn this off and contrast
this with Particular, Particular spits
| | 00:51 | out new particle that's meant to emit
particles of course and as we'll look out
| | 00:56 | throughout the training
series you can change that.
| | 00:58 | So you can basically change both, you
could have form and then particles and you
| | 01:02 | could have Particular stop emitting
particles, but by default that's the big
| | 01:06 | difference is that Particular is meant
to shoot out particles, emit them and
| | 01:11 | Form doesn't.So if you are going to
create something like smoke or fire or
| | 01:16 | embers as we'll look at or rain or snow,
something that kind of is constantly
| | 01:21 | generated, then
Particular might be your best bet.
| | 01:23 | If you are looking for something sturdy
and stable, something that will always
| | 01:29 | be on screen, later we'll look at a
flock of birds and you don't want those to
| | 01:33 | emit or change, Form might
be a good solution for that.
| | 01:37 | But essentially that is the big
distinction, of course there is a lot of other
| | 01:42 | little features that are in one, they
are not in the other, but that's just the
| | 01:46 | basic simple idea behind Form and Particular.
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1. Getting StartedApplying the Particular effect| 00:00 | Coming into this training series, at
this point we should know how to apply
| | 00:04 | effects, but there are some issues with
applying Particular that you might want
| | 00:08 | to be aware of, hence this movie here.
| | 00:10 | So what I am going to do is create a
new solid, I'm just going to just press
| | 00:12 | Command+Y on the Mac or
Ctrl+Y on the PC to do that.
| | 00:16 | And I am going to make sure this is comp
size and I'll choose some whacky color,
| | 00:21 | it doesn't matter what it is, it's
just some vibrant color of solid.
| | 00:24 | And let's go and ahead try, apply in
Particular here, it's in the Trapcode
| | 00:29 | section, the Trapcode category of Effects.
| | 00:32 | So if you are one that likes to apply
effects from the Effect menu say, you want
| | 00:37 | to go to the Trapcode subcategory and
choose Particular from that, and notice
| | 00:43 | that it did not respect the fact that
we had a red solid, it completely ignored
| | 00:48 | what we had going on.
| | 00:50 | I didn't use the color from it and it
completely replaced it with Particular.
| | 00:55 | Now I want to show you something else
here, I am going to delete Particular and
| | 00:59 | let's apply something like Fractal Noise.
| | 01:02 | Well, after we apply Fractal Noise,
does Particular change? No, it does not.
| | 01:08 | So it did not respect any of that
color from other effects and the stack
| | 01:13 | completely ignored it.
| | 01:15 | Let me show you one other example.
| | 01:19 | If I have something like say, for
example, the Circle effect, and the Circle
| | 01:25 | effect is kind of interesting because it
actually alters the alpha of the layer.
| | 01:30 | So If I choose to show the Transparency
Grid we could see that it has actually
| | 01:34 | replaced the contents of the layer, so
here is before and then after, we could
| | 01:38 | see that the alpha has changed.
| | 01:40 | And a lot of times when you apply an
effect after an effect it adjust the alpha
| | 01:45 | like this then the effect will only show
up within the contents of the new alpha
| | 01:49 | channel created by this effect.
| | 01:51 | But if you could see with
Particular, this is not the case.
| | 01:55 | It completely ignores, let me turn
back off the Transparency Grid, it
| | 01:59 | completely ignores the circle and puts
particles everywhere, even if I create a
| | 02:06 | mask here, which again a lot of effects
will respect, turn-off Particular here
| | 02:13 | and I'll turn-off Circle so we could
see that now our layer is just within the
| | 02:18 | confines of this mask.
| | 02:21 | Particular will ignore the mask
and its particles will go everywhere.
| | 02:25 | So that is why 100% of the time you'll
want to apply Particular to just a fresh
| | 02:32 | solid layer with no effects and
nothing else on it because again Particular
| | 02:36 | doesn't like to share its space.
| | 02:38 | It's going to take over whatever else
is there and so I just keep that in mind
| | 02:42 | when applying the Particular effect.
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| Using the included presets| 00:00 | Particular ships with a host of
really cool presets that you can use as
| | 00:05 | starting points for your own
project if you wanted to or maybe creative
| | 00:09 | inspiration to see what Particular
is capable of and also just kind of to
| | 00:12 | educate yourself more about how
Particular works and we'll show you how to do
| | 00:16 | that a little bit later on in this video.
| | 00:18 | First thing we need to do is go up to
the Effect Controls Panel where we have
| | 00:24 | Particular here in this
project, Particular presets.
| | 00:26 | I want to go to the flyout menu of
the Effect Controls Panel and choose
| | 00:29 | Show Animation Presets.
| | 00:32 | Give that just a second, and now
we could see our Animation Presets.
| | 00:35 | Now you might not see this list
of Presets from that dropdown.
| | 00:40 | If you are not seeing it, what you
need to do is actually quit After Effects
| | 00:44 | and then restart After Effects and then your
Presets will be seen in this dropdown here.
| | 00:50 | So what I am going to do actually is I
want to make sure I am on frame zero and
| | 00:55 | that means I am ready for the
application of these presets, but you see we have
| | 01:00 | a really diverse and really cool list here.
| | 01:02 | We have everything from Organic Effects
like Fireworks and Smoke and Snow and Stars.
| | 01:09 | There are some really cool Motion
Graphics effects and other things that we'll
| | 01:14 | get into which is kind of cool.
| | 01:16 | I am going to check out this Explode
Out effect, and as I preview this we could
| | 01:20 | see we actually have a really complex
and really organic looking explosion with
| | 01:25 | a bunch of arms here,
really great looking effect.
| | 01:30 | Now what I want to do is actually apply
another preset, but before I do I want
| | 01:34 | to reset Particular.
| | 01:35 | Now typically what I would do in that
case, because I was working with another
| | 01:39 | effect, is I will click the
Reset button here in Particular.
| | 01:42 | However, with the way that Particular
works some of its features don't reset all
| | 01:46 | the way when you click that button.
| | 01:47 | So what you need to do is go to the
Animation Presets dropdown and choose this
| | 01:51 | Preset, a Full Reset, and that gets you
right back to square one and now I want
| | 01:57 | to choose Organic Lines Motion.
| | 02:00 | One of my favorite presets, what a
beautiful effect, look at that, just organic
| | 02:05 | and just it's beautiful.
| | 02:06 | Now you might say to yourself, how in the
world would you create this from scratch?
| | 02:11 | Again this is all -- both of these
presets just with one layer and with one
| | 02:15 | instance in Particular and
no other layers involved.
| | 02:17 | So how would you create this from
scratch or what you can do is select the layer
| | 02:22 | and press the letter U twice fast, so
that's uu and then you could see all of
| | 02:28 | the properties that have been
adjusted from their defaults.
| | 02:32 | As you can see there is quite a bit
that goes into making this effect, but once
| | 02:37 | you go in and take this apart, you
can see what they did to make this.
| | 02:40 | It's a great educational opportunity
for you to learn a little bit more about
| | 02:45 | what Particular is capable of and how
to get it to do these amazing effects.
| | 02:50 | So you don't have to use Presets, but
if you would like to again for a jumping
| | 02:54 | off point for your own projects like if
you want to make snow, for example, you
| | 02:58 | could start with the preset of snow
or an explosion or whatever you wanted.
| | 03:03 | It's also a great way to see what
Particular is capable of and to learn a little
| | 03:08 | bit more about how it works.
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| Understanding the Particular paradigm| 00:00 | In this tutorial we're just going to
look at the way that Particular thinks.
| | 00:04 | There is a certain paradigm here that
once you get it, it really helps you
| | 00:08 | understand where a Particular is coming from.
| | 00:10 | So I have this basic little particle
system here and I just have an Emitter and
| | 00:14 | I have rotated it so that these
particles are shooting out in one direction so
| | 00:18 | it's easy to see what's happening here.
| | 00:20 | I've also changed the particles to
fade out as they die which brings us to
| | 00:25 | our first point here.
| | 00:28 | With Particular we are controlling a
particle system here, we have an emitter
| | 00:33 | that shoots out particles and as
opposed to other parts of After Effects we
| | 00:38 | don't have any control over
these individual little particles.
| | 00:41 | So If I want to keep everything else
the same and just take this one little guy
| | 00:43 | right here and move him up or
something like that, I can't do that.
| | 00:46 | So with the particle system I could
control the entire system and the way that
| | 00:50 | works and I have flexibility over a
lot of parameters here, but I don't have
| | 00:57 | control over each individual
particle I just control the system.
| | 01:00 | Now in Particular the things that you
will probably focus on the most are the
| | 01:06 | Emitter section which basically
controls how the particles spit out and the
| | 01:11 | particles section which
controls what is being spit out.
| | 01:16 | So what is being spit out is controlled
in the particle and in what way are they
| | 01:21 | being spit out is what the emitter
section controls, and the Physics section
| | 01:24 | kind of helps with the Emitter section a
little bit as well as we add-in Wind or
| | 01:29 | Bounce or Gravity or what have you.
| | 01:31 | So the Physics and the Emitter
sections kind of work together, but a lot of
| | 01:35 | these other systems you don't use on
a daily basis when you are working in
| | 01:39 | Particular only for more
complex and specific needs.
| | 01:43 | So we have this emitter and again we can
control the velocity and a lot of other
| | 01:47 | attributes and we consider that when
the particles are created from the Emitter
| | 01:52 | when they are emitted from the Emitter,
we call that the particle birth, so it's
| | 01:56 | almost like there is a life-span here.
| | 01:58 | So they are born from the Emitter and
they kind of live, we refer that to the
| | 02:04 | life of the particle and then
they die out, they are dying.
| | 02:09 | So they fade out as they die as I have
set this to do, but there is a lot of
| | 02:14 | other things you could do, I have it
set out to do when the particles are
| | 02:18 | dying, you could have them change in size or
color or opacity as we have here as they die.
| | 02:24 | So it's important to understand that
these particles are almost like little
| | 02:27 | lives that they are born, they live a
life and we have control over that life
| | 02:31 | and what they do during their lifespan
and then what they do when they die out.
| | 02:37 | So again keeping in mind this is the big
picture of what Particular does and how
| | 02:42 | it thinks and operates.
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|
2. Working with an Intro ProjectCreating the smoke emitter| 00:00 | Particular has been accused of
being a little challenging to work with.
| | 00:06 | So in this chapter what we are going
to do is, we are going to take a little
| | 00:08 | simple intro project and show you
that that doesn't have to be the case.
| | 00:12 | Now most people, when they think of
particles, they think of these little
| | 00:15 | kind of sparkles, and the Particular can do
that, and this is actually done with Particular.
| | 00:19 | What we are going to do instead is we
are going to make these kinds of smoke
| | 00:23 | like particles and these smoke particles are
going to be used by this text as an alpha matte.
| | 00:30 | So the text will only appear where the smoke is.
| | 00:34 | It creates a really cool effect and
as you'll see it's a very simple thing.
| | 00:38 | So go to the introprojectstartcomp and you
could see what we have here, we have this text.
| | 00:44 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to create that smoke to use as the
| | 00:48 | alpha matte for this text.
| | 00:50 | So what I'm going to do is I am going
to select the Particular layer, I am
| | 00:53 | going to turn on its visibility and I
am going to solo it, clicking this little
| | 00:57 | icon right here, so that's all we are seeing,
and apply Trapcode Particular to this layer.
| | 01:04 | Now we know that Particular uses an
emitter to shoot out particles, but the
| | 01:09 | default emitter is a point emitter.
| | 01:11 | In other words it's all kind of
stemming from this little one point here and
| | 01:15 | it shoots outwards.
| | 01:17 | So for the smoke that we are going to
be creating, I should need a bigger area
| | 01:21 | than that to fill more of the text.
| | 01:23 | So under the emitter area I am going
to change the emitter type from Point,
| | 01:27 | which is what it is, to Box.
| | 01:31 | With Box chosen as the emitter we can
actually create an area of particles.
| | 01:36 | So we do that by going down to the
Emitter Size X, Size Y, and Size Z. In this
| | 01:41 | case we are going to take Emitter
Size X to 530, that's going to make this
| | 01:46 | much wider, and for Emitter Size Y that's up
in down here we can take this to about 80 or so.
| | 01:54 | And although this looks nothing like
smoke, the particles, the movement of
| | 02:00 | the particles is done.
| | 02:02 | That's all we need to do and as you will
see here we really don't have that much
| | 02:06 | more to do, even though it looks like it,
we really don't have that much more to
| | 02:10 | do in order to make this smoky.
| | 02:12 | So we'll do that in the next movie.
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| Refining the smoke| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to take
the little particles we made in the last
| | 00:04 | movie and make them look more
smoky, a lot more smoky actually.
| | 00:08 | And you'll see that it's just really
an easy process. It was easy in the last
| | 00:12 | movie--we really do too much--and it's
going to be easy in this movie as well.
| | 00:16 | So in the Effect Controls panel I am
going to close up the Emitter section of
| | 00:20 | Particular, just to clean this up a
little bit, and we are actually going to
| | 00:24 | focus on the particle itself.
| | 00:25 | So open the Particle section, and what we
are going to do is change the Particle Type.
| | 00:30 | In the Particle Type dropdown, we have a
bunch of different types of shapes and
| | 00:33 | objects that we can turn this into.
We can turn this into stars or cloudlets
| | 00:38 | or use another layer.
| | 00:40 | But in my case I am going
to choose a Streaklet here.
| | 00:43 | And a lot of times when I am making
cloudy effects, I'll use Cloudlet--that's a
| | 00:47 | better choicbut for this case I
actually like the way Streaklet looks better.
| | 00:51 | So I am going to choose Streaklet, and
this kind of just looks like a little like
| | 00:55 | bunch of little bugs on the
screen or something like that.
| | 00:58 | So I am going to take this Size value
up really high, and actually I am just
| | 01:02 | going to click and type in here.
I am going to take this up to 76.
| | 01:04 | So if we kind of do a little preview
here, you'll see this looks a little bit more
| | 01:08 | smoky, but to really enhance the
effect what I am going to do is I am going
| | 01:13 | to change the opacity.
| | 01:15 | Now if we took the Opacity value which
is here, down, it starts looking okay,
| | 01:20 | kind of like smoke a little bit, but
the problem here is this isn't going to
| | 01:25 | generate enough opacity to make a good
alpha matte, because it starts to kind
| | 01:29 | of fading that away.
| | 01:31 | So what I am going to do is I am just
going to increase the Opacity random so
| | 01:34 | that way we have big bursts of solid
white or a 100% opacity, and then a lot of
| | 01:41 | semi-transparency throughout.
| | 01:42 | Now, this is the final result, actually.
It doesn't look that great by itself, but
| | 01:48 | again it doesn't have to look great.
We are using it as an alpha matte.
| | 01:50 | As an alpha matte, it's
really going to work well.
| | 01:54 | So as you see here, we set up this
really great smoke effect in just a few
| | 01:59 | simple and easy steps.
| | 02:01 | Now, in the next movie what we are going
to do is we are actually going to apply
| | 02:04 | this as an alpha matte to our text.
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| Using the particles as an alpha matte| 00:00 | So we've made this simple smoke in just
a few easy steps and now all it remains
| | 00:04 | is we have to make a track matte, an
alpha matte out of this layer here.
| | 00:09 | So what I am going to do is unsolo the
Particular layer, and if we move out in
| | 00:14 | time a little bit we'll see
the text underneath the smoke.
| | 00:19 | And now what we want to have happen
is we want this text to only appear
| | 00:23 | where there is smoke here.
| | 00:26 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to select the text layer and I am
| | 00:31 | making sure the modes is showing and
we could go to the columns and show the
| | 00:35 | modes after right-clicking on this top
little bar here, make sure the modes are selected.
| | 00:39 | And so under Track Matte, under
none, we'll dropdown and choose Alpha
| | 00:42 | Matte "Particular".
| | 00:44 | And that means wherever there is
complete opacity then the magic text layer will
| | 00:48 | show up and wherever there is
transparency the layer will be clear and wherever
| | 00:54 | there is semi-transparency there will
be semi-transparency on the text layer.
| | 00:59 | And to see this a little bit better
we'll solo the layer and then choose to show
| | 01:04 | the Transparency Grid using this icon here.
| | 01:07 | And you'd see that our smoke, even
though it didn't look super-great by itself
| | 01:11 | per se, it has made this really
interesting smoky appearance to our text.
| | 01:19 | So the point here is that we can use
Particular in really innovative ways, and
| | 01:25 | those ways don't necessarily have to
be complex in order to be innovative.
| | 01:29 | It's such a versatile tool that could
do all kinds of cool tricks like this.
| | 01:33 | So now that we have kind of gotten our
feed with Particular and it's not that
| | 01:38 | scary anymore, we are going to now dig
into Particular, into the Particulars of
| | 01:43 | Particular and we are going to really
start understanding how this thing works.
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3. Understanding the EmitterAdjusting the particles per second| 00:00 | In this chapter we're going to be
looking a little bit more closely at the
| | 00:04 | Emitter section in Particular, so I'm
going to open up Emitter here and I'm in
| | 00:10 | the Particles/sec comp and
the Particles/sec project here.
| | 00:14 | And what I want to talk about in this
movie is the Particles/sec, the default is
| | 00:19 | a 100, so that means that every one
second a 100 particles are released.
| | 00:25 | Now if I increase this, then we have
more density in the particles, because
| | 00:31 | there are more particles released per second.
| | 00:33 | As I take this down, then we have less,
so we could have just a few sporadic
| | 00:38 | little particles here.
| | 00:40 | Notice also that in the Info Panel, if
you have that visible, it will tell you
| | 00:44 | how many particles are currently
on screen in this Visible section.
| | 00:48 | The total refers to how many particles
Particular happens to be processing on
| | 00:52 | that Particular frame.
| | 00:54 | So we can - well, as mentioned here,
we can make this more dense and not as
| | 01:01 | dense and this will become more helpful
as we study the particle settings, we'll
| | 01:05 | want to go back to the
Particles/sec and adjust those.
| | 01:08 | But when you animate this, you get some
cool effects, I want to show you one of
| | 01:13 | those right now, so if you go over to
the fireworks start comp, we are going to
| | 01:17 | be making some cool little fireworks here.
| | 01:19 | So I have this Particular layer, so go
ahead and apply the Particular effect to
| | 01:22 | this layer, and when we do it, it
removes that black solid, so we could see this
| | 01:27 | little city background behind this here.
| | 01:28 | So open up the Emitter section, and
let's move out in time, and we'll click the
| | 01:34 | stopwatch to set a keyframe for Particles/sec.
| | 01:37 | We'll take this all the way down to 0,
so it means that before this there
| | 01:41 | will be no animation.
| | 01:42 | Then I want to press the Page Down key
to advance one frame and let's take this
| | 01:47 | really high, like 10,000.
| | 01:51 | So then I want to now hit Page Down one
more time, and set a keyframe of 0, now
| | 01:58 | it can be a little confusing, so let's
see what I did there, I'm going to press
| | 02:03 | the letter U on the keyboard
to reveal all the keyframes.
| | 02:06 | And you can see here we have no
Particles/sec, so nothing is happening, then
| | 02:11 | 10,000 particles are emitted on just
this one frame and then nothing afterwards.
| | 02:16 | So what that does is it creates a
little explosion, because there are 10,000
| | 02:21 | particles released on that
one frame and then nothing else.
| | 02:23 | So it creates a nice little burst,
it's good for fireworks in this case of
| | 02:27 | course, but it's also good for
explosions and spark hits and things like that,
| | 02:31 | where you just want a gush of particles.
| | 02:33 | So that's basically the trick to create
a simple firework effect, but I want to
| | 02:39 | take this effect a little bit further,
that's all we need to cover about the
| | 02:43 | Particles/sec, but If you'd like to
follow along we'll kind of make this into a
| | 02:47 | little bit better fireworks.
| | 02:49 | I want to click-and-drag here on the
Effect Control Point and move this away
| | 02:54 | from the center, that actually
correlates to the position X, Y parameter here.
| | 02:58 | Next I want to increase the Velocity,
so these particles spit out a little bit
| | 03:02 | faster, and again we're going to go
through these settings really quickly,
| | 03:05 | because we're going to be getting to
all of these in later movies in this
| | 03:09 | training series, so we're just
again going through this pretty quick.
| | 03:14 | So now those particles
explode a little bit faster.
| | 03:16 | Let's close up the Emitter section,
open up the Particles section.
| | 03:19 | I'm going to take the Life span down
from 3, by default it's to 3, which means
| | 03:24 | these particles all last for 3 seconds
and at the end of those 3 seconds they
| | 03:29 | are all just, boom, die,
right there instantly, boom, gone.
| | 03:33 | So what I want to do is take down the
Life down to 1.2 so they don't quite live
| | 03:38 | as long, so they kind of
blow up and then die out sooner.
| | 03:41 | And I also want to increase
the randomness of their life.
| | 03:46 | So I'm going to take Life Random to 50%.
| | 03:48 | What that's going to do is make it so
that as time goes on, that occasionally
| | 03:52 | particles will just randomly die out,
which is good, this is what I want.
| | 03:57 | Now before we go any further I'm
actually going to go down to the color
| | 04:01 | setting and click on the Color Swatch
and change this color to a nice pinkish
| | 04:05 | tone, a bright pink.
| | 04:08 | And then I'm going to actually add
some randomness so it's not all the exact
| | 04:11 | same tone of pink, I'm going
to take color randomness to 25.
| | 04:14 | Now anymore than that and it starts to
introduce all kinds of weird hues, but 25
| | 04:20 | just gives us a little bit of randomness
and still keeps everything basically in
| | 04:23 | the same color family.
| | 04:25 | Now it doesn't actually look very
realistic, because they are all of the same
| | 04:29 | opacity, so I'm going to increase Opacity
Random, pretty much take that up all the way.
| | 04:34 | And then what I want to do now is
adjust the Size over Life and the Opacity
| | 04:40 | over Life and these controls are a
little bit weird, if I open up Size over
| | 04:43 | Life you see we have this weird graphic,
and again we'll explain this in the
| | 04:46 | next chapter more clearly.
| | 04:48 | But for right now I'm just to going to
click this little button right here which
| | 04:51 | creates this ramp and basically what
that means is that the particles are going
| | 04:56 | to start out big and they are
going to get small over time.
| | 04:59 | Now open up Opacity over Life and again
this controls the opacity over the life
| | 05:03 | of the particle, and we are just going
to click this little preset here at the
| | 05:07 | bottom, and what that does is it
makes particles start out as completely
| | 05:11 | opaque, and then as they fade to
transparency, every once in a while there is a
| | 05:15 | little flicker up to a 100% opacity, which
kind of creates this nice little sparkle outwards.
| | 05:20 | You can kind of see it in the little
edges here as it's dying out as sparkles,
| | 05:24 | it's kind of a cool effect.
| | 05:26 | So basically now we have our firework,
if I preview that, boom, very nice.
| | 05:33 | Now what I did is I did a few more
finishing steps here in the fireworks finish
| | 05:37 | comp if you'd like to look at that, and
what I did is I duplicated the layer and
| | 05:42 | then I changed the color of the particle,
and then grabbed the layer and dragged
| | 05:46 | it a little bit later in time and
did it again, so we have a series, a
| | 05:50 | succession of fireworks;
| | 05:51 | boom, boom, boom, very cool.
| | 05:55 | And then also one of the things that
I did that I think that helps in this
| | 06:00 | Particular case, is I applied an
adjustment layer at the top with the glow
| | 06:03 | effect, I also took down glow
threshold really low, so that way all these
| | 06:08 | particles have a lot of glow and then as
they are fading out, the ones that come
| | 06:13 | back on with 100% opacity, that little
sparkle that we talked about, as they
| | 06:18 | fade out, they are a little bit
brighter as they trigger this threshold again.
| | 06:21 | So it just really enhances that sparkle
effect, you can really see that here in
| | 06:26 | the blue as it's fading out, nice
little sparkles that fireworks do.
| | 06:30 | Now again this isn't really complete,
this is not like something we'd want to
| | 06:34 | show to a client or anything, but it's
kind of a cool effect, we'd probably want
| | 06:37 | to play with the gravity and a few other
settings, but for a basic firework it's
| | 06:41 | kind of a neat little quick trick.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with different emitter types| 00:00 | In this tutorial we're going to look
at the different types of emitters in
| | 00:03 | Particular, and we're just going to
start from scratch here, so let's go ahead
| | 00:07 | and create a new composition. And I just
use the HDV/720 29.97 preset, 5 seconds
| | 00:14 | is fine. Click OK and let's go ahead
and create a new solid using Command+Y or
| | 00:19 | Ctrl+Y on the PC. Let's go ahead and
make this black. Actually, it doesn't really
| | 00:24 | matter. And we'll apply Particular,
and as we scrub in time, we'll see the
| | 00:29 | familiar Particular default settings.
| | 00:32 | And we're going to do, open up the
Emitter section here, and we're going to be
| | 00:35 | talking about these different types of emitters.
| | 00:38 | Now the default is the Point emitter,
which means that there is one finite
| | 00:43 | point where everything emanates from; all
these particles come from that one little point.
| | 00:50 | And so this is good for, like, something
like a spark hit or when you are creating
| | 00:54 | a trail and there is one finite point
that everything is emanating from.
| | 01:00 | But actually, I find that I use Box and
Sphere the most, and so we're going to be
| | 01:06 | spending most of our time in this
video talking about those, specifically box, but
| | 01:10 | we'll get to that in just a second.
| | 01:12 | Now the layer emitters and the light
emitters, this is much more complex and
| | 01:18 | advanced than the others, so we are
going to talk about them, but we'll do that
| | 01:22 | later in the training series.
And before we jump into Box and Sphere, let me
| | 01:24 | talk about grid very briefly.
| | 01:27 | Now a lot of these emitters are kind
of confusing, because when you scrub in
| | 01:31 | time, they kind of appear to do the same thing.
| | 01:34 | But grid is a little bit different here.
| | 01:37 | In order to see this, I'm going to take
the Velocity from 100 down to 0, and now
| | 01:42 | we could see what's going on.
We have a little bit of a grid here.
| | 01:45 | Open up the Grid Emitter controls
right here, still in the Emitter section,
| | 01:49 | and you can see we have 5 particles in
X, 5 particles in Y, and 1 particle in
| | 01:55 | Z. So as I increase the particles in
X, then it just kind of turns into a
| | 02:02 | mush, because the size of this grid is
not really big enough. So as I increase
| | 02:09 | the Emitter size X, big enough--and I think
we might have too many particles actually.
| | 02:13 | I take this down just a little bit.
| | 02:16 | But now that we can see that we are
actually creating a grid, like a wall of
| | 02:23 | the lights here, which is something
that you might want to use this for if you
| | 02:27 | are creating like a rock star light
wall that's really popular in music videos
| | 02:31 | or whatever. Increase the Y size and spread
those out. But now there is not enough particles.
| | 02:36 | So the size of the Y is good--it fills
the frame--but the number of particles,
| | 02:41 | so we would come down here to particles
and Y, and boost that up. And so now we
| | 02:45 | have again kind of like a light
grid. Here we could you use that.
| | 02:50 | And again, these are all emitters, so
if our Velocity is up a little bit--and
| | 02:56 | we'll see that this grid is just the
emitter. It's the thing spitting out the
| | 03:01 | particles, so be aware of that.
| | 03:05 | I'm just going to go ahead and click
reset, get our settings back to the way
| | 03:09 | they were and talk really about Box and Sphere.
| | 03:13 | Now Box and Sphere create an area
of particles, and the particles don't
| | 03:19 | actually stay confined in that area,
kind of like with Grid. They don't stay in
| | 03:24 | that little zone, but that is the emitter,
the size of the thing creating the particles.
| | 03:29 | And they are actually very similar,
but I'm just going to stick to Box for now,
| | 03:34 | And again, it looks very much like
Point and very much like Grid, and it's the
| | 03:37 | default settings and you can't really
see the Box. But if I increase Emitter
| | 03:42 | Size X and spread these out like this,
then you can see here now we have an
| | 03:47 | area of particles; they are
not coming from one single point.
| | 03:51 | And this is really handy, to be able
to have a big area of particles. So for
| | 03:55 | weather systems like rain or snow,
big clouds and fog, I always use the Box
| | 04:03 | Emitter type. We're actually going to
look at a couple of different uses of the
| | 04:06 | Box Emitter right now.
| | 04:08 | So what I'm going to do is take the
Emitter size over 1000--1100 or just fine
| | 04:15 | for that--and I'm actually going to
increase the number of particles, the
| | 04:19 | Particles/sec value, take that up to
1500, so we have a lot more particles now.
| | 04:25 | And I'm going to increase the Emitter
Size Z, which actually will bring the
| | 04:29 | particles farther away from us and
towards us more. So again, this is like an
| | 04:35 | imaginary box. As we increase the
Emitter Size Z, the distance or the size of Z,
| | 04:42 | the Z axis, which is the one that
we're looking at gets bigger. So I want to
| | 04:46 | take this up to 3000, so we have a
really deep set of particles here.
| | 04:51 | And actually, I'm going take down the
size of these particles. I'm going to go
| | 04:56 | into the Particles section and take
down the Size to 1, so they are much
| | 05:00 | smaller. And let's actually go ahead
and take the Velocity down from 100 to
| | 05:06 | about 25, and so we're making
this little asteroid field here.
| | 05:10 | Now, it's not that impressive to look at,
and we really would want to tweak this
| | 05:15 | a little bit. But what we can do here
is create a camera. I'm going to the
| | 05:20 | Layer menu and choose New > Camera.
The default settings are fine. I'm going to
| | 05:25 | go ahead and click OK.
| | 05:26 | Then I'm going to choose the Unified
Camera Tool here, up in the Tools area, and
| | 05:31 | I'm going to right-click and drag
upwards, which will float us into these
| | 05:37 | particles. And that's all we have to do
to have this 3D particle system, because
| | 05:44 | this is--Particular is a 3D effect,
as you can tell by this little cube icon
| | 05:48 | here. And we can click and drag with
the left mouse button, and we can see our
| | 05:53 | box of particles a little bit better.
| | 05:57 | And again, it doesn't mean that our
particles stay in that box; it just means
| | 05:59 | that that's the emitter.
That's what's creating them as a huge box of
| | 06:04 | particles. So again, I can scrub up
and scrub down. And just to show you how
| | 06:09 | versatile this is, I want to change
our entire look here by just adjusting a
| | 06:13 | couple of quick settings.
| | 06:14 | I'm going to go down to the Particle
area, change the Particle Type from
| | 06:18 | Sphere to Cloudlet. And that doesn't
look all that great I realize, but hang
| | 06:25 | in there. And what we're going to do is
change the Size, all the way up to 15.
| | 06:29 | It's a big jump and it looks ugly, but
again, hang in there. And we're going to
| | 06:36 | take the Opacity down to 1.
| | 06:37 | So we want a kind of big bank of clouds
here that we can fly through. Let's go
| | 06:42 | ahead and take up the Opacity Random
to 50%, and while we're at it, let's go
| | 06:48 | ahead and press Command+Y or Ctrl+Y on
the PC again to create another new solid
| | 06:54 | that we'll use as the sky background.
| | 06:56 | So click on the color swatch and
create some kind of, I don't know, skyish
| | 07:02 | color. And I'll go ahead and click OK
and drag this behind our Particular
| | 07:08 | layer, and now we could again pilot
our camera into our clouds here. And the
| | 07:14 | quality degrades a little bit because
of adaptive resolution, because it's too
| | 07:18 | much for the system to really process
in real time, but you can still get the
| | 07:22 | effect here, that we're flying into
this awesome little area of clouds here.
| | 07:28 | It's a very cool effect, very versatile,
all because of that Box Emitter, but
| | 07:32 | again, we couldn't get here with this
Point Emitter because this is an entire
| | 07:36 | world of clouds or asteroids or rain or
snow or whatever we are going to use it
| | 07:40 | for. But it is good to know about
these different emitter types so that you
| | 07:44 | could adjust one that fits the
type of project that you are doing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating emitter position| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to look at
animating the position of your particles
| | 00:05 | which can go a really long way in
creating different effects with Particular.
| | 00:09 | Now if you select Particular and you
move the particle system around, you can
| | 00:14 | see that things really don't change all
that much, the particles kind of move as group.
| | 00:21 | So when we animate the position of
let's say the Emitter, for example, and I'll
| | 00:28 | go ahead and click the stopwatch for
Position XY and move in time and then move
| | 00:34 | this over, that we create some really
cool effects as these particles kind of
| | 00:39 | streak across there.
| | 00:42 | Now there are a few other ways to
animate the particle, the position of
| | 00:46 | particles in Particular.
| | 00:49 | One is by using a Light Emitter which
again we'll talk about later in this
| | 00:53 | training series, but the benefit of
light emitters as we'll see is that they can
| | 00:59 | move in three dimensions, it's a kind of
a limitation of After Effects, that you
| | 01:04 | can either animate in Position XY or Z
when you are in an effect and not all
| | 01:09 | three at the same time, but lights can,
and so you might get more flexibility
| | 01:14 | with animation by using a light.
| | 01:17 | Now also, don't forget that these
particles are 3D, so I can go to the Layer
| | 01:23 | menu, create a New>Camera, go ahead
and click OK here, and we can use the
| | 01:29 | Unified Camera Tool and move
around, and these are actually
| | 01:32 | three-dimensional particles.
| | 01:35 | So if you have an existing 3D scene and
you have animated cameras or whatever,
| | 01:39 | you might want to just stick
Particular into your scene and you don't have to
| | 01:43 | worry about necessarily animating
it unless you want some kind of extra
| | 01:47 | special effect, or you could choose
to animate around it with a camera, if
| | 01:51 | that's your preference.
| | 01:52 | I'm just going to go ahead and delete
this camera, and select Particular and I'm
| | 01:57 | actually going to deselect the
stopwatch or Position XY to get rid of those
| | 02:03 | keyframes, press V on the keyboard
to get back to my Selection Tool.
| | 02:07 | Another thing you can do, is you
can actually use a Motion Path.
| | 02:12 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to unlock the Motion Path layer that's
| | 02:16 | here, and I'm going to press U, so I
can see the position value here, and I'm
| | 02:21 | going to open up Particular in the
Timeline so I can see, just open up this up a
| | 02:26 | little bit more here, so I can see the
Position XY of value here, I'm going to
| | 02:31 | Alt+Click on the PC, Option+Click on the
Mac, that stopwatch for Position XY and
| | 02:36 | use the Pick Whip, click-and-drag to
the position and property of the Motion
| | 02:41 | Path layer, and what that will do is it
will use the motion path, that's in the
| | 02:46 | Motion Path layer here, it will use
that motion path for the particles.
| | 02:53 | And this motion path by the way which
is the little shape that I created in
| | 02:56 | Adobe Illustrator, I just copied it and
pasted it here onto this layer, and so
| | 03:01 | now as I -- actually let me deselect
that layer so we get that ugly mask up, and
| | 03:06 | so now we have these swirling particles
that are very cool and again these are
| | 03:11 | all 3D, so there is a lot
that we can do with these.
| | 03:14 | Now when you create an animated trail
of particles like this, sometimes those
| | 03:18 | particles won't behave as
you might expect them to.
| | 03:22 | For example, we might not want our
particles to go drifting off so much or we
| | 03:26 | might want them to go drifting off more.
| | 03:28 | There is a lot of other things that we
might want to adjust with this, and a lot
| | 03:33 | of this comes from these areas here
with a direction and these velocity
| | 03:39 | parameters, so we'll talk about that
and add on to this in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding direction and velocity| 00:00 | Two of the most important attributes
when you are dealing with the way that
| | 00:04 | particles behave are direction and velocity.
| | 00:08 | So we are going to look at those in this movie.
| | 00:10 | First in the Direction comp here again
I just have a standard application of
| | 00:16 | Particular that I haven't adjusted at
all because these are kind of confusing
| | 00:20 | attributes, so we are going to just
have barebones Particular here so we
| | 00:24 | understand completely what's happening.
| | 00:27 | And we adjust Direction in this area,
in the Emitter section in Particular we
| | 00:32 | have this dropdown here, but one of
the gotchas with this is that it's really
| | 00:37 | hard to see when you are looking in a 2D
view, a lot of these don't seem to make
| | 00:41 | much difference at all.
| | 00:42 | So what I have done is I have created
a camera here and we are going to use
| | 00:47 | the camera to help us see what's happening
when we adjust the Direction options here.
| | 00:51 | So I am going to choose the Unified
Camera Tool and if we click around we can
| | 00:55 | see the default direction which is
Uniform, and basically that means that
| | 01:00 | particles shoot out from the
Emitter in random ways all over the place.
| | 01:04 | So there is no rhyme or reason why
these particles are coming out the way they
| | 01:08 | are coming out, so I'll just
randomly emit it from this Emitter.
| | 01:11 | Now if I change this to Directional,
we can see that we have a cool little
| | 01:16 | stream of particles here.
| | 01:18 | So you could imagine the use is here,
whether it's for like a sparkle trail or
| | 01:22 | for a jet engine exhaust or what have
you, directional, the very popular usage
| | 01:28 | of the Direction options here.
| | 01:32 | But let me show you this, if I take
off the visibility of the camera, so we
| | 01:36 | are looking at our original view
here, Direction doesn't look that much
| | 01:40 | different than Uniform.
| | 01:42 | So here is Uniform and here is Directional,
it's not really obvious what's happening.
| | 01:47 | If we do Bi-Directional, still really
can't see that much of a difference.
| | 01:52 | But again, if I turn on the camera we
could see that Bi-Directional actually
| | 01:55 | creates two bi-directional streams in
opposite directions from each other,
| | 02:01 | almost like a bowtie effect.
| | 02:04 | So if you want to create maybe like a
hammer smashing down and you wanted sparks
| | 02:08 | to shootout either side
bi-directional might be a good choice for that.
| | 02:12 | But again if we are just looking at
that 2D view, it's really hard to see, so
| | 02:16 | that's why it pays to be working in 3D or at
least be aware that this is the way it behaves.
| | 02:23 | Another thing that you can do is let's
say, for example, I want Directional here
| | 02:28 | and I can't really see what's going on.
| | 02:30 | We could also adjust the X, Y and
Z rotation of this in order to see
| | 02:34 | these particles better.
| | 02:35 | So I could adjust this, this way, point
it down, same thing with Y rotation and
| | 02:42 |
| | 02:43 | that can get aside of a jam.
| | 02:44 | So we could actually work in 2D if
wanted to and still see what's happening
| | 02:48 | with our particles.
| | 02:49 | As a matter of fact if I was going to
create rain I would probably start by
| | 02:53 | taking the X Rotation to negative 90
degrees and using a Box Emitter, using the
| | 02:59 | Directional Direction and also
increasing Emitter Size X, and this also works
| | 03:04 | for not only rain, but there is snow,
and we have to adjust the particles of
| | 03:10 | course, but we probably also want to
adjust the position of this so it's above
| | 03:16 | the top of the comp.
| | 03:17 | But we have some fairly believable snow,
but again if we didn't know about this
| | 03:22 | Direction option we'd really be stuck.
| | 03:24 | So let me actually undo that a little
bit so we get back to where we were,
| | 03:29 | turn back on the camera, zero out the
rotation and we have a couple of more
| | 03:33 | types to talk about here.
| | 03:34 | We have Disc which basically creates a disc.
| | 03:37 | So it emanates from the center point or
wherever, wherever the Emitter Type is
| | 03:42 | and it kind of creates as you could see
kind of like a disc shape, so if I play
| | 03:47 | that back, emanates like a disc.
| | 03:49 | And then we also have Outwards, and
Outwards seems an awful lot like Uniform
| | 03:54 | where they all just kind of spit out,
but if we take our Emitter Type to Grid
| | 03:59 | and we adjust the Emitter Size a little bit.
| | 04:06 | Let's take this back to Uniform, we
could see that actually Uniform, it's just a
| | 04:13 | bunch of random particles all over
the place or kind of going back in on
| | 04:17 | themselves at times and just spitting
out at times it really is random, and it's
| | 04:21 | not very uniform at all actually.
| | 04:23 | And Outwards is a much more uniform
expression of that, they are spitting out in
| | 04:28 | a much more uniform way but they
are all spitting directly outwards.
| | 04:35 | Now let's go over to Velocity.
| | 04:37 | Velocity is the speed that
the particles are emitted from.
| | 04:43 | So if I increase I just -- again this
is just a really default application in
| | 04:47 | Particular, I've done nothing here and I
am on the Velocity Static layer, and if
| | 04:51 | we increase Velocity we see
that they shoot out much faster.
| | 04:56 | It's really chaotic.
| | 04:58 | We can also take the Velocity down to
let's say 5 and then we just have kind of
| | 05:04 | like this little slow boil of particles
because they are really not spitting out
| | 05:09 | very much, because they don't
have the velocity to do that.
| | 05:12 | So the default value is a 100 and
sometimes that's way too much, sometimes
| | 05:15 | that's not enough depending on what
you are doing, but just be aware of that.
| | 05:19 | There is also a velocity randomness, we
could take down the Velocity really low
| | 05:22 | for example, and we could
increase the velocity randomness.
| | 05:25 | This will make it so
that the velocity is random.
| | 05:28 | So some particles will move away really
fast and some particles will move really slow.
| | 05:33 | And Velocity Distribution just refers
to the randomness here, so it's adjusting
| | 05:38 | the randomness of the -- the
distribution of the randomness of the velocity.
| | 05:44 | If you don't have any randomness to
your velocity then Velocity Distribution
| | 05:48 | doesn't do anything.
| | 05:50 | Now the next attribute
here is Velocity from Motion.
| | 05:52 | This is also really important, but in
order to see what this does you actually
| | 05:56 | need to have the Emitter position animated.
| | 05:59 | So I am going to turn-off the
visibility of the Velocity Static layer, turn
| | 06:02 | on the visibility of the Velocity Animated
layer, and I have just a simple animation here.
| | 06:07 | It starts at one side,
shoots across to the other side.
| | 06:10 | And when you are animating particles,
velocity is just as important if not
| | 06:16 | more so, and so I could see here when I
increase Velocity what it does to that
| | 06:20 | trail of particles.
| | 06:23 | But what I want to do here is
change the Velocity from Motion.
| | 06:26 | So when we have a negative Velocity
from Motion it pulls these particles back,
| | 06:34 | because basically what Velocity from
Motion does is it allows particles to
| | 06:38 | inherit the velocity from the emitter.
| | 06:42 | So our emitter in this case
is moving from left to right.
| | 06:48 | So as we have a positive value and
we go really high up here, then these
| | 06:55 | particles are also moving left to right.
| | 06:59 | So they are inheriting a lot
of the motion of the Emitter.
| | 07:03 | If we take it to a negative value, they are
going against the velocity of the Emitter.
| | 07:09 | So again this is great for like
exhaust, if this is a rocket and there is a
| | 07:14 | smoke coming out, then that we want to use
probably a negative Velocity from Motion value.
| | 07:19 | And if we wanted to do something
where maybe there is a lawnmower and it's
| | 07:25 | eating up grass and it's shooting out
grass in the direction then it's going or
| | 07:29 | it's maybe burrowing under the ground
and this is dirt particles that are being
| | 07:33 | broken up, then we want to use maybe
a positive Velocity from Motion value.
| | 07:38 | Now let's look at a practical example
so we kind of put all this together here.
| | 07:42 | Here is what we did in the last movie,
we have this little swirl of particles
| | 07:46 | and let's see if we can't adjust this
and customize this a little bit more based
| | 07:51 | on what we have learned about
Direction and Velocity here.
| | 07:55 | So I am going to select Particular and
let's see we want to streamline these
| | 07:59 | particles a little bit more.
| | 08:00 | Right now they are kind of all over the
place and we might want that but right
| | 08:04 | now it's a little too chaotic, I
can't really tell that this is a beautiful
| | 08:08 | spiral and I want to be able to tell that.
| | 08:11 | So from the direction dropdown I am going
to change this from Uniform to Directional.
| | 08:14 | Now that already cleans things up
because again Uniform shoots particles out in
| | 08:20 | every direction randomly;
| | 08:22 | but Directional is going to shoot things
in a direction, so it's going to follow
| | 08:27 | the course of this path.
| | 08:29 | It's kind of a cool look.
| | 08:31 | Now you notice how these particles are
also kind of drifting away, it's because
| | 08:35 | they have velocity applied a
little bit, the default is about a 100.
| | 08:39 | Now if we took this to 0 then the
spiral would just exist as a spiral.
| | 08:47 | Now the reason why there is some
velocity there still is because we do have
| | 08:52 | Velocity Random and Velocity from
Motion up a little bit their default
| | 08:56 | values are each 20.
| | 08:57 | So if I take this down to 0, so there
is no randomness in the velocity, we are
| | 09:02 | still getting some velocity from the
motion of the emitter, take this down to 0,
| | 09:07 | then we basically created this effect
where Particular kind of draws a path on,
| | 09:12 | that's kind of a cool effect.
| | 09:17 | So all of this from just changing the
Direction value and also the Velocity, and
| | 09:24 | these again are two huge properties
when we are talking about the behavior, the
| | 09:30 | control of the behavior of particles.
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| Creating a pre-run| 00:00 | In the intro project that we looked
at in the being of this training series
| | 00:04 | where we used a Particular to create an
Alpha Matte for this text, I actually in
| | 00:08 | the final version, in the project
files added some kind of cool smoke here in
| | 00:15 | the background for effect, and I
actually brightened it up a little bit from
| | 00:18 | what it was, from the originals you
could see a little bit more clearly.
| | 00:22 | But here is the problem with smoke of
that type and actually here is what we
| | 00:26 | could do is playback, here is the
smoke just by itself, there's some simple
| | 00:31 | Particular smoke just to give us some
more atmosphere, and again, it was darker
| | 00:34 | than the original, so it wasn't as noticeable.
| | 00:36 | But when you have particles, as we know,
Particular often starts from frame 0
| | 00:44 | and then starts generating particles.
| | 00:45 | Well, I actually want this smoke to
be on from the very beginning, I don't
| | 00:50 | want it to fade on;
| | 00:51 | I want it to be like this the whole time.
| | 00:54 | So what we have in Particular to remedy
the situation is a parameter called pre-run.
| | 01:01 | So if we go in the emitter section
in Particular at the very bottom there
| | 01:04 | will be Emission Extras.
| | 01:06 | So if I open up Emission Extras,
here we will have that pre-run value.
| | 01:11 | And what this specifies is the
percentage of how much of this system of
| | 01:20 | generating particles will happen before frame 1.
| | 01:24 | So in another words, right now 0% of
these particles will be on screen at frame 1.
| | 01:31 | But if I increase this all the way to
a 100, then it will make it so that all
| | 01:38 | of these particles, 140 particles will be
completely generated by the time the first frame hits.
| | 01:44 | And so now these particles just stay on,
and so from the very beginning of my
| | 01:49 | animation, my smoke is there.
| | 01:50 | So if you ever you find yourself where
you need particles to already be on the
| | 01:54 | screen on frame 1, then pre-run is
the parameter that you need to increase.
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|
|
4. Adjusting Particle AttributesAdjusting particle life span| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to be
looking at the life span of the particles,
| | 00:05 | what difference that makes,
and also, how to adjust that.
| | 00:09 | First let me introduce you to this little
project here, I am just going to play this back.
| | 00:17 | Very cool! So we are going to make these
sparks, later, I'll show you how to go through
| | 00:22 | that step by step, we'll get to
that later in this training series.
| | 00:25 | But I want to adjust it here in this movie.
| | 00:26 | See these particles, there
are just too many of them.
| | 00:30 | So by the time that one word comes on,
there are still particles left over from
| | 00:34 | the last word, it just
kind of gets a little messy.
| | 00:37 | So I want to reduce the particles on screen.
| | 00:42 | Now there are a couple of ways
that we can do that actually.
| | 00:45 | First and the most obvious is that we
reduce the particle count in the Emitter
| | 00:49 | section here, the Particles per
Second, the actual number of particles.
| | 00:52 | But if I look at the number of
particles here, I am actually happy with that,
| | 00:57 | it's actually good number of particles.
| | 00:59 | So the other thing that we can do is
adjust the Size of the particle in the
| | 01:03 | particle section and reducing the
Size of the particle will create the
| | 01:07 | illusion that there are less
particles, because they take up less screen,
| | 01:10 | because there are less of them.
| | 01:12 | Now the other option might not be so
obvious and that is the lifespan of the particle.
| | 01:17 | So what's actually going on here is we
have the right number of particles, they
| | 01:21 | are the right size, but they stay on
too long, and so it makes things messy.
| | 01:27 | So in the Particle section we
could adjust the life of the particle.
| | 01:31 | The default is 3 seconds long, which
for many particles is way too long and
| | 01:37 | actually for others, it's also way too quick.
| | 01:39 | So I am actually going to take this
down and set it 3 seconds long, I am going
| | 01:44 | to click in here and I am going to type in .6.
| | 01:47 | And now by the time that these OF
particles start, the MADE ones are completely gone.
| | 01:53 | So they fade out much more quickly,
making this appear much cleaner.
| | 01:58 | Now another thing we could do to get
this a little bit more life is actually to
| | 02:03 | increase the Life Random.
| | 02:05 | Right now they are all fading out the
same time, which can make things look not
| | 02:10 | so great and realistic.
| | 02:12 | So I kind of want to stagger their life,
maybe like I want some particles dying
| | 02:16 | out now and maybe a few stragglers did not
quite die out right at .6 of a second mark.
| | 02:24 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to click in here and I am going to type
| | 02:29 | 50 and that's going to
increase the Life Randomness by 50%.
| | 02:32 | So some of these are dying out already and
some of them are just kind of getting warmed up.
| | 02:37 | So the final result here looks like this.
| | 02:39 | (music playing)
| | 02:43 | So it's much more of a believable spark
hit, the way that those sparks kind of
| | 02:49 | hit and then fade out more quickly.
| | 02:52 | So that is Life Span, again it
controls the life of the particle, how long
| | 02:57 | the particles are on the screen from
the time that they are born, until the
| | 03:01 | time that they go away.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing the look of the particle| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to look at a
few basic ways to change the look of a particle.
| | 00:05 | We have here this cool little particle
system here, a little star field, and it's
| | 00:10 | basically created with a galaxy background and
I created it with a few layers of fractal noise.
| | 00:15 | And the star field is basically just
like the clouds we created a couple of
| | 00:20 | chapters back, where we create a Box
Emitter and we have a really big Z emitter size.
| | 00:26 | The look of the particle is pretty
much the default look of the particles.
| | 00:30 | So let's go ahead and change that.
| | 00:32 | In the Effects Controls panel I am
going to close up the Emitter, open up the
| | 00:36 | Particle section here, and I
want to look at the Particle type.
| | 00:39 | And again, by default we have this sphere.
| | 00:43 | And we also have this Sphere
Setting, which controls a little bit of the
| | 00:46 | feathering on a sphere. If I move in time here,
| | 00:48 | we can see when these particles are going to
get closer to the camera, look at this here;
| | 00:52 | we have this feather around the edge.
| | 00:54 | And if we take the feather down to 0,
we have a hard edge, and if we take it up
| | 00:58 | all the way to 100, then we have
a little bit softer of an edge.
| | 01:02 | I am going to take this to the default
value of 50. Let's look at some of the
| | 01:08 | other particle types here. I am going to
change this from Sphere to Glow Sphere.
| | 01:11 | And this adds a little layer of glow
around each of the stars, which makes this a
| | 01:15 | little bit more prominent.
| | 01:17 | It does kind of take away some of the
depth in this case, because some of those
| | 01:20 | particles that were really far away and
were dim are now a little bit brighter,
| | 01:24 | which gives them the appearance
that they are not quite so far away.
| | 01:28 | We also have this little Glow
Area down here at the bottom;
| | 01:30 | we'll talk about that later on this
training series, but just be aware that Glow has been added.
| | 01:36 | I am just going to change this to
Star now. Star is one that I use ever so
| | 01:40 | often, for sparkles.
| | 01:41 | I do find that the size of the star
in relation to the other particles is
| | 01:47 | a little bit large.
| | 01:48 | So what I typically do is go to the Size
parameter and take this down quite a bit.
| | 01:55 | And you could see now that we have
some of these little spikes and then for a
| | 02:00 | lot of these at the
background we can't really see it.
| | 02:03 | So for me that's a much better use of star.
| | 02:05 | I hardly ever use it a full size
like this, where it's super big.
| | 02:10 | But there is something. And again,
when we shrink this down and we can't see
| | 02:16 | this little--these little spikes on
the star for all these ones in the back,
| | 02:21 | it kind of add some irregularity,
which is actually pretty good.
| | 02:24 | It makes it seem more organic in this case,
| | 02:26 | so I actually like the way that those
stars look with the Star Particle type.
| | 02:32 | There is also Cloudlet, which we
have used for creating clouds.
| | 02:37 | But typically for this, you'd want to
make these really big and then play with
| | 02:40 | the opacity to make them look more cloudy.
| | 02:43 | In this case, they do add some
irregularity, but it's a little bit too much
| | 02:48 | irregularity, and it looks
unnatural, at least for stars.
| | 02:52 | Similar to Cloudlet is Streaklet, and
this was created for the express purpose
| | 02:57 | of creating these light streaks that we
will look at in a project at the end of this training series.
| | 03:03 | But again, as far as stars go,
it doesn't really help very much.
| | 03:07 | I am going to take this back to Sphere here
and take the Size back down to where it was, 4.5.
| | 03:14 | So basically, my point in this tutorial
is to show you that when we use Particle
| | 03:20 | types, in conjunction with the Feather
setting that is available on some of
| | 03:26 | these--for example, Star does
not have it, but many of these do.
| | 03:31 | And also the Size, we use these three
parameters in conjunction with one another.
| | 03:35 | We can really change the look of our particle.
| | 03:38 | Now, in this Particle Type dropdown
there are 6 others: there are 3 Sprite
| | 03:43 | settings and 3 Textured Polygon settings.
| | 03:45 | And these are for using another layer
as a particle, and we'll look at that in
| | 03:51 | its own chapter, which is actually the
next chapter, because it is a little bit
| | 03:55 | more of a complex issue.
| | 03:56 | But be aware that that is there.
You can also use another layer as a texture.
| | 04:01 | But until then, we have these
parameters--the Particle Type, the Feather, the
| | 04:06 | Size--to be able to control the look
of our stars, or whatever particle system
| | 04:10 | we are creating.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Particular curve-drawing interface| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
one of the more unique and sometimes
| | 00:06 | confusing features of Particular, and that is
something called the Curve Drawing Interface.
| | 00:11 | So open up Particular here, and then go to
the Particle Area, and open up Size Over Life.
| | 00:19 | Note that you'll also find a Curve Drawing
Interface in the Opacity Over Life as well.
| | 00:24 | So we with Size Over Life open, we see
this thing called the Curve Drawing Interface.
| | 00:32 | And again, it is a little bit
confusing, so let's dig in here.
| | 00:36 | Now I have this project here and I have
basically what looks like bocce, little
| | 00:41 | like glowing flares type thing.
| | 00:44 | And basically this is created by
opening up the Emitter section and taking down
| | 00:50 | the Particles Per Second to 10
Particles Per Second, creating a Box Emitter.
| | 00:56 | Taking down the Velocity to 50 and then
also increasing the Size of the particle to 60.
| | 01:04 | Now I want to give this more life than just
kind of these random circles moving around.
| | 01:09 | One of the things I could do is
increase the Size Randomness and that's pretty
| | 01:14 | good, but then they would stay
that same size their whole life.
| | 01:18 | And I want them to kind of
move to get bigger and smaller.
| | 01:21 | So I am going to take the Size Random back
to 0 and start drawing in the curve interface.
| | 01:26 | Now it's indicated here the size of the
particle is indicated by the vertical height.
| | 01:31 | So if we want a small particle, we
draw down here and if we want a big
| | 01:35 | particle we draw up here.
| | 01:38 | And from left to right, we have the life
span of the particle, from birth to death.
| | 01:42 | So if I want these particles to kind
of grow on slowly, I can click down here
| | 01:48 | and I am dragging upwards, and so they'll
start small and then they'll grow over their life.
| | 01:56 | So we can play that back now, and we'll
see that these particles kind of blossom
| | 02:02 | on the screen, kind of interesting.
| | 02:05 | Now I might want to reset my effect at
some point and undo that, but if I click
| | 02:11 | the Reset button, notice that it resets
everything in the effect, except for the
| | 02:17 | Curve Drawing Interface.
| | 02:19 | So be aware as you are working in
Particular that you cannot undo this by
| | 02:24 | resetting the effect.
| | 02:25 | So I am actually going to hit Command+Z
or Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo that, and
| | 02:30 | then I am going to click this button
right here, this top icon right here to get
| | 02:37 | back to square one with
the curve drawing interface.
| | 02:40 | And we have a series of presets
here, not just the regular default,
| | 02:45 | everything all the way, setting
right here, but we could also click this
| | 02:49 | button, which causes a fade out.
| | 02:51 | Or in other words in causes a
shrinkage over time, the particles will start
| | 02:56 | large and then over time they will get smaller.
| | 02:59 | So that's what this is like here,
so they get smaller over time.
| | 03:03 | Again, a completely different effect by
playing around with this curve drawing interface.
| | 03:08 | Click the next button for a
fade-in and then a slow fadeout.
| | 03:12 | We can have a gradual smoother
fade in and out with this preset.
| | 03:18 | We have a quick fadeout with this
preset and then we have this one, which is
| | 03:22 | very unique, because it
has these little spikes here.
| | 03:24 | So basically it's going to fadeout
gradually and then have spikes of bigness
| | 03:32 | over -- gradually over time it's going
to just spike upwards in size, so we'll
| | 03:36 | see a little flicker as they kind of pop
a little bit right before they die out,
| | 03:41 | which creates an interesting effect.
| | 03:42 | And we can also kind of draw that a
little bit more if we just kind of create
| | 03:47 | little hills and valleys by just
drawing up and down here, then we have these
| | 03:52 | really random frenetic popping circles here.
| | 03:57 | It's kind of an interesting effect.
| | 04:01 | And again, if you are going to try to
recreate this without knowing the curve
| | 04:04 | drawing interface, it'll be
really challenging to do that.
| | 04:08 | Another thing we can do is if we are
going to draw things our self like this,
| | 04:13 | I can just click the Smooth button a
few times and that will kind of smooth my
| | 04:17 | curves over, so they are not so jagged
edge or if I create a fade-in, and I am
| | 04:22 | doing it with my mouse, so it's all
rough and I get things like this, like a
| | 04:27 | jagged points, I can click the Smooth button
until we kind of smooth that out quite a bit.
| | 04:31 | Now another thing we could do is we
click the Random button and this will cause
| | 04:35 | just random data to be there, which
again creates these wild looks, where
| | 04:39 | everything is just kind of flashing.
| | 04:43 | And this could be an interesting fact,
if you are looking for glitter in the
| | 04:46 | background or just again an
interesting background, we could tone down the
| | 04:49 | opacity of these little
shapes so they are not that opaque.
| | 04:55 | And then we could also increase their
size a little bit more so they cover the
| | 04:58 | screen if we wanted to and we just kind
of have like this interesting pulsating
| | 05:02 | effect in the background.
| | 05:03 | Let me take this back up to 100% and
note that we could also copy if we want to
| | 05:09 | take a curve that we have drawn in this
Curve Drawing Interface and take it over
| | 05:13 | to the Opacity Curve Drawing Interface.
| | 05:16 | We could also flip things, so if we fade
-in here and we decide, oh, you know, I
| | 05:21 | actually want to go the other way where
I start they are going to get small, we
| | 05:26 | can click the little Flip button here
and that will flip things so that they
| | 05:29 | will start big and then go small.
| | 05:31 | Same thing here with this interesting
effect where it kind of spikes as it's
| | 05:35 | fading out, we could flip that so it
actually spikes like that, all crazy as
| | 05:39 | it's fading in, and then it has
a regular life span after that.
| | 05:45 | So this is the Curve Drawing Interface,
again, it's not too challenging once
| | 05:49 | you understand that this is the size,
vertically and the life span of the
| | 05:53 | particle, birth to death.
| | 05:55 | So again, if we want a big particle,
then a small particle, then a big particle,
| | 06:00 | it's just as easy as drawing that on,
and with the Curve Drawing Interface,
| | 06:04 | again, we can create some really
complex animations in the size and also the
| | 06:09 | opacity of our particles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Drawing particle opacity| 00:00 | In this quick tutorial we're going to
look at how to apply what we learned about
| | 00:05 | the Curve Drawing Interface in the last
movie where we looked at Size with the
| | 00:08 | Curved Drawing Interface.
| | 00:09 | We're going apply that same stuff to
Opacity in this movie, because, if we open
| | 00:13 | up the Particle section and Opacity
Over Life, we will also find again, this
| | 00:18 | Curve Drawing Interface.
| | 00:20 | Now what I have here are these
fireworks we worked with earlier, but I want to
| | 00:24 | customize them and tweak them a little bit more.
| | 00:26 | For right now I am just going to turn
off the visibility of the green and blue
| | 00:31 | layers we are working with
just the pink fireworks here.
| | 00:34 | And, so again, we have this Curve
Drawing Interface and we can click and drag
| | 00:38 | like we saw in the last movie for
birth and death, and this controls opacity.
| | 00:44 | So if I were to draw a curve like this,
let me just click Smooth a few times
| | 00:48 | here, then this will fade-in over time.
| | 00:51 | It fades in over time instead of
just kind of blowing up on screen.
| | 00:55 | Obviously, it's not what we want with
the fireworks but just be aware that you
| | 00:59 | can do that and that really does help,
if you don't want your emitter point to
| | 01:03 | be really obvious, in other words,
you don't want to have the particle be
| | 01:07 | visibly coming out of the emitter point,
sometimes it's good to start with the
| | 01:12 | particles completely transparent, and
then fade-in so that way the emitter
| | 01:16 | point remains incognito.
| | 01:18 | And another thing we could do is
fadeout of course, we could -- I am just
| | 01:22 | going to go ahead and reset this by
clicking this button, we can click and
| | 01:26 | drag here, so that the particles
start opaque and then towards their death,
| | 01:29 | they gradually fade out.
| | 01:31 | Now that's more we would want with
fireworks, but fireworks need to be
| | 01:35 | more sparkly and alive.
| | 01:37 | So what I want to do is may be click
this little preset down here, which is what
| | 01:41 | we did a couple of chapters back, we
looked at fire works which basically
| | 01:45 | creates a gradual fadeout.
| | 01:46 | But then as the particle start
fading out there are spikes of complete
| | 01:49 | opacity, so you will see the
particle start fading out, and it's kind of
| | 01:53 | subtle, but every ones in a while you
will see a little sparkle there, little
| | 01:57 | glitter of these particles.
| | 01:59 | But again, it is fairly subtle.
| | 02:01 | So if I want to do something a little
bit more intense with this effect, I can
| | 02:05 | click the Random button, and of course,
this just randomizes the opacity values
| | 02:10 | on every single frame, and as we
play this back, we just see all kinds of
| | 02:15 | glitter all over the place.
| | 02:17 | Now what I actually want these particles
to do is to explode on to be completely
| | 02:23 | opaque at the beginning and then
over time start to sparkle away.
| | 02:28 | They are going to die out anyway, so I really
don't have to create any kind of fade-in here.
| | 02:34 | So I am just going to click and make
these particles completely opaque in the
| | 02:39 | beginning, and then I'll just kind of
sparkle away as they fadeout, as they die
| | 02:45 | out and I really again don't
have to worry about them fading out.
| | 02:48 | So if I play this, they explode, and then
they just kind of shimmer away, and I love that.
| | 02:56 | If we look at the Size Over Life, what
I have done here is I've already made it
| | 03:02 | so the particles are regular size and
then kind of shrink as the die out anyway.
| | 03:06 | So in my case, I am not going to worry
about adding any diminishing opacity, I
| | 03:13 | like this kind of sparkling as they go.
| | 03:16 | Now I want to apply this to all of my
other green and blue fireworks, so what I
| | 03:23 | can do is click the Copy button here,
and again, there is no undo for these
| | 03:28 | curve drawing interfaces, so be very
careful what you do, especially if you draw
| | 03:32 | a really complexed curve.
| | 03:33 | I am going to click the Copy button and
then go over to the green fireworks and
| | 03:37 | the Opacity Over Life curve drawing
interface for that and click Paste, and then
| | 03:43 | I can go to the blue ones, same thing,
click Paste, again, making sure that
| | 03:47 | you're in Opacity Over
Life and not Size Over Life.
| | 03:50 | I can turn those on as well, and now we
have quickly and easily created a lot of
| | 03:55 | really interesting randomness and
sparkles for all the three of our fireworks,
| | 04:01 | because of this cool curve drawing interface.
| | 04:04 | And that's just about done rendering,
so let's go back and preview this now in
| | 04:09 | real time, and this is again a lot
more interest there, because of all that
| | 04:14 | beautiful shimmering, because of the
randomness of the opacity, because of the
| | 04:18 | curve drawing interface.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Coloring particles| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to look
at a few different ways to change the
| | 00:04 | color of your particles.
| | 00:05 | I have here a Particular applied just
to a regular old solid with a default
| | 00:10 | settings here and let's just tweak a
few of these, just so we can play with
| | 00:15 | this a little easier.
| | 00:16 | I am going to open up the Emitter
section and let's go ahead and take Velocity
| | 00:20 | up to 200, that way these
particles are a little bit more spread out.
| | 00:24 | We'll go ahead and close up the Emitter
section, open up the Particle section.
| | 00:27 | And let's go ahead and increase the
Size of these particles, to above 50 or so
| | 00:33 | and then let's take down
the Sphere Feather to 0.
| | 00:37 | So we can clearly see these particles
and actually maybe let's take down the
| | 00:41 | Size a little bit more, maybe to about 30 or so.
| | 00:45 | Now the easiest way to set color is to
come down here to the Color Swatch and
| | 00:50 | click this swatch, bring up the Color Picker
and then, choose different color or what have you.
| | 00:57 | But really what's going on here is
that the Set Color Value is set to at
| | 01:04 | birth, so we are setting the color of these
particles when they are born by this color swatch.
| | 01:09 | And we'll talk about that a
little bit more in just a second.
| | 01:13 | But before we do, there is a really
great option here to randomize the
| | 01:17 | color just a little bit.
| | 01:19 | So I like this color, but I want some
more colors that are kind of similar to
| | 01:23 | this, they are just not the exact same color.
| | 01:26 | So that's where this
Color Random Setting comes in.
| | 01:28 | I am going to increase this just a
little bit and you could go about up to 20
| | 01:34 | and you get variations of that same color,
but it's still kind of monochromatic.
| | 01:39 | It's a great way again to add just a
little bit of variation to that color
| | 01:43 | without much effort at all.
| | 01:45 | Take this up more than that and you are
going to get all kinds of random colors
| | 01:49 | in 100, it's basically just like graffiti.
| | 01:52 | So there is just no respect to the
color in the color swatch here, but if we go
| | 01:57 | back up to the Set Color area here we
can not only set the color At Birth, but
| | 02:01 | we can actually set the
color to change Over Life.
| | 02:05 | So choose that and then once that
happens, this color swatch is ignored and
| | 02:11 | Color Over Life becomes selectable.
| | 02:14 | So if we open that up we can see
that there is a rainbow gradient here by
| | 02:18 | default and what it's going to do from
birth to death, from left to right here,
| | 02:22 | the colors are going to be born and
be red and then change to yellow, then
| | 02:26 | green, then cyan, then blue Over Life.
| | 02:30 | Now we saw color random going here, so
I am going to take that down to 0, so we
| | 02:34 | are just seeing what's here in this gradient.
| | 02:37 | And as I scrub through time here, they
start red, and they go orange to yellow,
| | 02:42 | to green, to cyan, and to
blue over their lifespan.
| | 02:47 | So again we change the colors here.
| | 02:50 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to click on one of these stops and drag
| | 02:55 | it away to remove them.
| | 02:56 | I am going to make this kind of fiery look.
| | 02:58 | And I am actually going to drag my red
all the way to the right and let's drag
| | 03:03 | my yellow all the way to the left and
then I am going to click over here close
| | 03:07 | to the red to get more of an
orange and then bring that here.
| | 03:11 | So we can add more swatches just by
clicking and then moving things around.
| | 03:15 | So wherever we click is
going to be a new swatch.
| | 03:19 | And again, if we wanted to change the
color of this swatch, we can just double
| | 03:22 | click on that stop, and then
change it to whatever color we want.
| | 03:26 | Of course, I don't want that blue, so
I am just going to go back over here to
| | 03:31 | that stop, click and drag away to delete.
| | 03:33 | So now we have this cool little
ingredient, our particles are born, they are
| | 03:37 | yellow, then orange, and then
red as they go to their death.
| | 03:42 | Now another way that we could use this
gradient is by going to the Set Color
| | 03:45 | dropdown and choosing Random from Gradient.
| | 03:49 | So this makes it so that there is no
order to when these colors come, they are
| | 03:53 | just randomly, constantly one of
those colors, all throughout the gradient.
| | 03:57 | Now if you want more control over
these colors, what you can do again, is
| | 04:03 | let's say I'll click a red here and
drag this right up to that orange swatch,
| | 04:08 | then we'll go click next the yellow and drag
it right next to the orange swatch as well.
| | 04:14 | And so now we don't have all of these
different colors, we have just these few
| | 04:19 | colors, we have a little bit of orange,
this little sliver of orange here, but
| | 04:22 | mostly solid red and solid yellow, and
this is good if you need to have colors
| | 04:27 | be in a specific range, maybe for a
branding or some other marketing purpose or
| | 04:33 | for whatever reason.
| | 04:34 | If you want specific colors and you
don't actually want a gradient, that's the
| | 04:37 | way to do it by dragging
these colors next to each other.
| | 04:40 | I am just going to drag away to remove those
extra swatches, so we do have a smooth gradient.
| | 04:46 | Now you notice that I did not undo that
action, that's because you cannot undo this.
| | 04:51 | Once you create something here in the
gradient, it's stuck, and you can undo as
| | 04:56 | much as you want and nothing is going
to change, and you could even click the
| | 05:00 | Reset button for the whole effect and
it will not change the gradients at all,
| | 05:04 | very much like the curve drawing interface.
| | 05:06 | So just be aware of that as you make changes.
| | 05:08 | If you've already set to the way it was
when you first opened it, you can click
| | 05:13 | this little rainbow preset here.
| | 05:14 | There are few other presets you can choose from.
| | 05:17 | They are basically kind of jumping off points.
| | 05:19 | Again, we have similar settings here,
we have random, if you want to Randomize
| | 05:23 | these colors, and we also have again, just
like the curve drawing interface, we have Flips.
| | 05:27 | So if we actually want to this to go
from red to orange to yellow, we can choose
| | 05:32 | Over Life and then flip it, so then
it starts red to orange to yellow.
| | 05:36 | I am just going to flip this back.
| | 05:39 | And now another way we can choose
colors here or change the color of this,
| | 05:42 | the appearance is by this Transfer Mode
dropdown and this is actually really important.
| | 05:47 | If I choose Add for example, it's
going to use the add blend mode as these
| | 05:53 | particles overlap one another, and
so you get these really beautiful
| | 05:58 | semitransparent looking
overlays as these particles overlap.
| | 06:02 | This is really helpful especially in
the case of smoke and other things.
| | 06:06 | If I go back up here to Sphere
Feather and I increase this sphere feather.
| | 06:10 | You get a really different look as
these particles overlap and add modes.
| | 06:15 | If Add Modes are a little bit too
intense for you, you can take the Transfer
| | 06:19 | Mode from Add to Screen, and if that's
too intense, you can take that down to
| | 06:23 | Lighten, which also creates
some really interesting effects.
| | 06:25 | In this case, it creates
some cellular looking effects.
| | 06:28 | So I'll take this back down to Screen,
I think it looks best for just kind of
| | 06:32 | smoky look that I am looking for, and
again, you can change these colors in a
| | 06:37 | way as Transfer Mode works by
also playing with the Opacity.
| | 06:40 | So if I take down the opacity, increase
Opacity Random then we have a much more
| | 06:46 | smoky looking set of particles here.
| | 06:49 | May be we take down the Particle
Feather just a little bit and we also might
| | 06:53 | want to try Add again, now that we have
taken down the opacity, and Add is not
| | 06:57 | quite so overkill as it was before.
| | 07:00 | And again, we can play with the
Size and all kinds of things to create
| | 07:03 | different looks with this.
| | 07:04 | But again, we have so many
options to play with the colors here.
| | 07:09 | We have the Swatch, we have Color
Random and we also have this great
| | 07:13 | Gradient, we can have the colors
change Over Life or just be chosen randomly
| | 07:17 | from this gradient.
| | 07:19 | One lost option here, we are going to
talk about is this From the Light Emitter.
| | 07:23 | When we use a light as an emitter
here, which we will talk about later in
| | 07:28 | this training series, we could also
use the color of the light to control the
| | 07:34 | color of the particles.
| | 07:35 | So not too intense there,
but that is an option as well
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Working with Custom ParticlesUsing another layer as a particle| 00:00 | So far in this training series we've
just been using the default particle
| | 00:04 | types, Spheres, Stars, that type of thing and we
have been able to create some pretty cool stuff.
| | 00:10 | But it's time to take things to
another level, and what I want to do in this
| | 00:15 | movie is I am going to take this little
rocket I made in a 3D program, this acts
| | 00:19 | like just a 2D image file though,
and I want this to be the particle.
| | 00:22 | And what we are going to do is we are
going to make the first part of this
| | 00:25 | little project here, where we have
rockets shoot out and Particular is actually
| | 00:31 | generating these rockets.
| | 00:31 | And actually Particular is generating
these little fire trail as well, and
| | 00:36 | we are going to make that fire trail in a
later movie when we talk about Aux Particles.
| | 00:40 | But for right now, let's look at how to
create particles that are these little rockets.
| | 00:46 | So I am going to go over to the
rockets start comp and I have just a default
| | 00:50 | application of Particular.
| | 00:51 | And before we create rocket particles,
let's go ahead and setup Particular, so
| | 00:56 | it's ready for that.
| | 00:58 | And the first thing I want to do is
open up the Emitter section, make sure
| | 01:02 | that's all squared away.
| | 01:03 | I am going to take the Direction from
Uniform to Directional, and so that we
| | 01:08 | could see what we are doing.
| | 01:10 | I am going to take X rotation to 90
degrees, and I am going to take Y rotation
| | 01:16 | to 30 degrees and I want the Emitter
to be in the lower left hand corner off
| | 01:23 | screen, so the particles
emit up and to the right.
| | 01:26 | And actually I want a bigger spread
here, so I'll take Direction Spread to
| | 01:30 | about 35, and then let's see, I'll go
ahead and take down the Particle Per
| | 01:36 | Second to about 3 actually.
| | 01:39 | Things kind of get pretty hairy when
you have big images as your particles.
| | 01:46 | So you can imagine 100 rockets per
second, it not only bogs down the computer,
| | 01:51 | but also doesn't look very good either.
| | 01:53 | So I am going to leave that
to 3 particles per second.
| | 01:56 | I am also going to increase Velocity
to about 400 or so, so these launch a
| | 02:00 | little bit, let's go ahead and drag
the Emitter over to the bottom left out
| | 02:06 | of frame and as we play this back,
we can see that that's what our little
| | 02:11 | rockets will be doing.
| | 02:13 | It's more like rocket like behavior.
| | 02:16 | Well, I don't know if it's rocket
like behavior, that's what I am assuming.
| | 02:19 | I am not a scientist, but that's my
best guess, what rockets might do.
| | 02:24 | So now what we need to do is we need to
bring the particle into our same composition.
| | 02:30 | So the 3D rocket shrunk comp is -- if
I double click this, open this up, this
| | 02:36 | is the rocket and I just added some
glow to this little trail here and I put
| | 02:42 | this in a right spot for the flames which will
- again, we'll talk about it in a later movie.
| | 02:47 | So I am going go back to rocket start,
I am going to drag 3D rocket shrunk into
| | 02:52 | my rocket start composition.
| | 02:54 | I actually don't want this to be visible;
| | 02:56 | I just want it to be there, so I am
going to turn off the visibility by clicking
| | 03:01 | the eye icon in the Timeline panel here.
| | 03:03 | Select my Particular rocket's layer.
| | 03:05 | I am going to close the Emitter section,
open the Particle section and where it
| | 03:11 | says Particle Type I am going to
change this from Sphere to Sprite.
| | 03:16 | Notice there are several options for
Sprites and Textured Polygons, we'll talk
| | 03:20 | about the differences between these in
the next movie, but for right now just
| | 03:24 | choose regular old Sprite.
| | 03:26 | Now nothing happens here, because
we need to tell it what layer to use,
| | 03:30 | basically when you choose a Sprite
option or a Textured Polygon option, that's
| | 03:35 | how you can tell Particular to use
another layer as a Custom Particle.
| | 03:40 | But until you specify what layer that is,
then nothing happens and the screen is blank.
| | 03:45 | So I am going to open up the Texture
Section and from the Layer drop down I am
| | 03:50 | going to choose 3D rocket shrunk,
the name of our precomp down here.
| | 03:57 | Now note that this is a still image,
but we can actually use a movie file if we
| | 04:03 | wanted to, but there are some special
issues with that, so we'll look at that in
| | 04:07 | another movie a little bit
later on in this training series.
| | 04:10 | Now if I scrub my current time now, we
can barely see our little rockets here in
| | 04:16 | the distant, they are hard to make out.
| | 04:18 | So what we are going to do is come
down to the Size area and we are going to
| | 04:23 | boost this up to a whopping 100.
| | 04:25 | And now we can see those.
| | 04:27 | Now let's go ahead and take Size
Random to about 40 and if we play this back,
| | 04:33 | it's kind of heartbreaking actually,
because don't seem to move like rockets,
| | 04:38 | but we can go ahead and fix that pretty
easily actually, thanks to a wonderful feature.
| | 04:43 | I am going to open up Rotation here and
in the rotation section you'll find this
| | 04:48 | Orient to motion Property.
| | 04:51 | By default it's off, so I am
going to change this to on.
| | 04:54 | And basically that will make these
rockets point in the direction that they are
| | 04:58 | moving and it seems like that would
kind of fix things automatically, actually
| | 05:03 | made things a little bit worse.
| | 05:04 | So what we can do is go here to the
Rotate Z parameter and I am actually going
| | 05:08 | to change this again to about 100, and
now these will point in the direction
| | 05:15 | that they are shooting.
| | 05:17 | So now we have these great little
rockets that travel in the direction that
| | 05:22 | they are going, and they are all being
powered by Particular, which is really awesome.
| | 05:27 | Now I should probably point out too that
they are dying out, which does not look
| | 05:31 | realistic at all, just to
have these rockets disappear.
| | 05:34 | Notice that my composition is 5
seconds, but the default life of the
| | 05:38 | particles are 3 seconds.
| | 05:40 | So what I need to do is take this at
least above 5 seconds, so that they don't
| | 05:46 | die out while on screen, and then
we have created custom particles.
| | 05:52 | The possibilities with custom
particles are virtually endless.
| | 05:54 | I mean it comes in handy from simple
things like, let's say for glitter for
| | 05:59 | example, if we don't want to use these
default four pointed stars for glitter,
| | 06:05 | we might want multi-pointed stars.
| | 06:07 | We could use a shape layer for example
or some other customer particle instead
| | 06:11 | of that, or we can create different
kind of Smoke or Fire or whatever, just by
| | 06:16 | using these different types of particles.
| | 06:19 | Meaning, whatever you could think of can
be used as a particle here in Particular.
| | 06:23 | Custom particles significantly enhance
the capabilities and power of Particular.
| | 06:29 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with sprites and polygons| 00:00 | We are going to be starting off here
where we left off in our last movie where
| | 00:04 | we made these custom
particles using a rocket image.
| | 00:08 | Now I want to talk about this particle
type section where we can choose these
| | 00:12 | custom particles, we have three
options for Sprite and we have same three
| | 00:16 | options for Textured Polygon.
| | 00:18 | So basically what Sprite does is it tells
the particles to always face the camera.
| | 00:25 | So as we choose Textured Polygon, it
gives these particles permission to bend
| | 00:32 | away from the camera.
| | 00:33 | Now let me explain here.
| | 00:34 | What we want to do is create a Layer,
New Camera and this will all make sense.
| | 00:41 | So once we create a camera and the
default settings are fine, click Ok.
| | 00:44 | Go our Unified Camera Tool here, as
we click around we realize that these
| | 00:52 | particles actually exist in 3D space
because Particular is a 3D program, 3D
| | 00:58 | plug-in and actually 2D stars were
also created with Particular, so we are
| | 01:02 | seeing those move around in 3D space as well.
| | 01:05 | And when, if we go back to Particular
here, when we have a Textured Polygon
| | 01:09 | set up it's actually possible to move
around and to see the backside of these rockets.
| | 01:17 | And that actually in this case destroys
the illusion, that's not what we want.
| | 01:20 | So if we choose Sprite, then these
particles will always face the camera, so
| | 01:27 | even as the camera moves around the
particles will always remain flush with the
| | 01:33 | cameras that we never see their sides.
| | 01:37 | So all of the Sprite options, we have
Sprite, Sprite colorize and Sprite Fill
| | 01:42 | which we'll talk about in just a second.
| | 01:43 | Those are same things for the textured
polygon, Textured Polygon Colorize and Fill.
| | 01:48 | And with textured polygon these are
things maybe if you had flower petals or
| | 01:54 | other objects that it would be okay,
they might be flat and you would expect
| | 01:58 | them to be flat, those are the type of
things that might be pretty good to use
| | 02:02 | textured polygon for otherwise choose
Sprite if we are going to be moving the
| | 02:08 | camera around quite a bit.
| | 02:09 | Now let's talk about colorize for one
minute, if we go to Sprite Colorize,
| | 02:13 | this allows us to actually tint each particle
using the color swatch in the particle area.
| | 02:19 | By default, that's white, so it
turns everything black and white.
| | 02:22 | Notice that it doesn't make everything
completely white, that's what tint does
| | 02:27 | or excuse me, the Fill does.
| | 02:28 | So when we choose Fill, it makes
everything whatever color, the color swatch is,
| | 02:34 | and that's good for
creating kind of cartooning looks.
| | 02:36 | Now we have bunch of kind of
cartoony looking rockets here.
| | 02:40 | And if we wanted to, I'll just go ahead
and maybe click color similar to what we
| | 02:45 | have in the background, a bluish purplish color.
| | 02:49 | And we could also increase color random
to create some randomness in those colors.
| | 02:55 | And also note that when we choose a
Sprite Colorize that the randomness also
| | 03:00 | works, it creates a random
tint on each one of our particles.
| | 03:05 | So using the Sprite options and
Textured Polygon options it gives us a little
| | 03:11 | bit more control over how we have
Particular interpret our custom particle.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rotating particles| 00:01 | Now that we have looked at creating
custom particles and Sprites and textured
| | 00:05 | polygons, we can look at how to rotate
particles which is actually a little bit
| | 00:11 | more complex than it might seem on the surface.
| | 00:13 | So in this project, Particlerotation.aep,
I am going to go the 2D rotating comp
| | 00:18 | and first we'll look at
just plain old 2D rotation.
| | 00:22 | Now if I open up the Particle section
and my Particle type is the default Sphere
| | 00:27 | and I actually haven't changed any of
my settings from their defaults, but
| | 00:30 | you'll notice that we have a rotation
section here but everything is grayed out.
| | 00:35 | If I choose most of these default
little settings here like Glow Sphere or
| | 00:40 | Cloudlet or Streaklet these are also
not allowing me to adjust rotation.
| | 00:46 | The only default regular old
particle we can adjust rotation for is star.
| | 00:52 | And even then, all we can
do is adjust the Z rotation;
| | 00:57 | this is considered a 2D particle.
| | 00:59 | So we could adjust Z rotation and if we
adjust Rotate Z, for example then these
| | 01:06 | particles will rotate and every
particle will be at exact same rotation.
| | 01:12 | I don't want that in this case, I am
going to take this zero and we could play
| | 01:16 | with random rotation so that each
star has a different rotation value.
| | 01:21 | And we could also adjust the rotation
speed Z, and this allows us, let's say
| | 01:27 | I will take it to one for example,
then this allows the particles to rotate
| | 01:33 | on their own quickly.
| | 01:36 | And we could increase the speed of the
rotation by increasing random speed rotate.
| | 01:43 | So now some of the particles like
this one down here, it's moving pretty
| | 01:47 | slowly, it's rotating very slowly I should
say and some of them are rotating very quickly.
| | 01:53 | So we could adjust that and also I
should point out, oops, I am going to go back
| | 01:58 | up here to Particle Type, if we are
using a custom particle and we choose one of
| | 02:00 | the Sprite options, again for Sprites,
After Effects in Particular are going to
| | 02:06 | assume that the particle is going
to be constantly facing the camera.
| | 02:09 | So it's going to have the illusion of
a 2D particle, so you could only adjust
| | 02:14 | again the Z rotation which is basically
like clockwise and counterclockwise as
| | 02:19 | we saw with the star.
| | 02:20 | It's only when we change our Particle
type to Textured Polygon then we get
| | 02:26 | access to the full control of
all the dimensions of rotation.
| | 02:31 | So let's go over to the 3D rotation
composition and I have here these little
| | 02:36 | squares that I made and actually if I
go over here to pre-comp square, it's a
| | 02:40 | little simple shape layer that I made.
| | 02:43 | And the squares are growing on and there
is a camera in the scene and the camera
| | 02:49 | is orbiting around these little squares,
I am not going to wait for it to render
| | 02:55 | it, I am just going to skew it out in time.
| | 02:58 | And at one point, we see the sides of
the squares, you know, lot of them seem to
| | 03:03 | disappear and that's not super great.
| | 03:04 | So I want to add some randomness to this
and still keep this kind of geometric nature.
| | 03:08 | And so we are going to play with
the custom rotation of the square.
| | 03:12 | So I am going to select a Particular
layer and go up to the particle section
| | 03:16 | and open up rotation.
| | 03:17 | The particle type is already set to
Textured Polygon and again any of these
| | 03:20 | textured polygon settings will allow you to
play with the different X, Y and Z rotations.
| | 03:25 | And again, just as with the 2D layer if
we, let's say for example rotate X. If
| | 03:30 | we rotate X then all of these squares
will rotate 50 degrees for example in this
| | 03:38 | case and they will stay that way
for the duration of the animation.
| | 03:42 | So no movement just they are
oriented to 50 degrees of X rotation.
| | 03:48 | I am just going to clear that out.
| | 03:51 | If I wanted to increase the Rotation
Speed X for example then these would
| | 03:57 | rotate along X as the animation played and
they would animate without setting key frames.
| | 04:04 | Just really, really nice.
| | 04:06 | And also reminds me of the Card Wipe
Effect, the Card Dance Effect in After
| | 04:10 | Effects where you could just set a
little property and the animation will just
| | 04:15 | rotate along a given axis
without you having to set key frames.
| | 04:19 | I am just going to zero this out and if
we wanted to make this a little bit more
| | 04:23 | chaotic, we could increase random
rotation which will give us random rotation on
| | 04:28 | every axis for every particle.
| | 04:31 | It doesn't animate so, it's kind of
just like randomizing these three values
| | 04:35 | essentially, but it does kind
of create a more random look.
| | 04:40 | I'll zero that out.
| | 04:44 | If I wanted to increase Random Speed
Rotate, it's like randomizing these
| | 04:48 | different rotation speed values and
these particles are now all rotating in
| | 04:54 | every direction which is kind of cool.
| | 04:56 | If you want to create an explosion or
something like that, this would be a
| | 04:59 | great way to do it.
| | 05:01 | Or again more chaos, this always works.
| | 05:02 | I am just going to take this back down to zero.
| | 05:05 | What I actually want to do is take
the rotation speed Y which makes things
| | 05:10 | rotate around like in 3D space.
| | 05:13 | I want to take this down to 0.5, a pretty
modest value but actually creates a lot of action.
| | 05:18 | And now as these particles move they
spin a little bit around the Y axis.
| | 05:29 | Now it's a cool effect, this
might be a little bit too much though.
| | 05:34 | Let me take this down to maybe 0.3 after all.
| | 05:38 | But what's kind of cool is that I have
some lights in my scene as we'll talk
| | 05:43 | about in the next chapter and as these
particles are spinning around the Y axis
| | 05:46 | they are catching the light and then
they are not catching the light which
| | 05:50 | creates this really interesting
flicker effects and makes my scene feel much
| | 05:54 | more complex than it really is.
| | 05:58 | So just adding a little bit of random
rotation could give a lot of life to our
| | 06:02 | scene and to our particles again
because they play on light and again because
| | 06:06 | these particles appear to be more 3D as
they rotate along these different axes,
| | 06:13 | these different 3D axes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Integrating After Effects 3DUsing Particular in 3D scenes| 00:00 | Throughout this training series I have
mentioned here and there about how these
| | 00:04 | particles in Particular are 3D,
but what does that really mean?
| | 00:07 | In this tutorial, we are going to
look at what that means. We are going to
| | 00:10 | So I have here this little paint
brush scene I actually created in a 3D
| | 00:11 | talk about what 3D particles mean to you in
your life and how to take advantage of that.
| | 00:21 | program, Cinema 4D actually.
| | 00:23 | And I was able to exact that 3D data
from that camera scene and bring it
| | 00:28 | here, into After Effects.
| | 00:30 | So basically, this is just a 2D, a flat
2D layer here, an image sequence, but we
| | 00:38 | also have a camera here that
mimics this movement of rotating around
| | 00:43 | this little table. And what we are going
to do later on in this movie is we are
| | 00:48 | going to add some particles in
Particular and they will also appear to rotate as
| | 00:53 | the camera orbits around this scene.
| | 00:55 | But, before we get into this
real-world example, let's break things down a
| | 00:59 | little bit and get very simple,
so we understand what's going on here.
| | 01:03 | I have in this 3D particles comp,
just a simple layer, and that's all that's
| | 01:07 | here. I labeled that Particular but
there is nothing on it, so let's go ahead
| | 01:11 | and apply Particular. And again, I
wanted to start from scratch here so that you
| | 01:15 | could really see what we
are doing from the ground up.
| | 01:18 | So I am going to apply Particular to
this layer, and here we have this default view.
| | 01:23 | And if we go out to 4 Views--and make
sure you are not at the first frame where
| | 01:29 | there's no particles. Go out there and
time a few seconds, so we have a good amount of particles here.
| | 01:34 | We have here in the Active Camera View
these particles, but if we look over here,
| | 01:38 | we are actually seeing the Top view.
| | 01:39 | Now what I am going to do is create a
new camera. I am going to go to Layer >
| | 01:44 | New > Camera and the default
settings are fine. Click Ok.
| | 01:48 | We just need a camera here.
| | 01:49 | And so you could see that even though
this is our active camera viewport, we are
| | 01:55 | looking at the particles from this side.
| | 01:58 | So from the top view, we can actually see
that these viewports are rendering these
| | 02:03 | particles in three dimensional space.
| | 02:05 | It's actually pretty cool because if
we even have like a solid layer in 3D
| | 02:09 | space, it would just look like a flat layer.
| | 02:11 | But somehow, magically, Particular is
able to render in three dimensions, which is
| | 02:16 | very cool, because we could always
see where our particles are in 3D space.
| | 02:20 | And if were to increase the Z dimension,
we could see this go back and stretch
| | 02:24 | and all that type of stuff.
| | 02:25 | So I am going to actually go back to one
view, I'm going to select the camera, and I am
| | 02:30 | going to choose the Unified Camera tool.
And as we click and drag around, again,
| | 02:35 | we can see that these particles exist in
3D space, and we could again right-click
| | 02:40 | and drag and zoom in and zoom in to
these particles, again orbit or pan around
| | 02:46 | them by holding the middle mouse button down.
| | 02:48 | There's a lot we could do with this
camera. We could fly through these particles
| | 02:52 | as we make them look like
clouds or what have you.
| | 02:54 | But that 3D functionality of
Particular is one of its greatest appeals; it
| | 02:58 | gives you so much flexibility and
power because it really is a 3D environment
| | 03:02 | that it is creating.
| | 03:03 | So now let's go over to
our Paint Brush Scene start
| | 03:06 | now that we understand this. And again,
we already have a camera in our scene.
| | 03:10 | So here we have a Particular layer,
and let's see what this looks like. I am
| | 03:13 | going to go ahead and just apply in
Particular again to this layer here.
| | 03:19 | And the first thing we need to do is go
to the Emitter, open up the Emitter, and
| | 03:23 | change position X and Y to zero. 0, 0.
| | 03:27 | And that will put things kind of close
to where we need them to be. We need them
| | 03:30 | to be up a little bit higher.
| | 03:32 | So reduce the Y value to a negative, until it
about touches the center of that paintbrush.
| | 03:40 | And we haven't done anything other
than apply the effect. We haven't adjusted
| | 03:43 | any parameters other than its position
but yet if we were to scroll through this,
| | 03:48 | we would see that these particles orbit
around, following the camera, because the
| | 03:54 | camera is moving around.
| | 03:57 | So let's go ahead and play with these
particles and create some interesting
| | 04:01 | particles here, and maybe see
this a little bit more clearly.
| | 04:03 | First thing I want to do is change this
from a point emitter to a box emitter.
| | 04:09 | Now, by the way, you might have noticed
that these particles tend to be a little
| | 04:12 | bit more pink and purple than they
typically are, because what we have here is
| | 04:19 | some hidden adjustment layers. If I
click the shy switch you could see some
| | 04:22 | color adjustment layer, but these
are just the default regular old white
| | 04:25 | particular particles.
| | 04:26 | What I am going to do is I am going to
go open up the particle section, and let's
| | 04:32 | go ahead and increase the size of
these a little bit, and let's go ahead and
| | 04:38 | increase the size random a bit, bump
that up, and let's go ahead and increase the
| | 04:44 | opacity random, all the way. And we
have some interesting particles there.
| | 04:50 | Now let's go ahead and increase the
emitter size Y so that they fill up more of
| | 04:55 | the little paint jar, paintbrush
jar, and that's looking pretty good.
| | 05:01 | So if we were to go out in time here it
see some pretty interesting particles.
| | 05:07 | If we wanted to apply the velocity a
little bit, this velocity is a little
| | 05:09 | harsh; I might want to take this
down to 80, or even lower.
| | 05:13 | But for right now, that looks fairly decent.
| | 05:16 | We could also increase the emitter
size in Z so that these particles feel a
| | 05:21 | little bit more spread out.
| | 05:23 | Another cool trick that we can
do, that I like doing sometimes,
| | 05:26 | is just select this entire layer,
press Command+D on the Mac or Ctrl+D
| | 05:31 | on the PC to duplicate the entire
layer, and then drag that layer on top of
| | 05:38 | this Paint Brush layer, the layer with a paint
brush and a jar and all that kind of stuff.
| | 05:43 | So it seems like the paint brush is
actually being surrounded by particles, some
| | 05:48 | behind and some in front.
| | 05:50 | But because we duplicated the layer,
this is actually an exact duplicate of the
| | 05:54 | particles on the other layer.
| | 05:55 | So what I can do on this top layer is
change the Particle Type, for example, maybe
| | 06:00 | to Star. And let's go ahead and take
the size down considerably, maybe not to
| | 06:08 | zero but maybe to
four, something like that.
| | 06:14 | So everywhere where there is a little
bubble from the back Particular layer, we
| | 06:17 | have a little star on the top.
| | 06:19 | So it's almost like a little bit more
of a complex particle system, because we
| | 06:23 | we only have two
particle systems working here.
| | 06:25 | But both are going to pick up the
movement of the camera, or rather the camera is
| | 06:30 | going to move around the particles
as if they were here in this jar.
| | 06:36 | So again, it's a great way to add
life to your scene is to fly a camera
| | 06:42 | through, and you don't really have to animate
the particles to have them move with the camera.
| | 06:47 | Again, it's one of the best features of
Particular and as we go throughout this
| | 06:52 | chapter, you'll see how we'll able to
use more of After Effects 3D features
| | 06:56 | with Particular as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using After Effects lights as emitters| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to look at
using a light as a particle emitter.
| | 00:06 | Now this concept is a little weird and
foreign, so we're just going to start
| | 00:10 | with a completely blank fresh project
and this isn't going to be super pretty,
| | 00:15 | but it's going to be easy to understand
what's happening, and then later on in
| | 00:19 | this training series, we'll actually
look at their really cool use for using
| | 00:22 | lights as a particle emitter.
| | 00:24 | So I'm going to create a new
composition here and I'm going to use the HDV/HDTV
| | 00:28 | 720 29.97 preset and click OK.
| | 00:34 | I'm also going to right-click here
in the Timeline panel and choose New,
| | 00:39 | Solid to create a new solid and
click OK and let's go ahead and apply
| | 00:44 | Particular to this solid.
| | 00:46 | I already have my 4 View viewport
here, which you might want to do.
| | 00:51 | I'm also going to right-click here and
I'm going to choose New and I'm going
| | 00:56 | to create a new light.
| | 00:57 | Now it's important in the light
settings dialogue box, we actually changed the
| | 01:01 | name of the light to emitter and we'll
talk about why that is in just a moment,
| | 01:06 | I'm going to go ahead click OK there,
and then we have this light and I'm going
| | 01:10 | to go back to my black solid with
Particular, open up the Emitter section and
| | 01:14 | change the Emitter type to Light.
| | 01:16 | And now this light is actually an
emitter and if I move in time, these
| | 01:23 | particles come out of this light,
it's a little bit easier to see, if we go
| | 01:27 | back in the Particular settings and
change the direction from uniform to
| | 01:31 | directional, then it spits out based on
the cone angle which we'll look at more
| | 01:37 | closely in just a moment.
| | 01:37 | One thing I want to direct your
attention to in a Particular settings here, if
| | 01:41 | we click the Options button, here we
can change the name of what we want this
| | 01:47 | emitter to be called, but by default it
chooses the light that's called Emitter
| | 01:52 | and again here we can change it, if we
wanted to, but there's some great benefit
| | 01:56 | in having this light be a selective
light and not just light one or some generic
| | 02:02 | name, because you don't have a bunch of
lights in your scene and it might just
| | 02:06 | choose one of those lights instead of
the light that you've actually dedicated
| | 02:09 | as your emitter light.
| | 02:12 | Now let's go back to the Black Solid
with Particular and you'll notice that we
| | 02:16 | have some settings kind of grayed out
here, we have Position settings that are
| | 02:20 | gone, Direction Spread, Rotation and
that's because all of that is controlled
| | 02:25 | now by the light, so if I double-click
on the emitter, the Light layer here.
| | 02:33 | And I'll move this dialogue box over
next to the light, so we see what's
| | 02:37 | happening as we adjust it.
| | 02:38 | As we increase the cone angle, you're seeing
that the spread of the particles is increasing.
| | 02:44 | So now if we play this back, these
particles, oops I didn't click OK here, these
| | 02:49 | particles are now
spreading out a little bit more.
| | 02:53 | And I'll double-click this again, and
reduce this cone angle here, and as we
| | 02:58 | have a very narrow cone angle, then the
particles stay within that little area there.
| | 03:04 | I am just going to go ahead and double-
click this, now we could also change the
| | 03:08 | Light type and we'll have different
results there, so right now we're getting a
| | 03:12 | cone, I'm just going to open
this up a little bit more here.
| | 03:15 | We're having this kind of Cone shape,
because our light type is a spot, but if
| | 03:19 | we were to change this to for example,
a point light, then that would create a
| | 03:24 | Point Emitter from this light,
now let's double-click that again.
| | 03:28 | We could also change the Light type to
Parallel and we have Parallel Rays here
| | 03:35 | which is great for creating just a
beam of particles, because they all just
| | 03:39 | travel parallel to one another.
| | 03:42 | So again, a great for like
just a streak of particles.
| | 03:45 | I'm going to take this back to spotlight,
and I want to show you another great
| | 03:50 | attribute here, when you use a light as
an emitter, the intensity of the light
| | 03:56 | actually controls the particles per
second, so as I increase the intensity of
| | 04:01 | the light, we're getting more particles,
as I decrease the intensity of light,
| | 04:05 | we're getting less
particles generated per second.
| | 04:08 | So you could see, that they set up
this really interesting system where the
| | 04:13 | light settings now control a lot of the
core emission settings of the particles.
| | 04:19 | So these are cool tricks, and they
can be helpful, but one of the biggest
| | 04:23 | reasons why we use lights as an emitter
is found in the Position settings, if I
| | 04:29 | select the Emitter and press P, we
see something very interesting here.
| | 04:32 | We see X, Y and Z position, all values
of the same property, what that means in
| | 04:40 | plain English is that we can move this
light in 3D space wherever we want, we
| | 04:45 | could move it forwards, back, side-to-
side, up and down and we can create really
| | 04:50 | interesting animation moving around in
three dimensions, because they are all
| | 04:55 | values of the same property.
| | 04:57 | Now if you go back to Particular, and
we'll just go ahead and change this back
| | 05:02 | to a Point light for example.
| | 05:03 | We see that position X and Y and
position Z are all values of different
| | 05:08 | properties, and that's just a limitation
of After Effects plug-ins, so you can't
| | 05:12 | get really one property
with three dimensions that way.
| | 05:16 | So it's a little bit more challenging
to move things around in three dimensions
| | 05:21 | by using these settings.
| | 05:23 | So as we use a Light Emitter we can
move this around and have those particles
| | 05:28 | move around in 3D space a little bit
more fluidly, we can create a three
| | 05:32 | dimensional motion path for example
with our animated light and create some
| | 05:36 | really interesting results that way.
| | 05:38 | And again later on in this training
series we're going to have a little project,
| | 05:41 | we're going to make light streaks and
we're going to take advantage of these 3D
| | 05:45 | motion paths with these lights and
create that effect and it's really hard to
| | 05:49 | create that effect
without using a light emitter.
| | 05:52 | So that and the other reason being
that we could also again have a little
| | 05:56 | bit quicker control over a lot of
basic parameters of particles such as that
| | 06:02 | the Emitter type and the fact that the
light intensity can control particles
| | 06:07 | per second and so on, these can make using
light emitters a little bit easier sometimes.
| | 06:13 | In the next tutorial, we're going to
look at another value that After Effects
| | 06:16 | Lights has with Particular and that
is in adding shading to our particles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using light falloff on particles| 00:00 | I have here this project, it's not the
greatest thing in the world, I made a
| | 00:05 | little background and I made a custom
particles with this little dollar signs
| | 00:08 | and I made a box emitter with Particular,
I made them go back really far and it
| | 00:12 | just really looks terrible, it
doesn't look very good at all, this is not
| | 00:16 | something that you would
see in a professional setting.
| | 00:18 | So in the next couple movies, we're
going to look at a couple of really
| | 00:22 | important After Effects tricks that
you can use with Particular, to make your
| | 00:25 | particles really sing and look as good
they can, even this project is terrible
| | 00:30 | as it is, even this is going to look
pretty good by the time we're done with it
| | 00:34 | at the end of the next movie.
| | 00:36 | So I'm going to go to Particular here
and I'm going to close up my Emitter
| | 00:40 | section and I want to
open up the Shading section.
| | 00:44 | See one of the cool things about
Particular is that it allows you to use After
| | 00:48 | Effects lights to actually light your
particles and it also creates shadings,
| | 00:54 | falloff on your particles as well.
| | 00:56 | So I'm going to go down to my timeline,
I'm going to right click, choose New, Light;
| | 01:02 | I'm just going to make a point light
here, but I'm going to name this light,
| | 01:07 | Shadow with a capital S, Shadow;
| | 01:10 | I'll leave the Light> White, Intensity
about the default or there around, 96 is
| | 01:16 | fine, click OK and nothing really
happens, the Background layer is a 3D layer,
| | 01:23 | so we're seeing its results on the light,
but what we need to do to have these
| | 01:28 | particles recognize this light as you
go back to Particular and in the shading
| | 01:32 | section, we need to take Shading from Off to On.
| | 01:36 | And now we are seeing these
particles be lit by this light.
| | 01:44 | Now back in Particular here, there is
light fall off settings, setting I should
| | 01:50 | say, and there is the Natural(Lux)
setting and the none AE setting, and
| | 01:57 | basically this controls light falloff,
when it's set to none AE, then there
| | 02:01 | really is no falloff of the light.
| | 02:03 | If the light touches the particles, it's
lit, if it doesn't, its dark and that's it.
| | 02:08 | But if we change this to natural,
then we have a nice little falloff and we
| | 02:12 | could even animate the light going
through our scene here, we will click on that
| | 02:16 | little Z area and would have this go
backwards or forwards, so really relighting
| | 02:20 | our scene here, lighting our scene with
this After Effects light and again our
| | 02:25 | particles are allowing
themselves to be shaded by this light.
| | 02:30 | Now the reason why we named our light
shadow is because we want to use this
| | 02:35 | light as a shadowlet and so what I can
do is go to Particular and click on the
| | 02:40 | options again and in the same way in
the last movie, emitters, light emitters
| | 02:45 | start with emitter are called emitter.
| | 02:48 | By default Particular is going to look
for shadowlet lights called Shadow, so if
| | 02:52 | you're going to use a light
as an emitter name it Emitter.
| | 02:57 | If you are going to use a light to
cast shadows and give shading to your
| | 03:02 | particles, might be a good idea to
refer to it or called it shadow, and then we
| | 03:07 | could use it in the shadowlet section.
| | 03:09 | So if I come down here in the shading
area in Particular, the shadowlet for
| | 03:12 | main, these are our main particles, we
haven't talk about aux particles yet in
| | 03:16 | this training series, but we will.
| | 03:18 | But take shadowlet for main from off to
on and what that's going to do is cast a
| | 03:24 | little bit of shadow, so these
particles are actually going to cast shadows on
| | 03:28 | each other, they are self shadowing.
| | 03:30 | Now by default, if we open up the
shadowlet settings, the opacity for the shadow
| | 03:34 | is set to five, so I'm actually going
to click in there and I'll type 50, and
| | 03:42 | now we see a much darker
shadow as you could see that here.
| | 03:45 | Now we can adjust the size and the
distance and the color of the shadow even and
| | 03:51 | all kinds of stuff like that
but for now that's pretty good.
| | 03:54 | If I take this - oops, I accidentally
moved stuff that wasn't the light, I just
| | 03:59 | want to move the light, but as we move this
you could see those shadows changing as well.
| | 04:03 | It's a really cool effect being
able to play with the lighting of these
| | 04:08 | particles and even that is
significantly different than what we were looking
| | 04:12 | at when we started.
| | 04:13 | If we go back to Particular, you will
notice that there are few other options
| | 04:17 | here, we can increase the diffuse
lighting or decrease it, basically it's the
| | 04:23 | amount that the light is hitting the
particles, the amount of color, that it
| | 04:27 | comes from the light hitting the particles.
| | 04:30 | And we could also adjust the Ambient
light, that's the light in the shadows.
| | 04:34 | And I can increase this, this tends to
make things look pretty blown out, pretty
| | 04:39 | quick, we could actually take this down
to zero if you wanted, which makes pitch
| | 04:42 | black particles also.
| | 04:44 | And again we have Specularity controls
for the amount and the sharpness of the
| | 04:49 | little specular highlights there.
| | 04:50 | If you wanted kind of make maybe have
this, have a metallic texture and we
| | 04:56 | could also use a reflection map, if we
wanted certain colors in the reflections
| | 05:02 | of these particles.
| | 05:03 | I haven't really gotten great results
with that, so I tend to not use that,
| | 05:08 | but that option is here for you if
you'd like to play around with that, so
| | 05:11 | anyway this is one way to add a lot of
realism into our particles, by adding
| | 05:15 | lights into our scene and having that light our
particles in a very natural and realistic way.
| | 05:20 | In the next movie we'll keep going with
this realism theme and we'll add depth
| | 05:25 | of field, blur from a camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Achieving a shallow depth of field| 00:00 | In the last tutorial, we used After
Effects Lights to create some cool shading
| | 00:05 | and lighting fall off on these little
dollar sign particles here, and it looks
| | 00:10 | way better obviously, but it's still
lacking something, it still just messy.
| | 00:16 | There are particles everywhere and from
a design point of view, we have no idea
| | 00:21 | where we should look, if we were an
audience person watching this, consuming
| | 00:27 | this, you have no idea where to look
everything is vying for our attention these
| | 00:31 | particles here are huge.
| | 00:33 | This one is the brightest, but it's
really small there is bunch of junk here.
| | 00:37 | So another trick that we often use is to
use the Depth of Field of the camera to
| | 00:43 | create some blur and focus.
| | 00:46 | So what I am going to actually going
to do is go to Particular and in the
| | 00:50 | Rendering section, I want to make sure
that Depth of Field is set to Camera Settings.
| | 00:55 | Thankfully, that's actually the default,
so if you just forget about it, you
| | 00:59 | don't have to worry about it just
make sure that that is set there and not
| | 01:03 | turned off or else it won't work.
| | 01:05 | Then you actually can go to your
Camera Settings, open this up, open up the
| | 01:10 | Camera Options, and then here is
where we play with the Depth of Field.
| | 01:14 | So the Depth of Field in After
Effects is the range of focus.
| | 01:19 | Now if the Depth of Field is off which it
is by default then everything is in focus.
| | 01:24 | There is no range of focus
because everything is in focus.
| | 01:27 | So if we turn this on, then only a
little section will be in focus and we
| | 01:33 | use the focus distance parameter to
determine how far away from the camera is in focus.
| | 01:39 | Now to create a really beautiful look,
we want a shallow depth of field.
| | 01:42 | We don't want that much stuff in focus
and we get a shallower depth of field,
| | 01:49 | the same way we do in real
life by opening up the Aperture.
| | 01:53 | So we want to increase the Aperture
from 25 to maybe 250, there we are getting
| | 01:59 | some blur there now, and now when you
adjust that focus distance to make sure
| | 02:04 | that what we want is in focus and
actually what I can do is, if I turn off
| | 02:10 | Depth of Field for a second, I can choose an
object here that I want to be sharp and clear.
| | 02:15 | Now this dollar sign is
really getting my attention.
| | 02:18 | This one is straight towards the camera,
it's flat towards the camera, so there
| | 02:22 | is not a lot of weird shading or any
like skewing happening here it just a nice
| | 02:27 | clean little dollar sign.
| | 02:29 | It's getting lit really well.
| | 02:31 | This is the one that I want the
viewers to focus their attention on.
| | 02:35 | So I am going to turn back on Depth of
Field and I could adjust Focus Distance.
| | 02:39 | I am going to play with this
here until I get that one in focus.
| | 02:47 | I will actually disable at a time I
knew that this about a 1000 pixels out.
| | 02:50 | So I am going to click here and type
in 1000 and now this dollar sign is in
| | 02:57 | focus and everything
else is pretty out of focus.
| | 03:00 | Now if we wanted to increase the blur
of the particles closer to the camera and
| | 03:05 | further away from the camera than this
dollar sign, then again we could just
| | 03:09 | increase the aperture more.
| | 03:10 | So we can increase this up to 350 and
everything that's not in that Depth of
| | 03:15 | Field will be blurred more.
| | 03:19 | And so as you look at this, actually
I will increase it back to 250, its a
| | 03:22 | little overkill for me.
| | 03:23 | But as you look at this, this just
looks a lot cleaner a lot more professional.
| | 03:28 | We've taken this chaos and kind of
organized it by using lighting shading and by
| | 03:33 | using depth of field and now we have
something here that is starting to approach
| | 03:37 | a more professional look.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Tips and TricksAdding glow| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to look
at ways to make your particles glow and
| | 00:04 | some other ways to make them
pop off the screen a little bit.
| | 00:07 | I have here some glows kind of
floating passes background here.
| | 00:13 | I kind of wanted to make it look like
kind of dust particles in the air and
| | 00:17 | maybe little embers in the air, but in
order to see the glow, I had to make them
| | 00:21 | bigger than they should be, so this is
kind of unattractive, because particle
| | 00:24 | size should be down to maybe
three or so maybe even smaller.
| | 00:27 | But again, just so we could see
everything I am going to leave this pretty big
| | 00:31 | maybe about eight or ten or so.
| | 00:33 | Now we already have a little bit of a soft
edge because of this sphere feather value.
| | 00:40 | So I could actually increase this to a
hundred to feather that edge a little
| | 00:44 | bit more and again the opposite I could take
it down to zero to get a hard edge around that.
| | 00:50 | I take it back to its default 50.
| | 00:52 | Now you'll notice that, if we go down
here there is actually a glow section, but
| | 00:58 | it's not selectable.
| | 01:00 | The only particle types that allow you to
adjust the glow are Glow Sphere and Star.
| | 01:09 | So if I choose Glow Sphere, this
becomes active and our particles automatically
| | 01:13 | have an outer glow applied to them.
| | 01:16 | And same type thing, we have a feather
here as well, sphere feather or speather
| | 01:22 | if you combine those two words together,
and then in the Glow section, we can
| | 01:27 | increase the size of the glow.
| | 01:29 | We could increase the Opacity of the
glow and we could also increase the
| | 01:35 | Feather of the glow.
| | 01:36 | By default it's at a 100 but we
can take that down if we wanted to.
| | 01:40 | But putting these together, you can get
some really interesting effects, just to
| | 01:44 | kind of have this kind of burn out look
to them which is rather interesting and
| | 01:49 | again we also get these same glow
controls where we choose the star.
| | 01:53 | Notice that these stars are made up of
these sharp points and we can't adjust
| | 01:57 | those at all, but we can
adjust the glow around them.
| | 02:01 | So I might take down the Size.
| | 02:03 | As you could see the points aren't changing
size, but that glow around them is changing size.
| | 02:08 | So if we want just kind of like a
little kind of cross in the middle, we can
| | 02:12 | make these glows really big or if we
just wanted to make mostly the cross of the
| | 02:17 | star, we can just have this be a
small little thing in the back.
| | 02:21 | Now another thing that we could do, I
am actually going to take this to Sphere.
| | 02:26 | If we like our particles the way they
are, we can apply glow on the same layer,
| | 02:31 | the glow effect, After Effects effect,
just go ahead an apply that here.
| | 02:36 | We could apply that to our particles
or we could also create a new Adjustment
| | 02:41 | layer, by going to the Layer menu
and choosing New Adjustment Layer.
| | 02:46 | And the difference here is that if you
apply to that layer, it's going to add
| | 02:51 | glow to those particles.
| | 02:53 | If you add it to the Adjustment layer,
it's going to glow the entire scene which
| | 02:57 | can make things seem a little bit
more cohesive and pull together.
| | 03:01 | So again if I apply glow to this, I
might need to take down the Glow Threshold,
| | 03:05 | so you could really see what's going on here.
| | 03:07 | But now you see that the blue and the
orange lights on the sides are getting lit
| | 03:12 | up as well as the particles.
| | 03:14 | So not much control over glowing the
particles as opposed to the background, but
| | 03:19 | again if I were to increase the Radius
here and take this glow intensity down to
| | 03:23 | maybe 0.2 then, everything has like a
universal glow applied to it before and
| | 03:29 | after and again it kind of helps to
make things seem more cohesive sometimes.
| | 03:33 | In this case I really don't like it
actually so I am just going to select that
| | 03:37 | and delete it and same here.
| | 03:39 | I am just going to select the
glow on this layer and delete it.
| | 03:42 | Now another thing that we can do to
make our particles really pop is by playing
| | 03:46 | with transfer modes.
| | 03:47 | Now we have transfer modes down
here in the timeline panel, but that
| | 03:51 | controls the transfer of the
Particular layer of the particles with the
| | 03:57 | layers beneath that.
| | 03:59 | So it's all of the particles
blending with all the layers beneath that.
| | 04:03 | Now if you want to blend these
particles into the layer that Particular is
| | 04:09 | applied to, then you could go in to
the Rendering section and change the
| | 04:12 | transfer mode here, but again this
Transfer Mode control sets the blending of
| | 04:19 | all particles with the current layer,
we'll actually look at example with
| | 04:23 | this in the next movie.
| | 04:24 | Now in this case, that's not what I want,
I want to go to the Transfer Mode drop
| | 04:29 | down in the Particle category and
what this does is, it controls how the
| | 04:34 | particles blend in with
each other which is very cool.
| | 04:38 | So I am going to increase sizings for
example and I'll just zoom in a little bit
| | 04:42 | here and right now these particles
tend to just kind of like morph together.
| | 04:46 | It's not very attractive unless you
are going for that kind of blobby look.
| | 04:49 | If you want to make it look like film
was burning or something like that then
| | 04:53 | this could be really cool, you might
not want to play with the Blend modes, but
| | 04:57 | as we make these bigger and these
particles overlap, what we could do is change
| | 05:01 | the Transfer mode to something like Add.
| | 05:03 | And now as these particles overlap in
their brightest points they turn white,
| | 05:07 | which looks very cool and also if we
take down the Opacity a little bit, we
| | 05:11 | still have a little bit of
burning in there as well.
| | 05:15 | It's a very cool look.
| | 05:16 | It's great for glows and things
that are burning in on fire, even smoke
| | 05:20 | sometimes can benefit from
adjusting the transfer mode.
| | 05:23 | It adds a little bit too intense for
you to take that down to screen, screen is
| | 05:27 | too intense for you take that down to
lighten and then we kind of create these
| | 05:31 | weird self patterned looks sometimes.
| | 05:34 | But what I want to do is just leave it
on add and again if we make this really
| | 05:38 | big we start to see big differences
here with the way these particles overlap
| | 05:43 | one another and again the Transfer
Mode here in rendering will not get you
| | 05:47 | there, and the Transfer Mode dropdown
in the layer will not get you this result
| | 05:52 | because this is again controlling
how the particles overlap one another.
| | 05:56 | Now this is really offending my eyes,
it looks terrible in this case, I am
| | 06:00 | going to take this down to normal and
take this size back down to say three
| | 06:04 | like where I wanted them and maybe
take this down to Glow Sphere and increase
| | 06:09 | the size of the glow a little bit
and take down the opacity of the glow,
| | 06:15 | feather that all the way.
| | 06:16 | Maybe you can take this down to say two
and we have these nice little particles
| | 06:23 | just kind of float through the air,
and again maybe even two is too big.
| | 06:28 | It's looking a little large, but
choose one and now we start these beautiful
| | 06:33 | little specs that flow through the air
and that glow kind of helps them pop out
| | 06:37 | from the background just a little bit.
| | 06:39 | Again working with these different ways
of making particles glow and feathering
| | 06:44 | their edges and blending them as
transfer modes these are the type of things
| | 06:47 | that can really sell a shot and
make your particles look amazing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Particular with multiple effects| 00:00 | All right folks, we've got a couple
of fun little projects in this movie.
| | 00:04 | We are going to be making this little
scene right here with the planet and
| | 00:10 | eclipse and what not and
light rays coming from behind it.
| | 00:14 | Not the most impressive thing in the
world, but what I want to show you here is
| | 00:18 | that particle -- Particular doesn't
have stand on its own, you don't have to
| | 00:21 | just use Particular by itself, you can
combine Particular with other effects and
| | 00:27 | create some pretty cool results as well.
| | 00:28 | So let's go to the Multiple Effects
Start Comp in this project here, I am going
| | 00:33 | to start with this planet, I am going
to turn on its visibility and then solo
| | 00:37 | it, and let's go ahead and apply Particular.
| | 00:40 | We are going to be starting from
scratch everything here and as you could tell
| | 00:43 | by the name of the layer we are
going to be making that planet here.
| | 00:47 | And so what I want to do is go over to
the Emitter, open that up, change the
| | 00:52 | Emitter type to box, take the Velocity
down to zero and then take the Emitter
| | 01:00 | size X to about a 1000, Emitter size Y
to about 600 and let's take the Emitter
| | 01:08 | size Z to about 3100.
| | 01:11 | And now we need to close up the
Emitter section, open the Particle section;
| | 01:16 | change the Particle type to Cloudlet.
| | 01:19 | Let's increase Cloudlet Feather to a
100 and we actually want to take the size
| | 01:26 | up really big here, so we are going to
take this to 60, that's quite big, and
| | 01:31 | then we'll take the opacity down to
about four, and now this starts to look a
| | 01:37 | little bit like cloud this
is what we are going for.
| | 01:40 | Now I don't want these clouds to just
kind of drop out of existence when they
| | 01:45 | die, as you could see, there was kind
of some flickering here because they are
| | 01:50 | dying out, so I want to open up
opacity overlife and then this little curve
| | 01:55 | drawing interface, just click and drag
a little curve there and if we want to
| | 01:59 | we could just kind of smooth this here,
click the smooth button a couple of
| | 02:06 | times, maybe even a little bit more to
get that make sure they completely fade
| | 02:12 | all the way out there.
| | 02:13 | Okay, now we could smooth it,
and everything looks good.
| | 02:17 | Okay, close that up.
| | 02:20 | Now before we wrap this around our
planet, make our planet with it, I want this
| | 02:25 | to have a blue background and I want
the blue background and the Particular to
| | 02:30 | be on the same layer.
| | 02:32 | So what we're going to have to do is
change the content of the original layer,
| | 02:36 | the Source layer and
make that a blue background.
| | 02:39 | So I am going to select the Planet
2 layer, go to the Layer menu and
| | 02:44 | choose Solid Settings.
| | 02:46 | It gives us access to the
settings of this solid, hence the name.
| | 02:51 | So let's go ahead and click on the
color swatch here that black swatch and I
| | 02:55 | am going to create a kind of oceany
blue and something to that effect, kind of
| | 03:01 | desaturate it little bit darker, keep it
realistic and not get cartoony and click Ok.
| | 03:07 | Now we need to go to the Rendering
section and change the Transfer Mode
| | 03:11 | from None to Normal.
| | 03:15 | And now we see the blue
background with our clouds.
| | 03:19 | Now we can apply the CC Sphere effect to
this entire layer and we have this kind
| | 03:27 | of globe looking thing.
| | 03:29 | Again it's kind of a simple stylized
effect, this is not going to be ready for
| | 03:34 | production anytime soon, but the
point is that we have made this world with
| | 03:38 | these kind of glowing,
undulating clouds which is pretty cool.
| | 03:44 | And if you don't like how they are
coming on like this, like we see again the
| | 03:49 | flickering as they are being born.
| | 03:50 | We can go back to Particular, go over
to our Opacity over life and make them
| | 03:56 | fade in, but yeah we just click this
button here and make them fade in and out
| | 04:01 | smoothly and we don't have that much
flickering on, it's much smoother as they
| | 04:06 | kind of fade in and out there.
| | 04:08 | Now let's stop working on
the planet for a minute.
| | 04:11 | We'll turn off its visibility, turn on
the Rays layer, select it and then solo
| | 04:16 | it by clicking this switch here for
the Ray layers just like we did for the
| | 04:20 | Planet layer and then
apply the Particular effect.
| | 04:23 | I am sure you spell it
correctly and there it is.
| | 04:28 | I am going to open up the Emitter
section and I am going to take the Particles
| | 04:33 | per second to 220 and I am going
to take the Velocity to about 60.
| | 04:39 | Now we can close up the Emitter
section, open up the Particles section and
| | 04:43 | change the Size to about 10, a little
bit bigger and now we have these little
| | 04:50 | particles kind of being born, kind of
looks just like the default settings, but
| | 04:56 | very faint difference, it's
going to work for us here.
| | 05:00 | So now apply the CC Radial Fast Blur effect.
| | 05:06 | And we'll increase the amount to about 80 or so.
| | 05:11 | It's actually pretty specific probably
maybe exactly 80 for this one and then if
| | 05:19 | we turn back on the Visibility of the
Planet layer, unsolo the rays and now we
| | 05:24 | have these rays that are coming out
from behind our planet, it kind of creates
| | 05:28 | like an eclipse type look and if we play
this back what's cool about this, about
| | 05:32 | the streaks in the back especially is
because these are being created from
| | 05:36 | particles, the blur is being based on
the particles then as the particles move
| | 05:40 | around and as they are born, we kind
of get this really cool flicker on these
| | 05:45 | light streaks in the background.
| | 05:47 | Now again here, to make things a
little bit more smooth, we might want to go
| | 05:51 | back to the Rays layer just like we
did with the Planet layer with the clouds
| | 05:55 | there and open up Particular and open up
Opacity over life and click this button
| | 06:00 | here with fade in and fade out smoothly.
| | 06:04 | Now we have this kind of cool little
flickering light effect in the background.
| | 06:09 | Now at this point, we can go maybe
back to our Planet and do some fine tuning
| | 06:13 | here we could open up CC Sphere.
| | 06:15 | Open up the light area and we
could adjust the Light Height.
| | 06:19 | So I don't want to move the shadow,
reducing that value of Light Height and we
| | 06:26 | could make it so that just that edge
is kind of showing, it gives us a better
| | 06:30 | looking eclipse there, and we could fine
tune as much as you want or reduce that
| | 06:35 | value, so just like a little tiny sliver here.
| | 06:37 | And then I have an Adjustment
layer with a Curves Adjustment on it.
| | 06:41 | And I played with the few of the
channels here to create the final results.
| | 06:46 | So I turn that layer on and that kind
of ties everything together and now we
| | 06:51 | have our final result.
| | 06:53 | Again, this isn't something that we
would want to use in a feature film or
| | 06:57 | something like that, but the point
is that, we can create some really
| | 07:00 | interesting results by using
Particular in conjunction with other effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using 32-bit particles| 00:00 | All right, this is going to be a fun one.
| | 00:02 | We are going to look in this movie
about how Particular is a 32-bit enabled
| | 00:06 | plug-in which allows us to
create some HDR particles.
| | 00:11 | Now that sounds probably
lot of scientific gibberish.
| | 00:14 | But basically it means that we are
going to make some really pretty lights.
| | 00:18 | So we have this footage of a jazz
singer here and there is basically a black
| | 00:23 | background and so I was thinking,
what could we do to make this cool.
| | 00:27 | And often times, we use Particular to
create little bouquet, like little Lens
| | 00:32 | Flare type things in the background
like blossoming blooming highlights.
| | 00:36 | And so I created just a quick
garbage mask around her and faded it a lot,
| | 00:41 | because I didn't want to
rotoscope it and do all that work.
| | 00:44 | But this mask is going to get us there
and created a layer of Particular and
| | 00:48 | created just some simple little white light.
| | 00:51 | Now of course, we could color this
and what not, but what's going to really
| | 00:54 | make this beautiful and what's really
going to make these look like lights in
| | 00:58 | the background is, if we go over here
to our Project panel and Alt+Click on
| | 01:02 | the PC or Option+Click on the Mac,
click twice to 16-bits per channel then
| | 01:07 | 32-bits per channel.
| | 01:08 | When in this mode, in 32-bits per
channel mode then we could allow colors to act
| | 01:15 | more like lights do in the real world.
| | 01:18 | So if we open up with this Particular
layer selected, open up Particular and I
| | 01:22 | am just going to close the Emitter section.
| | 01:24 | In the Particles section, we
want to play with the color.
| | 01:28 | So click the Color Swatch and
right now the Color is at white, 111.
| | 01:33 | We change to 32-bits per channel;
| | 01:35 | the colors go from zero to one.
| | 01:37 | So this is white, but I want to make
this super white, brighter than white.
| | 01:41 | So I am going to leave the Red channel
at one, take Green channel to two, take
| | 01:46 | the Blue channel to three.
| | 01:47 | And so are basically pushing more
light into the green channel and even more
| | 01:53 | light into the blue channel which
creates this kind of Cyan color and as we
| | 01:57 | click Ok, we see that these lights
now bloom as if they were real lights.
| | 02:04 | And we could play with the Sphere
Feather and we could maybe take that down
| | 02:08 | and get that kind of look, that also looks a
lot like the bouquet that we are looking for.
| | 02:13 | We also increase the Sphere Feather
that has another interesting result to it,
| | 02:16 | take this back down to 50.
| | 02:17 | We could also play with the Opacity;
| | 02:19 | I am going to take this down, you
should see the particles overlap, you might
| | 02:23 | want to play around with
Opacity and also Opacity Random.
| | 02:26 | Now you notice that we are not having
to play with the Transfer mode here, this
| | 02:30 | doesn't have anything to do with
blending, this is actually just the color of
| | 02:33 | the lights and because the light that's
being used to make these particles is so
| | 02:39 | much brighter than white that we get
these really great, again blooms and colors
| | 02:44 | around the edges that looks very realistic.
| | 02:47 | So you might want to play with Sphere
Feather, get it somewhere where you like,
| | 02:51 | I think kind of a low value works
for me, somewhere around there, 25, 30
| | 02:56 | something like that, and
something else we could here.
| | 02:59 | I am going to select Particular and hit
Command+D on the Mac or Ctrl+D on the PC
| | 03:05 | to duplicate that effect.
| | 03:06 | Now we have two copies of
Particular on the same layer.
| | 03:10 | We are going to add more realism by
creating more bouquet of a different color.
| | 03:16 | So what we want to do is open up the
Emitter section, and then go to the
| | 03:21 | Emission Extras, actually it's not an
Emission Extra, below that, it's Random
| | 03:26 | Seed and so we can click and drag and
move this around until we get a different
| | 03:32 | version of those lights.
| | 03:35 | And that looks pretty good and you can keep
playing with that until you get one that you like.
| | 03:39 | And we need to go down to Rendering and
change the Transfer mode from None to Normal.
| | 03:46 | And now we can see both
sets of lights from Particular.
| | 03:51 | Now what I want to do is close up the
Emitter section, and the Rendering section
| | 03:55 | if you like and open up Particle
and now let's change the color.
| | 03:58 | I am going to click on this color swatch,
and I am going to change this to ed 3,
| | 04:04 | Green 1.5 and Blue 1.
| | 04:08 | So we get some kind of contrast here
and now we have these cool kind of warm
| | 04:14 | highlights which again makes it look
like there are maybe stage lights in the
| | 04:18 | background or maybe she is singing in a
city at night and there is kind of just
| | 04:22 | maybe traffic or something else
behind her and the city lights or whatever.
| | 04:26 | And we have them, we have them
growing and then fading away, and maybe
| | 04:32 | that's not the best idea.
| | 04:34 | We probably want those to stay put
and there are some problems with my
| | 04:38 | garbage mask here too, you could see that I
have some of the particles go over her shoulder.
| | 04:43 | So I might want to go back to that mask
and maybe make that a little bit bigger here.
| | 04:49 | Probably, the best thing to do is to go
and precompose this Particular layer and
| | 04:53 | then mask the particles, because
putting a mask on this layer won't work, we
| | 04:58 | have to pre-compose it first.
| | 04:59 | But all in all, I think you get the
idea that this, this effect is very cool,
| | 05:04 | all because Particular again is a
32-bit enabled effect which allows us to
| | 05:09 | create HDR colors which create
more realistic light scenarios.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Linking emitters to other layers| 00:00 | So here we have this sweet rocket,
it's ready to take off and then it goes
| | 00:07 | off into space there.
| | 00:08 | And what I want to do is I want to
attach a Particular Emitter to this tail
| | 00:14 | section right here, so then its
particles will stream back out of the back side
| | 00:20 | of this rocket there.
| | 00:22 | So what I would need to do first, and
which I have already done actually, is
| | 00:26 | make sure that the anchor point of
whatever you want to attach it to is where
| | 00:31 | you want a Particular to be, because
remember, wherever the anchor point is that
| | 00:35 | is what After Effects considers to
be the exact position of the layer.
| | 00:40 | And now, because of that that's
where Particular will put the Emitter, so
| | 00:46 | be careful of that.
| | 00:47 | So I have here this Particular layer and
I turn it on and I just have some fiery
| | 00:53 | smoke coming on here, that's going
to be perfect for our little rocket.
| | 00:57 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to go over to the Emitter section, and
| | 01:01 | actually before I do that I want to
go over to the 3D rocket and press the
| | 01:06 | letter P on my keyboard to
reveal its Position Property.
| | 01:08 | And I want to go back to Particular
here, and on the PC I want to Alt+Click;
| | 01:14 | on the Mac Option-Click Position XY.
| | 01:17 | And then I'll come down here to my Timeline.
| | 01:20 | And by the way the, reason why we
Option+Clicked it or Alt+Clicked it here
| | 01:25 | in the Effect Controls Panel is so that
this property reveals itself in the Timeline.
| | 01:30 | So we could have just done it down here,
it's not something you need to do, but
| | 01:35 | I like doing it that way.
| | 01:36 | So I am going to take this Pick Whip
for this Position XY, this expression we
| | 01:40 | have created, and drag the Pick Whip to
the Position Property of the rocket and
| | 01:44 | go ahead and click anywhere in
this blank spot here to accept that.
| | 01:47 | And now our Particular Emitter is
attached to this part of the rocket and now
| | 01:55 | we can play that back;
| | 01:56 | let me actually just reveal all of it,
and it's getting ready to go, and it is
| | 02:06 | going to launch now.
| | 02:12 | Now it's kind of going outwards and
not really where we want it to be.
| | 02:17 | So I am going back to here to my Particular
Emitter and change the Y Rotation to 180 degrees.
| | 02:23 | And now it's going to be coming out the
opposite side of the rocket and not at a
| | 02:27 | right angle from the rocket.
| | 02:29 | And so now when it comes out, it's
getting ready and it's launching.
| | 02:37 | And there it goes in all of its glory.
| | 02:41 | So just a quick little trick.
| | 02:43 | Remember that we don't have to
necessarily work with just these controls when we
| | 02:48 | want to play with Emitters;
| | 02:50 | we can attach them to objects
and have really cool results.
| | 02:54 | I mean, because Particular works the
way it does, the path created by my rocket
| | 03:01 | is followed by Particular and it moves
around accordingly and it just creates
| | 03:06 | these really cool smoke streaks, so
just something to be aware of going forward
| | 03:11 | that you can attach Emitters to other layers.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using a motion path| 00:00 | All right folks, this is a fun one,
we're going to look at how to have particles
| | 00:05 | follow a Motion Path.
| | 00:06 | Now the way that Particular does
this is a little weird and a little
| | 00:11 | non-intuitive, but it works.
| | 00:12 | So this is what we need to do,
we need two ingredients here;
| | 00:15 | we need a light with the Motion Path
and we need a layer with Particular on it.
| | 00:21 | And the position of the light is actually
what Particular can use as a Motion Path.
| | 00:27 | Now if I look at this path right here,
basically this is a light and I've moved it around.
| | 00:33 | I've used the Motion Sketch feature of
After Effects with a tablet, and so I
| | 00:37 | drew this with a tablet, and lacking
any creativity, just used my own name.
| | 00:44 | So I like have this light here, but I
set this up incorrectly, because I did
| | 00:48 | not name the light correctly, and you'll see
what happens because of that in just a moment.
| | 00:53 | So I'm going to go and apply a
Particular to my Particular Layer, we are going
| | 00:57 | to be basically starting from scratch
here, and I'll move out in time, and so we
| | 01:01 | have just regular old layer
Particular and our lights doing its thing.
| | 01:04 | Now you might think that we go into
the Emitter section to control the Motion
| | 01:09 | Path, because it's really the path that
the particles are going to follow, but
| | 01:13 | no, we actually need to go into the
Physics section, believe it or not, and we
| | 01:17 | need to make sure that the Physics
Model is Air and not Bounce, and we open up
| | 01:22 | Air and here we can choose the Motion Path.
| | 01:26 | Now again, I did not name the light
correctly, so when I choose, let's say for
| | 01:31 | example, 1 here, it says, The Motion
Path feature needs a light to follow;
| | 01:34 | yeah, we know that.
| | 01:36 | Could not find a light named
Motion Path 1 at the current time.
| | 01:41 | So I need to click OK, and we actually need to
change the name of this light to Motion Path 1.
| | 01:48 | Now it doesn't necessarily have to be 1,
it could be any number 1 through 9, but
| | 01:52 | it has to be some number, 1 through 9.
| | 01:55 | So we can choose that, let's say, for
example, if we add another light and
| | 01:59 | another layer with Particular, we had
Motion Path 2, Motion Path 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
| | 02:04 | all the way up to 9.
| | 02:05 | So we can't have more than one
Motion Path at a time on one instance of
| | 02:10 | Particular, but in our one comp we can
have nine different Motion Paths and nine
| | 02:15 | instances of Particular hooking
up to those different Motion Paths.
| | 02:19 | So what I'm going to do now is just play a
little bit with the look of my Motion Path.
| | 02:25 | I'm going to close up
Physics, we're done with that.
| | 02:27 | I'm going to go back up to the Emitter.
| | 02:30 | Now here is where we see the
advantage of using some other whacky part of
| | 02:33 | Particular to control the Motion Path
of the particles, because we still have
| | 02:37 | our Position X, Y, and Z to control this.
| | 02:40 | So I could still move this over and
put it where I want and I don't have
| | 02:45 | keyframes from the Motion Path to
mess up here, which is really helpful.
| | 02:48 | I'm actually going to take the Velocity
down to 0, so I can see now my particles
| | 02:54 | being drawn on, which is pretty cool.
| | 02:57 | Now it doesn't go all the way, because
the life of our particles is not enough
| | 03:02 | to go all the way there, so what I'm
going to do is to go up to my Particle and
| | 03:06 | increase this quite a bit.
| | 03:08 | And actually you'll probably want to
go to the end of your animation to make
| | 03:11 | sure that you're getting all
the particles covered there.
| | 03:15 | Now another thing you might notice is
that if we zoom in here, some of these
| | 03:19 | lines are a little bit jagged, and
that's because we're using a low quality
| | 03:25 | interpolation of the Motion Path.
| | 03:27 | So to get the smooth version, we go back
to the Physics section, back to the Air
| | 03:33 | area, and instead of choosing Motion
Path 1, we need to choose one of the high
| | 03:39 | quality options, HQ, so I'm going to
choose 1 HQ, and then everything gets all
| | 03:43 | nice and buttery and smooth,
look at that, it looks amazing.
| | 03:47 | So as I push this back, you can just
see that being drawn on really nicely.
| | 03:53 | Now choosing one of the HQ settings
will slow you down quite a bit, so just be
| | 03:58 | aware of that, but in our case here
it's well worth the extra render time.
| | 04:03 | Now one of the things I want to do
is maybe increase the Particles per
| | 04:06 | second (Particles/sec).
| | 04:07 | If we make this high enough, then
this will actually become a really smooth
| | 04:12 | writing tool, which looks great.
| | 04:13 | Now I'm going to go back and
I'll take these Particles per second
| | 04:17 | (Particles/sec) down a little bit, back
to something a little bit more normal.
| | 04:22 | And one other trick here, I'm going to
go to Particle Type and choose Cloudlet,
| | 04:26 | and we're going to play with this a
little bit and make it look like maybe sky
| | 04:31 | writing, like an airplane
flew and made this draw on.
| | 04:34 | And I'm just going to go to Set Color
and change this to Over Life, and open
| | 04:39 | up Color Over Life and let's just go ahead and
open this and choose this white to blue gradient;
| | 04:44 | looks like sky writing kind of.
| | 04:48 | And we can go ahead and
increase the Size of these clouds.
| | 04:52 | I'll increase Cloudlet Feather all the way.
| | 04:55 | And we can decrease the Opacity quite a
bit there, and that's really the key to
| | 05:03 | getting good looking smoke
is decreasing the Opacity.
| | 05:06 | If we want to we could increase the Opacity;
| | 05:08 | Random, maybe not quite that much, and maybe
the main Opacity can come down just a little bit.
| | 05:17 | Also maybe add some Size Randomness in
there, just kind of keep playing with
| | 05:21 | this until we get good old
smoky looking particles here.
| | 05:25 | And now we have smoke that draws on
our name, thanks to the Motion Path
| | 05:30 | feature in Particular.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Intermediate FeaturesUsing a movie as a particle| 00:00 | In this tutorial we're going to have a basic
introduction for using a movie as a particle.
| | 00:05 | And again, we're going to get into
this a little bit later on in our project,
| | 00:08 | and we've already talked about using
still images, but this movie is going to be kind of a hybrid.
| | 00:12 | I have here this little motion
graphics project that you might find at the
| | 00:16 | beginning of a TV show or something like that.
And I have here all of these card symbols--
| | 00:22 | diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades--and
this is all being generated with Particular.
| | 00:27 | The cards are being created with the
Card Wipe effect, but all of these symbols
| | 00:31 | are being generated with Particular.
| | 00:33 | So again, this is going to be kind of
like a transition. We're not going to be
| | 00:37 | using full-on movies, which we'll do later on;
| | 00:40 | And we're not going to be using images;
we're going be using kind of like a hybrid and use multiple images.
| | 00:44 | So I have here this Symbols Comp, and
it's a four-frame-long composition, and on
| | 00:49 | each frame there is a
different one of these shapes.
| | 00:53 | So on frame one there is a diamond and
then a heart and then a club and then
| | 00:59 | a spade, and so this is all one,
again, four-frame-long composition.
| | 01:03 | If I play it back, it goes really fast,
because it's only four frames long.
| | 01:06 | So if we go over to the Movie particles
START Composition, we could see we have
| | 01:10 | Particular here.
It's just regular old Particular.
| | 01:13 | So I'm going to select a
Particular Layer, and then let's go over to
| | 01:18 | the Particle section.
| | 01:20 | Let's close up the Emitter section for now.
| | 01:23 | In the Particle section I'm going to
take the Particle Type to Textured Polygon.
| | 01:28 | That again allows us to
use our own custom layer.
| | 01:31 | And they don't stay flat to the camera.
| | 01:33 | The Sprites all stay flat to the camera;
Textured Polygons are allowed to rotate around.
| | 01:38 | Now we open up the Texture section,
and then from this Layer dropdown, we
| | 01:42 | choose the Symbols Comp.
| | 01:45 | It doesn't say it's big, but it seems
like it's always too big, so just go ahead
| | 01:48 | and click OK. That's going to be fine.
| | 01:50 | Now this Time Sampling dropdown is
where it gets kind of confusing, because
| | 01:54 | there is so much power here.
| | 01:57 | Particular gives you so much control
over how your movies play back in particles.
| | 02:04 | So the default setting is Current Time,
and basically what that means is that
| | 02:09 | when it's on frame one, we are
seeing frame one of the texture,
| | 02:14 | in this case the Symbols Comp.
| | 02:15 | And actually, let me increase the size
here quite a bit, so we can see that.
| | 02:19 | And then we can go back up to our
Emitter section, we take down the Particles
| | 02:23 | per second, increase
the Velocity since we're spread out a
| | 02:27 | little bit, and there we go.
Close up the Emitter section.
| | 02:30 | So we're using the Current Time here, so
they're all diamonds, and then as we go
| | 02:36 | one frame, they're all hearts;
the next frame they're all clubs,
| | 02:39 | then all spades, and then they're gone,
because this comp is only four frames long.
| | 02:44 | So one of the things that you'll
notice that this allows us to do when we're
| | 02:48 | using a custom texture layer is that
we're allowed to change the particles into
| | 02:55 | other things over time,
which is really interesting.
| | 02:58 | Now, as we look at the Time Sampling
dropdown here--this is kind of important to
| | 03:02 | remember--these options on the left
side here--this is how I remember these
| | 03:08 | different settings--the options on
the left here refer to how Particular is
| | 03:12 | going to look at the texture layer.
| | 03:15 | So does it look at the
Birth, the Start at Birth?
| | 03:18 | Does it look at a random frame or
does it split the clip into different
| | 03:22 | proportions, which we'll
look at in just a second.
| | 03:24 | And then the one on the right,
the options on the right are basically how the
| | 03:29 | life of the particle is going to be affected.
| | 03:33 | So if we start at birth and play once,
then each particle is going to go through
| | 03:40 | this entire Symbols Comp and just play it once.
| | 03:44 | So each particle is going to only last
for four frames, regardless of the life.
| | 03:48 | It's going to go through all four frames.
| | 03:50 | Now if we had a longer texture layer
here, if we the Symbols Comp was longer--
| | 03:54 | let's say it was 2 seconds long--then
each particle would last for 2 seconds.
| | 03:59 | So if we choose Start at Birth and then
Loop, then what happens is is that it
| | 04:05 | starts from birth. Each particle start
as a diamond, so we could see that there
| | 04:09 | is three diamonds here, for example.
| | 04:11 | And then if you go to the next frame,
they all turn into hearts, then clubs,
| | 04:15 | then spades, and then if we keep going to the
next frame, then they go back to diamonds again.
| | 04:20 | So each frame they are changing, and they are
cycling through this loop over and over again.
| | 04:26 | If we take the Start to Birth - Stretch,
then it will take the lifespan of the
| | 04:33 | Texture Comp and it will stretch
that over each particle's lifespan.
| | 04:40 | So each particle's lifespan, let's say
for example--if we go back to Particular
| | 04:44 | here--our Lifespan is set to 3.0 seconds.
| | 04:47 | So what that means is over 3 seconds
each particle will go from diamond to
| | 04:53 | heart, to club, to spade.
| | 04:56 | So it creates a really interesting look.
| | 04:58 | So they all start out as diamonds,
and then they go over to hearts, then
| | 05:03 | clubs, then spades over time, and this is
really controlled by the life of the particle.
| | 05:09 | So if we were to elongate the life,
then they would have a longer distance to go
| | 05:14 | before they would change.
| | 05:15 | So again, it's stretching these four frames
over the 3 seconds of the life of each particle.
| | 05:20 | So let's go ahead and just take this back to 3.
| | 05:23 | And we'll skip over Random for the
time being. If we go to Split Clip, this
| | 05:29 | allows us to split the clip into
a number of predetermined clips.
| | 05:34 | So let's say, for example, we had ten
little animations of an army guy moving or
| | 05:40 | something like that, and they were all
on the same layer or on maybe different
| | 05:44 | layers in that same composition.
| | 05:46 | So we could say if they were--maybe
this is a 10-second-long texture clip, we
| | 05:51 | could break this up into five
different clips and each one will be 2 seconds
| | 05:55 | long, and so then Particular would
look at each of those 2-second clips, and
| | 06:00 | each one of those
particles would be a 2-second clip.
| | 06:03 | And again, these will all make sense
more when we use them later on in the
| | 06:07 | project, later on in this training series.
| | 06:09 | For now I want to choose Random - Still Frame.
| | 06:13 | So what that's going to do is it's going
to choose a random frame for my texture
| | 06:17 | layer and it's just going to pause.
| | 06:20 | So the particles are not going to
change. They're not going to evolve.
| | 06:23 | When they are born, they are going to
be born a diamond, a heart, a club, or
| | 06:27 | a spade, and they are going to stay that
way throughout the duration of their life.
| | 06:32 | And so that's what I use to
create these cool animations.
| | 06:36 | So using these texture layers,
we don't have to necessarily use just still
| | 06:41 | images; we could use a movie file; we
could use an animation; we could use a
| | 06:45 | series of objects like this and create
kind of like an arrangement of different
| | 06:52 | shapes or symbols or whatever we want.
| | 06:54 | Now that's the end of this tutorial, but
for those of you that are interested, in
| | 06:58 | my intro project here, we had this kind
of cool little project, or it would have
| | 07:03 | been cool, but these
cards don't look quite right.
| | 07:06 | These cards were created, again, using
Card Wipe, and Card Wipe doesn't have the
| | 07:10 | same features that
Particular does when it comes to 3D.
| | 07:14 | We can't get a shallow depth of field
with these cards, and it just doesn't
| | 07:19 | really blend well with Particular.
| | 07:21 | So what I could have done is I could
have made these cards out of Particular.
| | 07:26 | So when I made these cards from Card
Wipe, I just created these texture layers,
| | 07:34 | so I had one texture layer that's all
the backs. Again, this is one flat solid
| | 07:38 | layer, and then the front of the cards
were one flat solid layer as well, and
| | 07:42 | then Card Wipe lets me kind of chop
those up and play with those like that, and
| | 07:48 | it's just a little bit easier.
| | 07:49 | But if I want to take the time and make
each card its own layer, then Particular
| | 07:54 | could have seen that. We could have use
this as, again, another movie particle.
| | 07:58 | And then these particles could have
interacted with each other. We could have
| | 08:02 | gotten depth of field, and this
would have created a much better look.
| | 08:05 | So I didn't take the time to do that,
but just be aware that things like that
| | 08:09 | are possible with this
functionality in Particular.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with gravity| 00:00 | Folks, the next few movies we've got
some exciting stuff coming up. We're
| | 00:02 | going to be looking at physics with
particles, which really opens up a lot of
| | 00:07 | really cool new doors.
| | 00:09 | So I have here this gravity text that
comes onscreen. These particles kind
| | 00:12 | of follow it and then they kind of
grow a little bit, but what we're going to
| | 00:17 | do here is we're going to look at how
to use gravity kind of to maybe play
| | 00:20 | around with our particles a little bit and
create a different kind of vibe and atmosphere.
| | 00:25 | So I'm going to choose my Particular layer.
I already have Particular set up for us here.
| | 00:30 | And I can close up the Emitter section,
close up the Particle section, and I
| | 00:34 | really want to go to the Physics section.
| | 00:36 | And you'll want to make sure that the
Physics Model is set to Air for this, and
| | 00:40 | there's really two choices:
| | 00:41 | Air and Bounce. It's set to Air by
default, but just again, double-check to
| | 00:45 | make sure it's there.
| | 00:46 | And here we have this Gravity setting.
| | 00:48 | So as we increase the Gravity, we can have
these particles fall down, as you can see.
| | 00:53 | It's basically the amount of gravity,
how intense gravity is, is what that
| | 00:58 | setting is controlling.
| | 00:59 | So now as we preview this--actually,
let me zoom back out so we can have this
| | 01:04 | render just a little bit faster--
now we see that the particles are still
| | 01:08 | coming along with the text, but then as
they are born, or after they are born and
| | 01:15 | that initial velocity wears
off, then they start falling.
| | 01:19 | So it's almost like it's like dust
on the text and then as soon as it
| | 01:25 | settles, it kind of falls.
| | 01:27 | So this is different than in the
Emitter section, the Direction, changing the
| | 01:31 | Direction, because that basically
just shoots it out in one way and the
| | 01:35 | gravity allows it to kind of come
along for the ride and then afterwards,
| | 01:42 | gravity pulls it downwards.
| | 01:45 | So again, it acts very much like
gravity does in the real world. Something can
| | 01:49 | have an initial trajectory, but then
gravity gets a hold of it and it will fall.
| | 01:53 | Now we can also go the other way. We can
go to negative direction and have these
| | 01:58 | particles almost like bubbles or something.
| | 02:00 | So then as I preview this, again, the
particles will go along with the text and
| | 02:05 | they will be kind of effervescent and
kind of bubble away. So this is great for
| | 02:09 | kind of soda bubbles or champagne or
something else that you might find that
| | 02:14 | would bubble upwards like that.
| | 02:16 | It's kind of a cool effect.
| | 02:19 | Now I'm just going to take this back down to 0.
| | 02:21 | There is even more power here. If we
open up the Air section, there is another
| | 02:26 | property I want to talk
about called Air Resistance.
| | 02:29 | This basically refers to how dense the air is.
| | 02:33 | So what I'm going to do is increase
the Air Resistance, maybe to like 8 or so,
| | 02:41 | and that basically makes the air
thicker and hard to maneuver, which is really
| | 02:46 | interesting, because you can see, as
these particles are born, they can't get too
| | 02:53 | far because the air is so thick. It's
almost like viscosity, like the viscosity
| | 02:58 | of the air, which is interesting.
| | 03:01 | And I have these particles stopping,
the Particles per second
| | 03:05 | stopping. I'll just press U to reveal
that. But I'm going to move this last
| | 03:09 | keyframe that stops the particle birth;
I'm going to move this over so the
| | 03:13 | particles continue to grow.
| | 03:14 | And maybe take this Air Resistance up a
little bit more to like 10 or so, and it
| | 03:19 | creates kind of an interesting effect,
because the particles are born, but then
| | 03:22 | they can't go anywhere.
| | 03:23 | So it's kind of like this kind of
heavenly mold or something, where the
| | 03:30 | particles can't grow, so they are kind
of like growing like mold all over the
| | 03:35 | particles, but in this case they are
glowing. And I don't know, just kind of
| | 03:39 | like an interesting look.
| | 03:40 | I'm not sure what you would do with
that, but it's just a very interesting look,
| | 03:45 | because of the Air Resistance.
| | 03:48 | Now one thing that's important to
point out, and is actually kind of
| | 03:52 | heartbreaking a little bit, and so I'm
sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but
| | 03:56 | in the Gravity section here and the Air
Resistance, you'll notice that there is no stopwatches.
| | 04:01 | These are not animatable properties.
| | 04:03 | So we cannot have the particles have 0 Air
Resistance and then start growing on our text.
| | 04:12 | Same thing with Gravity; we can't
animate Gravity later on to just be normal and
| | 04:18 | then get heavier. We can't do that.
| | 04:20 | But there are other things that we
can do with physics that alter our
| | 04:24 | particle's lifespan, some
substitutions, and we're going to look at one of
| | 04:29 | those next when we talk about wind.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Moving particles with wind| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to look
at how to create wind and specifically we
| | 00:04 | are going to look at how
to create windblown snow.
| | 00:08 | So if you look at the snow, every once
in a while there is like gust of wind and
| | 00:14 | just adds a lot of realism to this shot.
| | 00:16 | This is basically a photo I took with my
iPhone because I thought it looked like
| | 00:20 | Skyrim, one of my favorite video games.
| | 00:23 | And then I wanted to add some snow to
this, and I added some camera wiggle, and
| | 00:28 | the trees are bending a little bit to
make it look like the leaves are blowing.
| | 00:31 | And so I kind of wanted to create this scene.
| | 00:33 | So that's what we are going
to be doing in this movie.
| | 00:36 | Now let's go to the Snow with Wind
START Composition, we are going to be
| | 00:40 | starting from scratch here.
| | 00:41 | So go ahead and apply a Particular to
this Particular Layer and, again, we are
| | 00:47 | going to be starting from scratch.
| | 00:48 | This photo in the background is kind of
distracting, so I am just going to turn
| | 00:53 | off its visibility so we can see what
we are doing a little bit more clearly,
| | 00:57 | and go back to that Particular Layer.
| | 00:59 | So open up the Emitter, get
the Emitter set up right here.
| | 01:02 | We want a Box Emitter of course;
| | 01:04 | when we have weather systems,
that's kind of the natural choice there.
| | 01:07 | And for Direction we don't want Uniform,
we want Directional, because the snow
| | 01:11 | will fall from the sky.
| | 01:13 | And we want to take X Rotation to -90
degrees so the snow will be pouring downwards.
| | 01:21 | And actually let's back out and then drag
the Emitter up above the top of the screen.
| | 01:29 | And let's go ahead and increase the X
Emitter Size so that it gets that super wide there.
| | 01:37 | I think a value of about 5000 is going
to be good, just because we are going to
| | 01:43 | have the wind blowing the particles.
| | 01:45 | And so if we don't have enough
particles on either side, then there will be
| | 01:49 | nothing for the wind to blow and
there will kind of be a gap in particles.
| | 01:53 | Now as it stands we have some very
cartoony snow, but there is no depth, it
| | 01:59 | doesn't go back very far.
| | 02:00 | So you might think that we would need
to increase the Emitter Size Z, but in
| | 02:06 | actuality because we have rotated this
90 degrees, Y is the new Z, so we have
| | 02:12 | got to bump up the Emitter Size Y.
Let's bump it up really big, like 20,000 or
| | 02:20 | something, really big there.
| | 02:23 | And if we need to change the Height, we
could adjust Z, which is again the new Y.
| | 02:30 | So there we have it, and now
we have some good, good snow.
| | 02:35 | If we want to bring this closer, we
could increase the Position Z, so that maybe
| | 02:39 | those particles get a little bit closer,
or we could go and adjust their size in
| | 02:44 | the Particle section.
| | 02:45 | Before we do that, let's just get a
little bit more snow and then we will close
| | 02:49 | up the Emitter section.
| | 02:50 | Let's increase Particles per second (
Particles/sec) to about 350, and then let's
| | 02:54 | close up the Emitter section, open up
the Particle section, and let's make the
| | 02:59 | Lifespan (Life span) a little bit longer.
| | 03:01 | Let's take this to 9, and that kind of,
again, gives us a little bit more snow.
| | 03:06 | And we'll leave the Particle Type as Sphere.
| | 03:09 | Let's go ahead and bump up the Sphere
Feather to a 100, that way if we have any
| | 03:13 | particles that are close to the camera, they
look kind of soft and blurry, which is good.
| | 03:17 | Let's bump up the Size to about 6,
so they are a little bit bigger.
| | 03:21 | Now let's give this a little bit of
Size Randomness, maybe to about 25% or so.
| | 03:26 | Now if we turn on our background layer at
this point, this is starting to look pretty good.
| | 03:31 | Let me zoom in a little bit closer here.
| | 03:33 | I think it might look a little bit
better if this white was a little bit more
| | 03:38 | like the white in the image,
which is actually a little bit cooler.
| | 03:41 | So you might click the Eyedropper for
the color swatch, and we just click this
| | 03:45 | little blue swatch here, and as you can
see, again, this is a little bit cooler
| | 03:49 | of a white than what we had
initially, and that makes these little snow
| | 03:54 | particles seem just a little bit better.
| | 03:56 | Now that we can see our particles we
actually might close up the Particle
| | 03:59 | section and open back up the Emitter
section and push these particles back
| | 04:05 | a little bit farther in Z, so we
have got some particles way in the
| | 04:09 | distance there, there we go. Looking good!
| | 04:15 | So now that we can just see that there
is just kind of like this haze in the
| | 04:20 | back, because there is a lot of
particles, which is what happens when there is
| | 04:24 | snow, it just kind of appears a little hazy.
| | 04:26 | Looking pretty good!
| | 04:27 | Okay, so let's go ahead and close up
the Emitter section, and now let's open up
| | 04:31 | the Physics section and, again, making
sure that it is set to its default value
| | 04:34 | of Air, the Physics Model, open up
Air, and now we have our Wind value.
| | 04:38 | Now this is what's really cool about
Particular is we could have the particles
| | 04:43 | fall from the top and then we can have
the secondary wind force acting on them.
| | 04:48 | So let's say, the Wind X, we will
increase that, and as we are increasing that,
| | 04:53 | you see these particles move to the right.
| | 04:55 | And so I might take this up to a value
of, let's say, 50 or something, and now
| | 04:59 | as these particles fall, they are
falling from the top, but they are also kind
| | 05:04 | of drifting off to the side,
because the wind is pushing them.
| | 05:07 | So again, we have two directions here
which is what adds a lot to the realism.
| | 05:12 | I think that what I might want to do
is actually go back up to the Emitter
| | 05:16 | section really quick, open up Emission
Extras, and let's take Pre Run to a 100,
| | 05:20 | so that way we have a full area of
snow at frame 0, and we don't have to wait
| | 05:26 | for that snow to grow on.
| | 05:28 | So this is looking pretty awesome!
| | 05:29 | Now what we might want to do
is animate the Wind X value.
| | 05:35 | So I am going to click the Stopwatch
for Wind X and move a couple of seconds,
| | 05:39 | and then take this up really high, like
300 or 400 or something like that, like
| | 05:45 | there was a big gust, and
then take this back down to 50.
| | 05:49 | So now let's see what that looks like.
| | 05:51 | So if I play this back, little bit of
wind, and then there is a big gust, which
| | 05:57 | is like slow motion wind, because it's
getting loaded into RAM there, and then
| | 06:04 | the snow slows back again.
| | 06:06 | Let's go ahead and see
that back in real speed there.
| | 06:09 | Just a little bit of wind, little
gust, and then slows back down again.
| | 06:14 | Little details like that add so much to
the realism of the scene, I love that.
| | 06:19 | Now here is another really cool trick.
| | 06:21 | If we open up Turbulence Field, this is
kind of like a fractal noise distortion
| | 06:26 | of the air, which kind of creates a lot
of just kind of random warbling in the
| | 06:33 | air, which if snow is falling, it's
going to move a little bit more random than
| | 06:37 | these particles are moving.
| | 06:38 | And the wind is not going to be uniform,
and so we kind of do want a little bit
| | 06:42 | more randomness here, and that's
what this Turbulence Field gives us.
| | 06:45 | Now by default it's off, we could have
it Affect the Size and we could have it
| | 06:49 | Affect the Position.
| | 06:50 | So what I want to have it
do is Affect the Position.
| | 06:54 | So I am going to turn up Affect Position to 150.
| | 06:58 | And now as these particles are moving,
you see that there is just kind of like a
| | 07:03 | random wobble to what they are doing.
| | 07:07 | And that adds a lot to the
believability, because when snow is dropping, it
| | 07:12 | just kind of goes all over the place in
random little flurries and so it looks
| | 07:16 | a lot more realistic.
| | 07:17 | You are going to have particles
going the opposite direction and that's
| | 07:20 | exactly what we want.
| | 07:21 | And actually I will press the letter B
here and letter N here to create a small
| | 07:26 | little work area, and now as we preview
that, the gust of wind and then the snow
| | 07:30 | particles are kind of going all over the place.
| | 07:32 | They might be a little bit too
active at this point, also because we are
| | 07:37 | applying this against a photo, the
more that we have our particles move like
| | 07:41 | crazy, the more it's going to be
obvious that this is not reacting the way that
| | 07:46 | our snow is reacting.
| | 07:47 | So if we our snows are full of flurries
and wind and these tree branches are not
| | 07:53 | moving at all, it's going to be a dead
giveaway of our digital fakery, so we
| | 07:59 | want to be careful with that.
| | 08:00 | So I am going to take
this back down to about 75.
| | 08:03 | But I just wanted to make sure that you
could see what's going on, and you could
| | 08:07 | see the result of the Turbulence Field,
you could see the results of the wind,
| | 08:11 | so that's why I am kind of pushing
that like a little bit heavy there.
| | 08:14 | But there we have it, we have some
pretty believable snow and we have some
| | 08:18 | randomness with the Turbulence Field;
| | 08:19 | we have gust with the wind,
it's a very cool effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Bouncing particles off of other layers| 00:00 | And now we are going to look at a very
powerful feature of Particular, and that is Bouncing.
| | 00:06 | It doesn't sound all that complex,
but it really can get that way.
| | 00:10 | So what I am going to do is I am going
to select this Particular Layer and open
| | 00:15 | up the Physics system.
| | 00:16 | Now I have already created
these layers, I set them up for you.
| | 00:20 | And I have a Floor Layer and it's
moved in 3D space, so look like a floor;
| | 00:25 | and I have a Wall Layer, and
basically this is just 3D text moved around to
| | 00:30 | make it look like a floor and a wall,
but they are not really any special
| | 00:34 | layers or anything.
| | 00:36 | Now in order to use these as a bounceable
surface for Particular, we need two things;
| | 00:41 | we need a layer that is a 3D layer;
| | 00:45 | and it cannot have the Collapse
Transformation Switch checked.
| | 00:51 | So those are very important, because those
are pretty big limitation, so be aware of that.
| | 00:57 | Now I have Particular here, I am going
to go in the Physics section, change the
| | 01:01 | Physics Model from Air to Bounce and then
Bounce becomes active and we open this up.
| | 01:06 | Now we have, as I mentioned, a Floor
and a Wall, and in Particular you can
| | 01:12 | choose a Floor Layer and a Wall Layer
that the particles will bounce off of.
| | 01:17 | Now there really is no difference
between the Floor and the Wall, it
| | 01:20 | basically could be written bounceable
surface one and bounceable surface two,
| | 01:24 | they are both the same.
| | 01:25 | It doesn't matter where they are,
there is really no difference.
| | 01:28 | So just to keep things clear, I am
just going to change my Floor Layer to my
| | 01:32 | PRECOMP floor, and let's
actually just look at that really quick.
| | 01:37 | So as I play this back, now my
particles are bouncing off of my Floor Layer.
| | 01:45 | It's pretty awesome!
| | 01:46 | Now I can change the amount of Bounce;
| | 01:53 | I could take this up to, I don't know,
really high, 128 for example, so they
| | 01:57 | really bounce once they are hit,
Captain Kangaroo over here.
| | 02:01 | I am actually going to just
take this back down to 50;
| | 02:04 | but be aware if you want more bouncy
surface, you just can increase the Bounce value.
| | 02:09 | Now the Floor Mode is actually pretty
interesting, we have three choices here.
| | 02:13 | When we choose Infinite Plane, it
looks at the plane on which our 3D object
| | 02:18 | rests and then it kind of goes off
into infinity based on this plane.
| | 02:24 | So this particle, for example, just
hit and it bounced, even though the Floor
| | 02:29 | Layer isn't right here on the right-
hand side, it still bounced because we had
| | 02:33 | Infinite Plane checked.
| | 02:35 | Now we could also make this Layer Size.
| | 02:38 | So only where the bounce of the
layers are, only that gets bounced.
| | 02:46 | And if particles bounce around this,
then they will just keep falling.
| | 02:53 | Now we could also change this to Layer
Alpha, and this gets very interesting,
| | 02:56 | because now only where the Alpha
Channel is do particles bounce.
| | 03:01 | So if particles were to land in the
center of the O, for example, then they
| | 03:05 | would go straight through,
which is pretty interesting.
| | 03:08 | You see particles going straight through,
because they are landing in the middle
| | 03:13 | of the O or wherever there is not text,
which is, again, really interesting.
| | 03:18 | Now while this is set to Layer Alpha, I
am going to come down to the Collision
| | 03:22 | Event, this is where it gets really
powerful, and this is why you could just
| | 03:26 | have an entire lynda training series
just on bouncing Trapcode Particular
| | 03:29 | particles, it's incredible.
| | 03:31 | So the default Collision Event
behavior is to Bounce, but we could also have
| | 03:36 | these particles Slide.
| | 03:37 | So when they hit, they just kind of
roll around like balls that just hit a
| | 03:42 | surface, which is, again, really interesting.
| | 03:45 | We could also have these particles Stick.
| | 03:49 | Now in the last movie if we created 3D
text, for example, in the snow, we could
| | 03:53 | have had the particles, the snow
particles Bounce with the Stick Collision Event
| | 03:58 | and Gather on the particles.
| | 04:00 | Now these don't seem to be gathering
very well because they have a low lifespan,
| | 04:04 | but if we went back into the Particle
section, increased the Lifespan,
| | 04:08 | you could see it looks like now
our particles have measles or something,
| | 04:11 | but these particles are Sticking.
| | 04:14 | And because Layer Alpha is our Floor Mode,
then we still have a lot of particles
| | 04:20 | that are just kind of flying through
the Alpha, but anything that touches the
| | 04:23 | text will stick to it, really interesting!
| | 04:28 | Now the last option here might
not seem cool, but it really is.
| | 04:33 | The Collision Event here is Kill, and
basically what that does is that it kills
| | 04:38 | the particles as soon as they touch it.
| | 04:41 | So this is a great way to create
an object that will kill a particle
| | 04:46 | instantly, so they don't have to
fade out, you don't have to worry about
| | 04:49 | timing or anything.
| | 04:50 | Let's say, for example, you had
clouds that touched a building and you want
| | 04:54 | those clouds to look like they are
going behind the building or whatever, you
| | 04:57 | need those clouds to die out the second
that they touch the building, then this
| | 05:01 | is the way to do it, to bounce them with Kill.
| | 05:04 | There are a lot of situations where you
want particles just to die when they get
| | 05:08 | to a certain point, and because of the
randomness of particles, you can't do
| | 05:11 | that with necessarily Life or Size or
Opacity, because they are all going to be
| | 05:16 | hitting at different times.
| | 05:17 | So to guarantee that particles will die
as soon as they touch an object, then we
| | 05:22 | change the Collision Event to Kill.
| | 05:24 | It's a little dark to talk about the
death of particles and killing them, but
| | 05:32 | let's move on to something a
little bit more bright and sunshiny.
| | 05:35 | Let's take the Collision Event back
to Bounce, and we could also change the
| | 05:39 | Wall Layer to Wall here, and I am going to
change the Floor Mode back to Infinite Plane.
| | 05:44 | And basically now we have two bouncing
surfaces, so now as these balls come off
| | 05:50 | and bounce, they could bounce off of
the Wall, which because they are coming
| | 05:54 | from the top, they might not be that
likely to do, but they will often bounce
| | 06:00 | from the Floor into the Wall and back.
| | 06:03 | You see that particle is bouncing, and
there it goes now it's bouncing off of
| | 06:07 | the Wall, just bounced off there.
| | 06:09 | So you have particles bouncing all over
the place and it just creates a really
| | 06:13 | interesting and fun alternatives to
just having particles fall somewhere.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Globally adjusting particle timing| 00:00 | Deep within the bowels of Particular
there is an amazing setting that allows you
| | 00:05 | to control the timing of everything,
the global timing of everything that's
| | 00:11 | happening with that instance of Particular.
| | 00:14 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to use it to create kind of like a
| | 00:19 | matrix like effect here.
| | 00:20 | So we are going to have these rockets
and then we are going to have a camera
| | 00:24 | rotate around while the rockets are frozen.
| | 00:26 | Okay, so let's take a look how this works.
| | 00:29 | It's actually really easy, although it
might be a little challenging to find.
| | 00:33 | So what we are going to do is open up
the Physics section, and then in the
| | 00:37 | Physics section there is this little
property called Physics Time Factor.
| | 00:42 | By default it is set to 1.0, which
basically you can think of as kind of like
| | 00:46 | 100% speed, it's just
kind of going just regular.
| | 00:48 | So as we play this back, rockets go,
and I'll back this up so we can see it
| | 00:54 | real-time, that's what real-time looks like.
| | 00:55 | So now what we could do is I could
take this to 2.0, for example, and now it
| | 01:01 | doubles and everything is going twice as fast;
| | 01:04 | all the particles, rockets,
everything is going twice as fast.
| | 01:08 | I could take this to 0.5 and it's the opposite.
| | 01:13 | Everything is going half the speed.
| | 01:17 | So again, it's a great way to
universally control the timing of everything.
| | 01:21 | So what we will talk about in the next
movie is these auxiliary particles, and
| | 01:26 | that's coming off of these rockets,
which are actually particles themselves.
| | 01:30 | So basically all that you are seeing
here is just one instance of Particular as
| | 01:35 | far as the rocket and the fire.
| | 01:37 | And so this Physics Time Factor
allows us to control the speed of
| | 01:41 | everything with one little parameter here, and
I should also point out that it's keyframeable.
| | 01:48 | So what we could do is, let's say,
we'll go to the 2.0 second mark and we'll
| | 01:52 | go ahead and take this back up to 1.0 and,
again, that's just regular and normal speed.
| | 01:58 | Click the Stopwatch, we will advance
the frame, take this down to 0, which
| | 02:05 | freezes everything, so now we could
just go out wherever we want in time and
| | 02:08 | nothing is happening.
| | 02:09 | Go to the 3.0 second mark, and we'll actually
press U to reveal this property in the Timeline.
| | 02:17 | Click this little Keyframe area in the
Keyframe Navigator to set a Keyframe at a 0 value.
| | 02:25 | Press Page Down, advance to another
frame, and then we'll take this back up to
| | 02:29 | 1.0, so everything is back as it was,
and then the particles keep on going.
| | 02:34 | So we'll play this, it stops,
and then it keeps on going.
| | 02:40 | Now what we can do to enhance this is
we could actually create a camera move.
| | 02:44 | So we could press P4, the Camera Position,
and click the Stopwatch to set a Keyframe there.
| | 02:52 | Then they go to the end of the
animation, and we'll grab the Unified Camera
| | 02:56 | Tool, or you can press C on your keyboard,
and then we'll click and drag and move around.
| | 03:01 | Also, these stars are in our 3D
environments, another layer of Particular.
| | 03:04 | So at the same instance of
Particular, but it's on a different layer.
| | 03:08 | And so now, as we are flying around here,
everything freezes, the camera rotates
| | 03:15 | all of the matrix, and once it stops
moving, then these rockets come back in,
| | 03:23 | which is actually really cool, because
there is some parallax here with these
| | 03:26 | rockets and their fuel or their fire
that is spitting out here, and as we pan
| | 03:31 | around, it's a really interesting effect.
| | 03:33 | Again, same thing too with these aux
particles, the fire that is shooting out
| | 03:37 | here, it's a really cool effect.
| | 03:40 | So again, it's cool for creating
matrix style animations where we are kind of
| | 03:43 | freezing frames, or when we want to go
into slow motion or something like that,
| | 03:47 | but again, it's also really helpful
too if you just want to universally slow
| | 03:51 | everything down or speed everything up as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding complexity with the aux system| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
one of the best features of Trapcode
| | 00:05 | Particular, and that is Aux Particles.
| | 00:07 | We have been looking at these rocket
examples, we have been -- we used this
| | 00:10 | earlier where we created these custom
rocket particles, but I didn't tell you
| | 00:15 | about how to make the fire come out of
these particles, and that's what we are
| | 00:19 | going to do later on, but first,
before we get into that a little bit more
| | 00:23 | complex example, let's
break it down to Aux Basics.
| | 00:25 | So go over to the Aux Basics Comp where
I just have a plain old solid and apply
| | 00:30 | Trapcode Particular, we are just
going to start from scratch here.
| | 00:33 | Now what Aux Particles are and the
power behind them is that it takes each
| | 00:40 | individual particle and turns
it into its own particle emitter.
| | 00:46 | So that concept just blows the mind.
| | 00:50 | But we have all these particles here,
we have one emitter, and that emitter is
| | 00:54 | spitting out all these particles, but
if we go into the Aux System here, and
| | 01:00 | under Emit, if we change this value
from Off to Continuously, we'll see that
| | 01:06 | each one of these particles is now
generating a stream of particles.
| | 01:11 | So that's just insane.
| | 01:16 | So what we can do here is
adjust some of these setting.
| | 01:19 | Emit Probability is a 100%;
| | 01:20 | that means that every single particle
is definitely going to generate its own
| | 01:23 | Aux Particles, but we might want to reduce that.
| | 01:26 | Let's say we take this down to like
maybe 10 or so, and then only 10% of these
| | 01:31 | particles are going to be
generating their own particles.
| | 01:34 | I will take this back up to a 100 for right now.
| | 01:37 | Now initially this might kind of
seem overwhelming, there is just so much
| | 01:41 | you could do here, but let's just play
around with this and see what we come up with.
| | 01:46 | I am going to take Particles per
second from 10 to, I don't
| | 01:50 | know, a really high value
and see what we come up with.
| | 01:53 | Once we have enough Particles per
second, then you will see that
| | 01:56 | we have this just beautiful stream here.
| | 01:59 | And we could take up the Life of the
particle so that we are not seeing the
| | 02:03 | entire rainbow lifespan;
| | 02:04 | maybe we are just seeing
the cool red and yellow part.
| | 02:08 | That looks awesome!
| | 02:10 | We might want to increase the Size and
make those a little bit thicker there.
| | 02:15 | Maybe we want to take down or increase
the Gravity so that these particles kind
| | 02:20 | of generating like that, just
beautiful, what an incredible shape!
| | 02:26 | Now what we could do here is these
little white particles now are not very
| | 02:31 | attractive, so we can go up to the
Particle section, and we take the
| | 02:35 | Opacity down to nothing.
| | 02:36 | We don't have to see those original particles.
| | 02:38 | Now we have this beautiful like ocean
wildlife object here that's incredible,
| | 02:43 | and this is a fully functional 3D object.
| | 02:46 | And again, as we learned in the last
movie, if we want to just put this in our
| | 02:49 | scene and we don't want it to move,
we can open up the Physics section and
| | 02:53 | take Physics Time Factor to 0, so that this
object, this structure, stays as it is for good.
| | 03:01 | I can go ahead and create a new camera
here, I will go to Layer>New>Camera, go
| | 03:06 | ahead and accept the default settings.
| | 03:08 | Select the Unified Camera Tool.
| | 03:10 | As we orbit around this, we
see that this is actually a fully
| | 03:13 | three-dimensional structure. Beautiful!
| | 03:18 | Just amazing!
| | 03:19 | So go back to the Particular here and
we could adjust the Opacity of these
| | 03:24 | particles, and we could bring those up.
| | 03:26 | We could also make them spread out a
little bit by adjusting the Velocity;
| | 03:30 | that kind of messes with our current
shape so I'll take this back down to 0.
| | 03:36 | But there are other settings
here that we could play with.
| | 03:39 | We could play with the Feather and
some other self-explanatory settings, but
| | 03:42 | that's the basics of what
the Aux System is doing here.
| | 03:45 | So again, each one of these little
strands is a stream of particles being
| | 03:51 | emitted by the main particles.
| | 03:54 | So let's go over to the Aux Rockets
START Comp where we have our little rockets,
| | 04:00 | and they are just lonely rockets
without anything to propel them.
| | 04:04 | I am actually going to go back and
select my regular old Selection Tool.
| | 04:08 | So let's talk about how to get
these particles shooting out rockets.
| | 04:13 | Let's go to the Emit area of the Aux
System, change this to Continuously.
| | 04:17 | By the way, we could also
change this to At Bounce Event.
| | 04:20 | So we have been talking in this chapter
about bouncing and we could have these
| | 04:25 | particles, once they bounce, we
could have them emit these Aux Particles.
| | 04:30 | So we could go into the Bounce section
and we could have these particles, when
| | 04:37 | they collide, when they bounce, have
them be Killed, and then have Aux Particles
| | 04:42 | come out once they get Killed.
| | 04:44 | So again, the possibilities
are just absolutely endless here.
| | 04:47 | I will take the Physics Model back to Air, go
back to our Aux System, turn it on Continuously.
| | 04:54 | We don't see anything just yet, but
let's go ahead and play with these settings
| | 04:58 | and see if we can't make these fine
little particles come out and say hi.
| | 05:01 | First of all, let's get the Particles
per second (Particles/sec) quite a bit,
| | 05:05 | maybe 120, 130, and now we are
starting to see a little bit of those
| | 05:08 | particles coming out.
| | 05:09 | Let's go ahead and increase the
Size a bit, maybe to 15, and now we are
| | 05:13 | seeing some particles.
| | 05:15 | Now one of the problems here is that the
type of the particles is by default set
| | 05:21 | to the Same as Main.
| | 05:23 | So it looks really beautiful in our Aux
Basics Comp when these are just spheres
| | 05:27 | duplicated, and when we increase the
Particles per second (Particles/sec) and
| | 05:32 | the Lifespan (Life span), then we have
these beautiful streaks of particles, but
| | 05:36 | when our particles are rockets, having
the particles that come out from behind
| | 05:40 | them as little mini rockets,
it doesn't look super great.
| | 05:44 | So let's change the Type of particle
from Same as Main to Sphere, there we go.
| | 05:49 | Now this is starting to look pretty good,
but let's go ahead and change the Color.
| | 05:53 | Open up Color over Life, and we have
these this gradient already set up for you
| | 05:57 | here, and that's because trying to
get these exact colors would be kind of
| | 06:02 | annoying, so leave those colors as is.
| | 06:05 | And then for Transfer Mode, change this
from Normal to Add, and that creates our
| | 06:09 | perfect little streak here.
| | 06:11 | Now we can play with a few of
these parameters a little bit more.
| | 06:14 | For example, we can increase the
Velocity up to 50, so we have these cute little
| | 06:19 | bubbles that spread out or whatever,
or if we wanted to go up further, we can
| | 06:23 | have it more or like smoke.
| | 06:24 | I'll take that back down to maybe about
50 or so, but also increase the Opacity,
| | 06:29 | if we wanted to do that.
| | 06:30 | We could also increase the Gravity so
that there is some pull on these particles.
| | 06:35 | Now one of the properties that
you might miss is Randomness.
| | 06:38 | So we have Life, Size, and Opacity, and
in the main area of Particular we have
| | 06:44 | right next to those properties Randomness;
| | 06:46 | so Size Randomness, Life Randomness,
Opacity Randomness, and for some reason in
| | 06:51 | the Aux section, Randomness
is all found at the bottom.
| | 06:54 | So if we wanted to add some Life
Randomness, Size, and Opacity Randomness, we
| | 07:00 | could do that here in the Randomness section.
| | 07:03 | And now that we are done here, we have
each one of these particles, each one of
| | 07:08 | these rocket particles generating
another stream of particles, so this complex
| | 07:14 | system of rockets with fire shooting
out of them is being created by one
| | 07:18 | instance of Particular,
again, thanks to Aux Particles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Project One: Camera FlashesCreating the basic flash particle| 00:00 | From this point forward in the
training series we are going to stop looking
| | 00:05 | at the features of Particular specifically
and we are instead going to focus on projects.
| | 00:10 | We are going to look at using
Particular in real-world situations.
| | 00:15 | And in this chapter we are going take
footage of a Jazz singer at the end of a
| | 00:19 | concert as if she is kind of
looking out across the concert.
| | 00:23 | We are going to add a bunch of
camera flashes, like a bunch of people are
| | 00:25 | taking pictures of her, and of
course we are going to create these camera
| | 00:28 | flashes with Particular.
| | 00:30 | Now these little flashes are custom
particles I created, and in this movie we
| | 00:35 | are going to look at how to
create those from scratch.
| | 00:37 | Now you'll notice that at the bottom of the
Project Panel this is in 32 bits per channel.
| | 00:41 | I wanted some of these particles to kind
of fade out a little bit, but at 8 bits per
| | 00:46 | channel they just turn kind of gray and yucky.
| | 00:49 | But in 32 bits per channel they can
be faded and still be bright, it still
| | 00:54 | looks like it's white kind of showing through
light, which is fantastic, that's what I want.
| | 00:59 | So that's why I run through 32 bits per channel.
| | 01:02 | So go ahead and create a new
composition from scratch, we are going to call
| | 01:06 | this flash particle and we'll make it
400 by 400 pixels, and actually I don't
| | 01:11 | want the Frame Rate to be 29.97
because our footage is actually 23.976, so
| | 01:17 | we'll select that so it matches and
choose the duration of 10 seconds and we'll
| | 01:21 | go ahead and click OK.
| | 01:24 | Now what we are going to look at here
is the way I chose to make this particle,
| | 01:28 | but again to make a camera flash there
is probably a zillion different ways to
| | 01:31 | do it, so you can pick whatever
way you want, this is what I did.
| | 01:34 | I am going to go to Layer>New>Solid,
we'll call this flash or this solid layer
| | 01:42 | flash particle and we'll go ahead
and make it comp size and make sure the
| | 01:47 | background is pure black,
0, 0, 0, click OK and OK.
| | 01:52 | And let's apply the Lens Flare effect,
and what I want to do, I am going to
| | 01:59 | zoom in here a 100%, I am going to
click this Effect Control Point and put the
| | 02:04 | center of the flare in the middle, and
so everything is kind of lined up all
| | 02:08 | nice and tidy, like so.
| | 02:11 | And it doesn't seem like because I want
to get in the exact right spot, but that
| | 02:15 | will be good enough for now.
| | 02:16 | And this is fine if you want to
use this as your flash as well.
| | 02:18 | I chose to do a few other things, so if
you want to follow along you can do that.
| | 02:22 | From the Lens Type dropdown I change
this to 35 millimeter Prime and I made this
| | 02:26 | a little bit brighter about there it works.
| | 02:30 | And I didn't want it to be black and
white, I thought that will be distracting.
| | 02:34 | So I applied the Tint effect which maps
white and black to different values, but
| | 02:39 | at the default settings it turns just
to gray which is exactly where I want it,
| | 02:43 | so I left it like that.
| | 02:45 | And what I want to do actually is
create a circular mass to get rid of this
| | 02:48 | because one of the problems of the
Lens Flare effect is that in order to get
| | 02:51 | rid of the black or the original
content layer you have to use blend modes and
| | 02:56 | because we are using this as a particle
for Particular that's not available to us.
| | 03:01 | So it would show up as this
box if you left it as it is.
| | 03:03 | So I am going to go to the Elliptical
Tool or the Ellipse Tool, and with this
| | 03:07 | layer selected I am going to click-and-
drag, actually I can click-and-drag from
| | 03:11 | the center and I could just hold Command+Shift
on the Mac or Ctrl+Shift on the
| | 03:16 | PC as I scale out and
that looks about right there.
| | 03:22 | And I am going to go also apply the
Minimaxs effect because I want the Mini
| | 03:29 | Mac's effect to eat-way some of this
extra content around the particle here.
| | 03:36 | By default the Operation is set to
Maximum, so if we increase the Radius there
| | 03:39 | it would expand the layer.
| | 03:41 | It just doesn't really work in this case.
| | 03:44 | So I am going to take this to Minimum
and I don't want the channel to be color,
| | 03:48 | I want to adjust the Alpha, so I want
the Channel drop down to just Alpha.
| | 03:52 | And as we increase the Radius value it
kind of eats away at that alpha channel
| | 03:58 | which is exactly what we want here.
| | 04:01 | Now what I want to do is select the
layer and press the letter F to get to Mass
| | 04:05 | Feather and increase this just
a little bit, and there we go.
| | 04:09 | We are starting to have something now
that resembles our flash particle, and
| | 04:12 | what we could do is click on the
Transparency Grid to see what the particle
| | 04:15 | actually looks like with its
transparency, and that looks fantastic.
| | 04:20 | So actually one last step I want to do
is I want to apply the Levels effect, and
| | 04:25 | I want to change the channel from RGB
to Alpha, so we are just working on the
| | 04:31 | Alpha, and we want to take the Gamma of
the Alpha and it sounds really nerdy I
| | 04:37 | realize but, I am going to take this
and drag this to the right so we just get
| | 04:42 | rid of a little bit more of that black
and so we have just that particle going
| | 04:47 | for us, and we don't want to raise too
much of it, because then it gets weak.
| | 04:51 | So somewhere around there and we could
turn off the Transparency Grid just to
| | 04:54 | make sure that we are not eating away
too much of this, but that looks like a
| | 04:59 | pretty decent flash
particle if I do say so myself.
| | 05:02 | If we want to make that core a little
bit brighter we could go back to the RGB
| | 05:07 | value and drag this right-hand slider
over to the left a little bit, and I think
| | 05:13 | that's good, I am going to leave mine there.
| | 05:16 | Now in the next movie we are going to
actually apply this in Particular as a particle.
| | 05:21 | So what we are going to do is go to
File and I am going to choose Increment and
| | 05:25 | Save so that this creates Camera_
flashes_02.aep and we'll resume the tutorial
| | 05:30 | with that project file in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Simulating camera flashes| 00:00 | In the last tutorial we made this cool
camera flash particle and now we're going
| | 00:04 | to hook this up into
Particular and make some magic happen.
| | 00:08 | So let's go over to the Camera
flashes READY composition, basically we just
| | 00:12 | have our jazz singer footage here, and
she is actually waving and saying thank
| | 00:21 | you to a black screen.
| | 00:24 | So there is no transparency here if we
click the Transparency Grid, so we'll
| | 00:28 | have to deal with that issue in just a minute.
| | 00:30 | Now you have a blank solid layer for
you to apply a Particular too, and we also
| | 00:35 | need to drag and drop the flash
particle into this composition, go ahead and
| | 00:41 | turn that layer off, but make
sure it's in this composition.
| | 00:45 | Select a Particular layer and let's go
ahead and apply Particular to the layer.
| | 00:50 | Oh no where did it go?
| | 00:53 | Well remember that there is no
transparency in the jazz singer layer, so we're
| | 00:56 | going to have to go ahead and just solo
the Particular layer for right now and
| | 01:00 | then we'll deal with again
that issue in just a minute.
| | 01:03 | So we have here these particles,
let's go ahead and open up the Particles
| | 01:07 | section first off, change the
Particle Type from Sphere to Sprite.
| | 01:14 | So now that it is Sprite, we need to
open up the Texture section and change the
| | 01:19 | Layer from None to flash particle.
| | 01:23 | And now we have all these flash
particles here, let's go ahead and take up the
| | 01:26 | Size a lot, maybe to like 150, and
then let's take the Size Random to about a
| | 01:35 | 100, and let's actually now go up to the
Emitter section and fiddle with that a little bit.
| | 01:41 | Let's go up to the Emitter Type and
change this from Point to Box, because we
| | 01:45 | want an area, a surface area covered here,
and we'll make the Emitter Size X and
| | 01:51 | Y the same dimensions as our
composition, this is 2K, so we're going to make
| | 01:55 | this 2048 in the X by 1024 in the Y.
| | 02:00 | And we want some depth here, and we
get a little bit of depth because of the
| | 02:05 | size variation, at least some
perceived depth, so let's go ahead and increase
| | 02:10 | that though to 5,000.
| | 02:12 | So now we have a good amount of depth,
we've got people in the cheap seats and
| | 02:17 | we've got people down
here taking pictures as well.
| | 02:20 | Now of course there are way too many of
these flashes on screen, so let's take
| | 02:24 | the Particles/sec down to about 40
and that's still too many, but that's
| | 02:28 | actually a good amount of -- as far as
the generation goes, so let's go up to
| | 02:35 | -- down to Particle and let's go ahead
and take the Life down a lot, maybe to
| | 02:41 | 0.2 or so, so we've got just a few of these on
screen and they are drifting, I don't like that.
| | 02:48 | Let's go back up to the Emitter section
and take the Velocity to 0, so that way
| | 02:54 | when they are born they stay right
where they are, which again helps our -- the
| | 02:58 | effect that we're in a big concert
hall and there is people taking pictures,
| | 03:04 | because they wouldn't be running
while they are taking pictures.
| | 03:07 | Now let's also while we're here, open up
Emission Extras and take the Pre Run up
| | 03:11 | to a 100, so we could start at frame
0 and there is flashes of frame 0, and
| | 03:16 | we'll close up the Emitter section for
now and this is actually looking pretty
| | 03:21 | good, except that I don't want the
particles just to kind of blink on and that
| | 03:26 | just doesn't look that good.
| | 03:28 | So the magic here is in the Size over
Life property, what I'm going to do is
| | 03:34 | open up Size over Life and I want just
a little bit of ramp up at the burst, we
| | 03:39 | want it maybe not start super big, but
kind of just get big, maybe like a frame
| | 03:45 | or two, yeah, there we go, see how
that's smaller and then like the next frame,
| | 03:47 | it kind of gets a little bit bigger,
that's kind of what we want, so it's kind
| | 03:51 | of flashing very quickly, and then
let's have it, at this point let's just
| | 03:55 | click-and-drag down, let's see what that
looks like, maybe open this up a little
| | 04:01 | bit and smooth it, hit the
Smooth button a couple of times.
| | 04:05 | But this is kind of what I want.
| | 04:06 | I want a big flash and then I want to
kind of fade out really quickly and the
| | 04:10 | Life span isn't that long, so this
flash should be pretty quick here.
| | 04:15 | So if we preview that, there we go.
| | 04:18 | That looks a lot more flashy,
like camera flash bulbs going off.
| | 04:23 | All right, pretty good.
| | 04:25 | Now how are we going to get our
particles to actually show up?
| | 04:30 | Well we can take our top footage here
and we can set it in Add mode and of
| | 04:37 | course if this were a real professional
project we might want to rotoscope her
| | 04:40 | out, but that's a little ridiculous,
it's a lot of work, especially with her
| | 04:45 | hair and all this kind of stuff, I don't
think we really need to get that crazy with this.
| | 04:50 | So we put it into Add mode and now
we're seeing our particles which is great,
| | 04:54 | but some of them are appearing and so
she was not going to have this gigantic
| | 04:58 | flash going through her back like that.
| | 05:01 | So what we're going to do is we are
going to click the Particular layer and
| | 05:07 | Shift+Click the flash particle layer so
that they are together, and then go to
| | 05:12 | Layer>Pre-compose to compose these
together and we'll call this PRECOMP
| | 05:19 | Particular and flash and click OK.
| | 05:24 | So now we have Particular and the
flash in this one layer, and now we can
| | 05:30 | mask them out, because Particular does
not respect our mask, so in order for
| | 05:34 | it to respect a mask which is what
we're going to do, we need to pre-compose
| | 05:38 | it like we just did.
| | 05:39 | So I'm going to select the Rotobezier
option here, I'm just going to make a
| | 05:44 | quick and dirty mask
around the core of her body.
| | 05:48 | I'm not going to be too worried
about her arms, because they are flailing
| | 05:52 | around quite a bit, and if there
were particles that were seen around her
| | 05:56 | hands, it's feasible that the flash
would react with the lens in a way that the
| | 06:02 | light would go over her hand, even
though the flash is behind it, so I'm not
| | 06:06 | super-worried about that, I just
basically want to make sure that again the
| | 06:09 | core of her body is covered in this
mask, it doesn't have to be very tight,
| | 06:14 | that looks pretty good.
| | 06:16 | And we can press the letter M to reveal the
mask properties and take the mask to subtract.
| | 06:22 | Now let's go ahead and press F on your
keyboard for Feather, let's go ahead and
| | 06:26 | increase the Feather quite a bit here,
and so now you see this particle that
| | 06:31 | was right on top of her, even now it's
like right behind her and some of that
| | 06:36 | light is spilling on top of her, but you are
not going to notice it because it happens so fast.
| | 06:41 | So it's kind of a quick and dirty way
to make things happen, but it works.
| | 06:45 | Now another thing that we can do here
is that some of these particles that are
| | 06:49 | way up here at the top of the stadium
we'd imagine, because typically stadiums
| | 06:52 | have stadium seating, so they are
close at the bottom and they kind of get
| | 06:57 | farther away as they go up, so this flash
would be farther away than this flash would be.
| | 07:02 | So we might want to kind of darken
this a little bit, and again this is why
| | 07:07 | I put this in 32 bits per channel,
so I can darken this a little bit and
| | 07:11 | still have it be white.
| | 07:12 | So what I'm going to do to darken
this is choose a rectangular mask, choose
| | 07:16 | the Rectangle Tool and with the
PRECOMP layer selected, I'm going to
| | 07:19 | click-and-drag a mask around the
cheap seats we'll call them, and we'll go
| | 07:24 | ahead and where it says Mask 2 we'll
change the mode to Subtract and then
| | 07:29 | we'll press F for Feather, maybe you
have to push that again to reveal it, and
| | 07:34 | we'll feather this a lot; maybe 300 or so.
| | 07:39 | And you could see that this is still
fairly bright, even though it's masked off
| | 07:45 | because this is 32 bits per channel.
| | 07:47 | We might want to go back to our
main Selection Tool, our black arrow,
| | 07:53 | double-click on our mask and
shrink that just a little bit.
| | 07:58 | So it's just faded out a little bit, but
it's still kind of bright, go ahead and
| | 08:01 | hit Enter to accept that change and
then now we could press 0 on the numeric
| | 08:06 | keypad to preview that and we
have a pretty good looking shot here.
| | 08:11 | Oh yeah I like that.
| | 08:16 | Another thing you might want to do is
look at the actual content of the footage.
| | 08:22 | Now here our mask is off a little bit.
| | 08:24 | If you really wanted to you could
animate the position, but right now there
| | 08:28 | is no flashes that are going off right
here, it's not hurting anybody, so I'm
| | 08:33 | not worried about it.
| | 08:34 | But right here when she holds up her
hands it's kind of like an iconic pose,
| | 08:38 | it's really beautiful and I
really want to feature that.
| | 08:40 | So I want to make sure that the
flashes, while her hands are up are
| | 08:44 | absolutely perfect.
| | 08:45 | So what we might want to do is go back
into the Particular comp here, and it
| | 08:51 | probably would have been a better idea
to do this before I pre-compose, but what
| | 08:55 | we could do is change the random seed
until maybe we get something that we would
| | 09:02 | like, that might look a little
better with that Particular pose.
| | 09:05 | So when her hands go up and there is a
bunch of cameras in the shot, there is
| | 09:10 | five cameras at once, a big flash going
on over here, that's perfect for what we
| | 09:14 | want though, so right now I can
see it could really help with that.
| | 09:18 | And lastly if you want to, you could
add a glow layer, this is a little harsh,
| | 09:22 | but I could press T for the Opacity
property and reduce this as desired, but I
| | 09:29 | put a little glow layer on here, but
again this is just to taste, you don't have
| | 09:33 | to turn it on if you don't want to, but
this is our final result creating these
| | 09:37 | flash particles and this whole scene
from scratch, let's just wait for it to
| | 09:43 | render and then we'll preview that back.
| | 09:45 | And there it is our final scene with
the jazz singer, quickly masked, set up
| | 09:51 | super-fast, looks great, we created
this whole new world, thanks to Particular.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Project Two: Campfire SmokeMaking the smoke| 00:00 | In this chapter we're going to take a
little look at this cute little campfire
| | 00:04 | scene with my wife and our children.
| | 00:08 | And there is this little campfire here,
and what we're going to do is we're
| | 00:12 | going to make the smoke
and then these little embers.
| | 00:15 | Now what's kind cool about this is
little scene, is that in the original, if I
| | 00:20 | just show you the source footage,
which you actually don't have, this is
| | 00:24 | actually shot in a studio and you can
see that there's curtains and light stands
| | 00:29 | and all kinds of things going on here.
| | 00:31 | And if I just play this regularly here,
you could see that there is no smoke, no
| | 00:36 | fire, no embers, no nothing to speak of there.
| | 00:40 | So that was all added in After Effects
and that's what we are going to look at.
| | 00:44 | So again in this movie we're going to
look at making the smoke here, next movie
| | 00:49 | we will look at making these embers
that are flying out of the fire and
| | 00:52 | shooting out, and then in the third
movie in this chapter, I am just going to
| | 00:54 | give you a quick walkthrough of some
of the other things that I did in this
| | 00:57 | movie to bring this scene to life.
| | 01:00 | A lot of times when we're working with
Particular, it's the other things that we
| | 01:04 | do in After Effects that make
the Particular stuff look so good.
| | 01:08 | So anyways, we'll come back to that a
little later on, now let's make some
| | 01:11 | smoke, so I'm going to go to the
Campfire START composition, select the
| | 01:15 | Particular smoke layer, turn it on and
apply Particular to it and we have our
| | 01:23 | default Particular settings here.
| | 01:25 | This comp is 2K, it's very large, so
let's go ahead and solo it, solo this
| | 01:31 | layer, the Particular smoke layer, so
we don't have to worry about rendering
| | 01:35 | all those other layers.
| | 01:36 | And let's go ahead and make
some beautiful smoke here.
| | 01:39 | Let's go ahead and open up the Emitter
section, of course we want to turn this
| | 01:44 | to a Box Emitter and we also want to
go down to the Direction section or the
| | 01:51 | Direction dropdown and
change this to Directional.
| | 01:54 | And we want this to point upwards, so I'm
going to change X Rotation to 90 degrees.
| | 02:00 | We can also click in here and drag
the Emitter downwards so it's below the
| | 02:06 | screen here and our smoke is coming upwards.
| | 02:10 | So as we start working with all these
other settings, we kind of have a frame of
| | 02:15 | reference of what this is actually looking like.
| | 02:17 | Now the first thing I want to do is
make this wider, so I'm going to take
| | 02:21 | Emitter Size X to 800, that's about how
wide I want my smoke to be, even though
| | 02:25 | the fire is probably a little bit more
narrow, my smoke to kind of come out in
| | 02:30 | the outskirts of that fire.
| | 02:31 | And I want this to be a little bit
deeper in Z space so I want to increase
| | 02:36 | Emitter Size Y a little bit, because
again because we rotated at the X rotation
| | 02:41 | here, Y is the new Z.
| | 02:43 | So if we actually rotate Z it's going
to -- or increase the size of Z, it's
| | 02:48 | actually going to go up and down,
which actually I don't really want, so I am
| | 02:52 | going to right-click and
choose Reset on that one.
| | 02:54 | And again take the Emitter Size
Y up to something like 600 or so.
| | 02:59 | Now what are the key elements here is
that I want these smoke particles to go
| | 03:04 | upwards, but there are smoke particles,
they are going to be easily blown around
| | 03:08 | by wind and whatever else is there, so
they are going to kind of want to spread
| | 03:12 | out, so I choose a Directional Emitter,
but I want some randomness after these
| | 03:17 | particles grow and we can create that
with Direction Spread Percentage, so I'm
| | 03:21 | going to take this actually to 40%,
and so now as this kind of grows these
| | 03:26 | particles kind of spread out a little bit more.
| | 03:28 | Let's take the Velocity to 80 so these
aren't moving as intensely, as quickly as
| | 03:36 | they were, and that will be good for
right now, and actually let's open up
| | 03:40 | Emission Extras, because right now if we
start the composition at the beginning,
| | 03:45 | the particles kind of grow on screen
and we want them to be there on screen the
| | 03:50 | whole time, because if we look at the
original comp here, it starts and they are
| | 03:55 | already in action, they've got roasted
marshmallows, looks a little bit like
| | 03:58 | sushi, but it's actually
supposed to be roasted marshmallows.
| | 04:00 | And so we want to make sure that our
smoke starts on frame one, so I'm going to
| | 04:05 | turn back on my smoke layer, solo it
again and then increase the Pre Run value
| | 04:09 | to a 100 and then close up the Emitter
section, open up the Particle section.
| | 04:14 | Now typically the way I make smoke,
just kind of like my standard go to formula
| | 04:19 | is that I go to my Particle
Type and I change this to Cloudlet.
| | 04:23 | I increase the Cloudlet feather to 100
and the secret with smoke for Particular,
| | 04:28 | at least the way that I like to make
it, is with the Cloudlet with a 100%
| | 04:32 | feather and then really big particles,
and then really transparent particles.
| | 04:38 | So I'm going to increase my Size really
big, like 150 big, and then increase the
| | 04:45 | Size Random to I don't know may
be 100 or so, maybe not, maybe 50.
| | 04:53 | And then we want to take our Opacity
down really low, really, really low, and
| | 04:59 | actually let's take the Opacity Random
to 50, and it's still looking a little
| | 05:06 | dense, we need to go to less than one,
so I'm going to type-in 0.3, and now
| | 05:13 | we have what looks like campfire smoke,
just really faint little puffs of smoke here.
| | 05:19 | Now I want my smoke to go higher, so
what I need to do here is actually increase
| | 05:25 | the Life span of the particle, so I
could increase the Velocity and make the
| | 05:29 | particles go higher, but then that also
makes it go faster, and so I don't want
| | 05:33 | it to go faster, I want to keep the
same speed, but I want it to go higher.
| | 05:38 | And so again increasing Life is the
way to do that, so I want to take this up
| | 05:42 | to about 8 seconds.
| | 05:43 | And give that a second to render,
things are slowing down because we have such
| | 05:47 | huge particles here, but now it's
going up to the character's faces which is
| | 05:51 | good and that's what I wanted, and
let's take up Life Random to about 50%, so
| | 05:56 | sometimes smoke particles are dying out.
| | 05:59 | Randomness is good when you have a fire,
because it is pretty chaotic in there.
| | 06:03 | Now my smoke is looking a little
strong, it's kind of hard to tell until we
| | 06:07 | actually see the composite on top of our
original material, but I have a feeling
| | 06:11 | this is still going to be a bit too
strong, so I'm going to click on the Color
| | 06:16 | Swatch and I'm just going to keep this
on the left-hand side of Color Picker, I
| | 06:20 | am going to bring this down just a
little bit till it's a light gray instead of
| | 06:24 | white, and click OK.
| | 06:25 | Now at this point you might still be
thinking that the smoke is too opaque,
| | 06:29 | let's go ahead and take off the solo
layer, so we can see this looks like
| | 06:33 | it gets our footage.
| | 06:34 | Yeah, it is a little intense and one
of the things with particle systems in
| | 06:37 | Particular too, you want to make sure that
you aren't trying to make your work be seen.
| | 06:43 | So we want this smoke to be felt more than seen.
| | 06:48 | For this campfire when I rendered it, I
actually rendered it out how I felt it
| | 06:54 | looked believable, but then you
couldn't really see it that much for tutorial
| | 06:58 | purposes, so I went back and I
re-rendered it with more opaque smoke, so you can
| | 07:03 | actually see it, but in reality I
think this is a little bit too opaque, this
| | 07:07 | calls too much attention to itself.
| | 07:09 | So in real life if I were doing this,
I would make this kind of sink into the
| | 07:14 | background, as visual effects, we're
always trying to make our work be seen, we
| | 07:16 | want people to say, hey, look at what I
did, look at my cool embers, look at my
| | 07:19 | cool smoke, but in reality, you kind of
want to be more behind the scenes than
| | 07:23 | that and if you look at -- go to
YouTube and look at reference footage of
| | 07:27 | campfires or whatever, the smoke, the
heat distortion, the embers, a lot of that
| | 07:33 | stuff is just really subtle and so a
lot of times you get the best results by
| | 07:38 | just being really subtle.
| | 07:40 | So I'm going to take the opacity of the
entire layer down to about 80% and let's
| | 07:46 | give that a second to recalculate here,
so there is that and so you can barely
| | 07:53 | see that smoke, but that looks a lot
more realistic about what -- for what the
| | 07:57 | smoke should be like.
| | 07:58 | We also might want to open up Opacity
over Life, and trim off a little bit of
| | 08:04 | that smoke so that as it fades up
here, it kind of gets a little bit more
| | 08:10 | transparent, so we are not seeing it
over the characters' faces as much.
| | 08:16 | Now at this point and probably watching
this tutorial wherever you're watching
| | 08:20 | it, it's probably difficult to see,
I'll zoom into 100% here, it'll take just a
| | 08:25 | second to render, and if we zoom in 100
% we can see the smoke here, and you can
| | 08:31 | barely see it here and probably
watching it again, wherever you are watching
| | 08:35 | this on the Web or whatever, it's
probably challenging to see that.
| | 08:38 | But if I take this layer off, and then bring
it back on, you really can see the difference.
| | 08:44 | So again we're not trying to stick out here,
we're trying just to add the haze of the smoke.
| | 08:50 | So again try not to make your work
stick out just so you can see it.
| | 08:56 | We want to make a realistic scene here.
| | 08:58 | So again for tutorial purposes, I made
this a little bit more obvious, but in
| | 09:02 | real life, try to make your work
blend in the background and look at the
| | 09:06 | realism, and again the before and after
is really key here, because smoke really
| | 09:11 | just add a haze, it would kind of
brighten everything a little bit, and just add
| | 09:15 | a haze more than be like super-obvious.
| | 09:17 | So I think we've done
that here, it's pretty good.
| | 09:20 | Okay, so in the next movie we're
going to look at creating embers, let's go
| | 09:24 | ahead and go to File, and I'm going to
choose Increment and Save, if you don't
| | 09:28 | want to do that you don't have to, but
I'm going to choose Increment and Save,
| | 09:31 | so that we could start at Campfire
02 in the next movie when we look at
| | 09:35 | building embers.
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| Adding embers| 00:00 | Now that we've made our smoke its
time to make some embers, glowing embers.
| | 00:04 | So let's go to the Layer menu create a
New>Solid, we'll call this Particular
| | 00:12 | Embers, make sure it's the Comp Size,
it doesn't matter the color and click OK,
| | 00:17 | apply Particular to it.
| | 00:19 | Now let's go ahead and solo that layer
so we could work on just these embers
| | 00:23 | for the time-being.
| | 00:24 | And let's go ahead and open up the
Emitter, let's get the animation of these
| | 00:29 | particles right, the movement,
and that's going to be the key here.
| | 00:32 | Now there is probably a lot of
different ways that you could have done this.
| | 00:36 | So the way I chose to set it up might
not be the best way, you might choose to
| | 00:41 | do something different, but I made a
Box Emitter, I also choose to change the
| | 00:44 | Direction to Directional.
| | 00:45 | Now just so we could see what we are
doing here again let's take X Rotation to
| | 00:50 | 90 degrees, let's lower this so
the Emitter is below the screen here.
| | 00:56 | And I want these to kind of shoot out
all over the place, so let's increase the
| | 01:02 | Emitter Size X, maybe 500 looks good,
we could also increase Y which again is
| | 01:12 | the new Z, that gives us a little bit of
depth and that's looking fine for right
| | 01:17 | now if we need just later we can.
| | 01:19 | I really want to adjust a direction
spread here, let's take this all the way
| | 01:22 | up to let's say 50, and then we
have just these particles kind of just
| | 01:26 | spreading all over the place.
| | 01:27 | Now with the way embers behave they
often shoot out very quickly but there is
| | 01:33 | some randomness in terms
of how much they shoot out.
| | 01:37 | So what I'm going to do is, I'm going
take Velocity to 200, but I am also going
| | 01:42 | to increase velocity
randomness to about a 100 as well.
| | 01:44 | So you see we have particles
going all over the place, way too many
| | 01:47 | particles actually.
| | 01:48 | Let's take this down to 8 particles per second.
| | 01:52 | And it's starting to look pretty good
there, it's kind of embery, and let's go
| | 01:57 | ahead and take Emission Extras, a Pre
Run to a 100 so we have embers at frame 0.
| | 02:04 | Close up Emitter open up Particle, the
Particle Type, these kind of do look like
| | 02:10 | embers already but we are going to
take this from Sphere to Glow Sphere, so I
| | 02:14 | have a little something extra
that kind of on fire a little bit.
| | 02:17 | Another alternative to that to what I
was thinking about doing is taking this to
| | 02:21 | 30 bits per channel on the project
and then making these particles be
| | 02:24 | super-white but there are so many
layers here, this project is already bogging
| | 02:29 | down quite a bit because
of all the stuff going on.
| | 02:31 | So I decided, man, I'll just use the
Glow Sphere and have that extra glow.
| | 02:35 | Let's change the color to a
nice embery, orange color.
| | 02:39 | They are looking okay, yeah,
got to work for right now.
| | 02:46 | Let's go ahead and take Life to 1.5
seconds, they don't quite get that far,
| | 02:52 | let's go ahead and take randomness up
to a 100, so that occasionally we might
| | 02:56 | have an ember like shoot up in front of
somebody's face or something like that.
| | 03:01 | Now even though they are kind of
small already, let's take the Size down to
| | 03:04 | 2, embers are these kind of just
these little tiny dots, but we can take up
| | 03:09 | the size randomness to 50, so every once in
a while there is kind of like a bigger one.
| | 03:14 | So let's take up opacity randomness to 100%.
| | 03:16 | Another thing that I think I want to do
is open up Opacity over Life because as
| | 03:22 | embers shoot off from the fire they are
usually completely opaque and they kind
| | 03:27 | of die out pretty quickly.
| | 03:28 | So I think I want to grab
this and drag down here.
| | 03:32 | So that's kind of smooth, and we get
smooth out a few times, you have a nice
| | 03:38 | smooth fade out there or not so smooth
but that's good enough and so as I play
| | 03:42 | this back those look like embers.
| | 03:49 | We might want to add a few more or
maybe take down opacity randomness so that
| | 03:55 | they are a little bit more opaque, I
mean we could count on that opacity.
| | 04:01 | But let's go ahead and
unsolo this and see what we have.
| | 04:06 | That's good, we could see these embers
right here, they look believable, they
| | 04:10 | are not drawing attention to themselves,
again like we talked about in the last
| | 04:14 | movie we don't want visual effects
that are intentionally obvious, we want to
| | 04:18 | make sure that they are realistic.
| | 04:20 | And so I am going to change the Blend
mode here from Normal to Add, and that
| | 04:25 | does make them a little bit brighter,
it makes them feel a little bit more like
| | 04:30 | embers, I believe in that, I
think that looks pretty good.
| | 04:33 | Now with the cloud and the embers let's
go back and hit the Home key and preview
| | 04:37 | what we have so far.
| | 04:39 | So this is only about half of our
composition, but we could still see what's
| | 04:45 | going on here, we have our clouds, we
have our embers kind of shooting up and
| | 04:49 | maybe that's too many embers, but we
can always go down in the particles per
| | 04:53 | second and reduce that if we wanted to.
| | 04:57 | I like the way they look though, they
might want to be a little bit more orange,
| | 05:01 | and actually let's go ahead make that change.
| | 05:03 | I will go ahead and click here, make
these a little bit more orange maybe, like
| | 05:07 | they are a little bit hotter, I guess,
yeah I like that a lot better and then
| | 05:12 | maybe we could go to the Emitter and
maybe take this down to 6 particles per
| | 05:16 | second or something like that.
| | 05:17 | Those are looking really good the
smoke looks great, so that's basically what
| | 05:21 | Particular did for this Particular
project and if you are interested in knowing
| | 05:27 | what else I did to this footage to get
this result and that's what we'll look
| | 05:32 | at in the next movie.
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| Enhancing the effect| 00:00 | In this movie I am going to give you a
big picture overview of the other steps
| | 00:04 | that I took to create this final
composite, and we've already done all the
| | 00:09 | Particular stuff, so this has nothing
to do with Particular, but in case you
| | 00:12 | are interested in knowing what else happened
behind the scenes that's what this movie is about.
| | 00:17 | So I am going to go into this same
project here open up Final results, open
| | 00:21 | up the Campfire FINAL composition and I am
going to go ahead and resize this a little bit.
| | 00:29 | What I am going to do I am going to
solo layers from the back to the front here
| | 00:33 | and show you what I did.
| | 00:35 | So we have the background layer of
course, I added some Particular stars that
| | 00:38 | flicker, and then I added a moon, and I
added a shape layer that had some moon glow.
| | 00:44 | We can't see that yet because I added
adjustment layer with some glow there, and
| | 00:48 | that really made the stars pop and also
made the moon and the glow behind it pop
| | 00:53 | as well, it just looks a
little bit more realistic that way.
| | 00:56 | I also added some realistic clouds here,
there is just some fractal noise and I
| | 01:02 | added a mask here and feathered it,
so that there is a little bit of clouds
| | 01:06 | over here and then a big mask over
here, so these clouds are kind of
| | 01:10 | illuminated by the moon.
| | 01:12 | And we also added this night sky layer
which is just basically a blue layer.
| | 01:17 | I am just going to create this really
feathered mask, which is kind of like a
| | 01:22 | stripe of blue in the sky, just kind
of mix things up and make it look a
| | 01:26 | little bit more random.
| | 01:27 | And then I also added a background
darkener so that it wouldn't distract from
| | 01:30 | our family and then we have
the family layer of course.
| | 01:34 | Now the family layer what I did
here is I made it really bluish.
| | 01:39 | I wanted the whole thing to be
washed in blue like a night sky.
| | 01:44 | I also needed to create a mask here,
a soft feathered mask so that the
| | 01:49 | background sky would show through.
| | 01:52 | Now another thing that we need to do
is create this blanket darkener layer.
| | 01:58 | So I have just made a black solid with
a soft feathered mask here to darken the
| | 02:03 | spots that would be in shadow here,
so on the sides of their chairs and
| | 02:08 | underneath their legs.
| | 02:09 | And I made sure that you could light
it up when the fire came, but I want
| | 02:13 | the default settings here when there is no
light hitting them directly just to be much darker.
| | 02:17 | When you have it just like this, it
just screams that we shot it in a studio
| | 02:21 | because there is way too much
light down towards the bottom here.
| | 02:24 | So maybe it seem a lot more nighty and
then I turned on this fire fill layer here.
| | 02:29 | This is just an orange solid with a
mask around it and this just kind of gives
| | 02:34 | everything a nice warm glow
in the center of the image.
| | 02:39 | So the fire will just kind of
generically light everything in the center also
| | 02:43 | creates a nice cold warm contrast of
that light, then we of course had our
| | 02:48 | Particular smoke and our
embers that added a lot.
| | 02:50 | Let me skip over this pre-comp flames
layer for a second and these two layers
| | 02:55 | I think added a lot.
| | 02:56 | I added just a yellow solid in the Add
Blend mode, in this fire glow, I just
| | 03:02 | made it just added a little like
reflection from the fire, a little glow from
| | 03:07 | the fire I should say, and I added
another orange solid in the Add Blend mode
| | 03:11 | with this mask here just to kind
of create the glow of the fire.
| | 03:15 | Now this is interesting, I also added
a layer or an adjustment layer I should
| | 03:19 | say of turbulent displace.
| | 03:21 | And what turbulent displace does it just
kind of warps everything underneath it.
| | 03:26 | So with a really low size and a
fairly low amount just kind of creates this
| | 03:31 | warbled look like when you are looking
through flames and it kind of creates
| | 03:35 | this heat distortion.
| | 03:36 | And so if we come over here and I
shall go over to the campfire rendered comp
| | 03:41 | that renders faster.
| | 03:42 | But if we go over here you could see
that there is like in this section there is
| | 03:46 | some warping that happens and that's
kind of typical when you look through a
| | 03:51 | fire and there is a lot of
warping going here as well.
| | 03:55 | So that's what I use that for.
| | 03:57 | It's very subtle because again I want
to call attention to it, but it's there.
| | 04:01 | I also created just this final color
correction adjustment layer just to kind of
| | 04:06 | make the oranges pop and
increase the contrast a little bit more.
| | 04:10 | Now I am going to hit the Caps Lock
key and turn the solo off of all of these
| | 04:16 | layers and then solo the
PRECOMP flames layer, fractal flames.
| | 04:21 | We double-click that to open it.
| | 04:23 | You can see we have this layer of fractal noise.
| | 04:25 | It's not too much to look at, but what
I was going for is I wanted to create
| | 04:32 | these little flames down towards the
bottom of the frame and I wanted them to
| | 04:37 | move really quickly.
| | 04:39 | Then I pre-composed them and brought
them back over into the final comp here and
| | 04:44 | I created a mask with a few little
spikes and some feathering and I created some
| | 04:49 | roughen edges with some animation, and
that kind of created, if I go ahead and
| | 04:55 | turn back on that Transparency Grid
here, I'll turn it off, I kind of create
| | 04:59 | these nice little flames down towards
the bottom of the screen, that kind of
| | 05:04 | look like flickers of the tops of flames.
| | 05:07 | So I think it is important
for this Particular composite.
| | 05:10 | And when you put that in the Add
Blend mode, it does create this kind of
| | 05:15 | realistic flame flicker, I mean if
everything else is in order that you got the
| | 05:20 | heat distortion, you got some smoke,
and you got embers and you got lights and
| | 05:24 | the flickering, then these tops of the
flames really do look I believe we kind
| | 05:30 | of don't think twice about it.
| | 05:32 | So that's how I made the
other steps in this project.
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|
|
11. Project Three: Welding SparksAbout particle motion blur| 00:00 | Our sweet project for this
chapter is this little sparky thing.
| | 00:09 | (video playing)
| | 00:10 | Very cool! Now as part of this, there are
these little welding sparks that come out.
| | 00:17 | And before we make those in the next
movie we need to understand a little bit
| | 00:21 | about motion blur for particles, let's
go over to the Particle Motion Blur Intro
| | 00:26 | composition where we have a regular old
solid with a regular old application of
| | 00:31 | Particular with the default settings here.
| | 00:34 | Let's open up in the Particular effect here,
open up Rendering and then open up Motion Blur.
| | 00:40 | Now in order to see this I'm going to
actually open up Emitter as well and
| | 00:44 | increase the Velocity, so we have
particles that move a little bit faster, so
| | 00:48 | they are more likely to create a motion blur.
| | 00:51 | Now when we have a motion blur, by
default it's set up to the comp setting, so
| | 00:57 | if we enable Motion Blur for the
composition, and then enable it for the layer
| | 01:01 | that Particular is on, we'll see motion blur.
| | 01:04 | Now what I think is more interesting
than that, and this is what we're going to
| | 01:08 | be using in the next movie here.
| | 01:09 | I'll just go ahead and turn off
Motion Blur for the comp and for the layer.
| | 01:13 | We can change the Motion Blur value in
Particular to be off completely or on,
| | 01:18 | regardless of what the composition settings are.
| | 01:21 | And when we do that we have something
very similar to what we saw earlier with
| | 01:25 | the motion blur, except it's
constantly on regardless of what's going on in
| | 01:28 | the rest of the comp.
| | 01:30 | Now as part of this we can also go over
to the Shutter Angle value and increase
| | 01:34 | this which increases the motion blur.
| | 01:36 | So now we are creating something that
resembles more like -- something more like
| | 01:41 | welding sparks, so these little --
just little shoots here, little lasers and
| | 01:46 | sparks shooting out here.
| | 01:47 | Now one of the things that happens is
that the particle actually is a sphere
| | 01:51 | and because it's stretching over this
distance now, because of the blur, it
| | 01:55 | appears to be faded.
| | 01:57 | So gosh these Particular people really
thought of everything, props of them.
| | 02:01 | So this is opacity boost value, so
we can increase the opacity boost and
| | 02:06 | now those sparks are much more vibrant and
this is something that's very interesting.
| | 02:12 | It's very cool, it definitely looks
like they are lit up and like they are
| | 02:17 | welding sparks, maybe we have a change,
the particle values, which is really cool.
| | 02:22 | Now something else that can happen here,
if we go into Physics and let's say we
| | 02:26 | change the Physics Time Factor to 0.
5, to slow things down quite a bit.
| | 02:31 | Well, because these particles are also
slowed down, then their motion blur is
| | 02:37 | not as powerful as well, so
they don't stretch as much.
| | 02:42 | So we can actually go down here and
there is a Disregard dropdown and we
| | 02:45 | could choose to disregard the Physics
Time Factor, so it completely ignores
| | 02:50 | the fact that we have made this go
faster or slower, and those particles
| | 02:55 | still look stretched out.
| | 02:56 | So we're going to use this technique
in the next movie to create some welding
| | 03:02 | sparks, but just be aware as you work in
Particular, if you want motion blur for
| | 03:06 | your particles, you can have it use
that comp setting so everything blends in,
| | 03:10 | but you don't have to, you can give
its own special blend of motion blur.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating welding sparks| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to continue
on what we learned in the last movie and
| | 00:04 | we are going to make these cool welding sparks.
| | 00:06 | So go over to the Welding Sparks
composition where we have a basic layer of
| | 00:11 | Particular and I'll just get the setup
stuff out of the way, what we need to
| | 00:15 | do is have these particles emit when
the text comes out so it look likes it's
| | 00:21 | kind of like hitting.
| | 00:23 | So what we are going to do I've created
these markers here, these comp markers,
| | 00:27 | you could use the numbers one, two and
three on your keyboard to just kind of
| | 00:31 | jump back and forth between these.
| | 00:33 | So we are going to the one marker
here and I want to hit the Page Up key to
| | 00:38 | backup one frame and I want to go to
the Emitter, and we're just going to first
| | 00:45 | worry about the Particles/sec and then
we'll about worry about the location.
| | 00:48 | So I want to set a keyframe for 0
Particles/sec and then go to the first comp
| | 00:56 | marker and set a
keyframe for 2000 Particles/sec.
| | 01:00 | Now let's go out about three frames
or so, adding more than that, and three
| | 01:09 | frames is actually good and
it will take this down to 0.
| | 01:13 | So this is what we are going to do
for these next two comp markers, so I am
| | 01:17 | going to go hit the number two to get
the second comp marker, Page Up to go back
| | 01:22 | one frame and what we'll do is we'll
press U on our keyboard to reveal this
| | 01:26 | property in the Timeline Panel and we
could go here to the Keyframe Navigator
| | 01:29 | and click this empty spot to force a
keyframe at 0 frames per second here, or 0
| | 01:35 | Particles/sec, I mean and then we'll
go to our second comp marker and on that
| | 01:40 | exact frame we'll go back up to 2000,
and then we'll go out three frames, one,
| | 01:45 | two, three, and take this back to 0.
| | 01:49 | Now one more, we'll go to the third
comp marker, page up, and we will force the
| | 01:55 | keyframe here at 0, go to the third
comp marker, take this up to 4000 this time
| | 02:01 | and then go out three frames, one,
two, three, and drop this down to 0.
| | 02:08 | So what we have done here is that we
have a burst of particles coming out and
| | 02:13 | then another burst of particles
coming out, and then a third burst of
| | 02:17 | particles coming out.
| | 02:19 | Now of course we want to line up the
Emitter so that it looks like the text
| | 02:24 | hitting is actually creating these sparks.
| | 02:26 | So let's go to the first comp marker
and I've created these guides for you
| | 02:30 | here, if they are not showing, you go
to View menu and choose Show Guides, and
| | 02:35 | what I want to do is click on
Position XY and actually click on this little
| | 02:40 | Effect Control Point here and at the
first point I want to go to this spot
| | 02:44 | about right there, with the end of MADE and I
want to click the stopwatch for Position XY there.
| | 02:53 | Hit 2 to go to the next spot and we'll
move the Emitter over to the OF here,
| | 03:02 | over the right tip there, and then
we'll hit number 3 and we'll go to right
| | 03:09 | about here, that spot right there
on the L, and now we have our point.
| | 03:15 | So what we need to do though is come
back to our layer, press the U key again
| | 03:20 | and maybe a third time actually to
reveal all of our animated properties.
| | 03:24 | We need to click-and-drag a marquee
over these three bottom keyframes for
| | 03:28 | Position XY or we could just click
the Position XY property to highlight
| | 03:32 | all those keyframes.
| | 03:33 | And right-click on one of these
keyframes and choose toggle hold keyframe.
| | 03:39 | And what that will do is it will make it
so that the keyframe will be right here
| | 03:43 | and then it will not interpolate, it
will spit the particles out right there,
| | 03:47 | and it will stay there until it moves to
the next spot, and then it will blow up
| | 03:52 | there, and then it will blow up the
third time that STEEL in the right spot.
| | 03:57 | So now that we got all set up out
of the way let's make some sparks.
| | 04:02 | Now let's change the direction here
from Uniform to Outwards and that creates
| | 04:06 | kind of a slightly better animation I think.
| | 04:10 | Let's take the Direction Spread from 20
down to 10 so that things don't spread
| | 04:14 | out quite as much when they are exploding.
| | 04:17 | Let's take the Velocity up to 500, so
this goes much quicker, and also we will
| | 04:24 | enable motion blur for
the comp and for the layer.
| | 04:29 | So now we can create these sparks
as we talked about in the last movie.
| | 04:34 | Now let's just go ahead and clean
things up a little bit visually.
| | 04:37 | So let's go ahead and solo this layer
and let's go ahead and go to the View menu
| | 04:42 | and uncheck Show Rulers and uncheck Show Guides.
| | 04:47 | Now this should soften the opacity or
take down the opacity a little bit of
| | 04:51 | our sparks, so let's go into
Rendering and Motion Blur and let's bring up
| | 04:55 | Opacity boost to about 20.
| | 04:57 | There we go, close that back up.
| | 05:00 | That's cool with the Emitter
section go into Particle section and get
| | 05:03 | these looking good.
| | 05:04 | What I want to do here is take the
Particle Type to Glow Sphere, so we have a
| | 05:09 | little bit of glow on these, but it's a
little bit fixed so let's take the Size down to 2.
| | 05:15 | Now we've got these nice little strings here.
| | 05:17 | Let's actually take this a little bit
further by going to Size Random and taking
| | 05:22 | it all the way up to a 100.
| | 05:24 | See now this is starting to
look like some sparks here.
| | 05:27 | Let's also increase the Opacity Random
to a 100% so we have some particles that
| | 05:32 | are kind of faded out already
and some that are really strong.
| | 05:36 | We also go into Opacity over Life and
just kind of make this a little bit, so it
| | 05:41 | kind of die out a little bit.
| | 05:46 | You could do that to taste if
you'd like, we'll smooth that.
| | 05:50 | Now for the color I am a
little Particular about this.
| | 05:54 | I fiddled around with this a long
time before I got the color that I want.
| | 05:56 | So I am going to click on the Color
Swatch and I am going to type-in these
| | 05:59 | numbers 245, I am going to press the
Tab key and then go to 120 and then
| | 06:05 | tab again and press 18.
| | 06:08 | This orange color was the exact right
color for me, and again it was really hard
| | 06:11 | to get that exact right color,
nothing else seemed to work right.
| | 06:15 | So I am going to take Color Random to 20.
| | 06:18 | So now we have a little bit more randomness.
| | 06:20 | We have a little bit more yellow,
little bit more red, and I think that's why
| | 06:24 | that exact color works.
| | 06:25 | So I wanted things on both sides, a
little yellow, a little red, a little
| | 06:29 | orange and I also want to take the
Transfer Mode to add so in case any of these
| | 06:33 | little welding sparks overlap they
get really bright like that right there,
| | 06:37 | that looks really good.
| | 06:38 | Now the last thing I want to do is to
play with the Physics, because if this as
| | 06:43 | we watched just the particles we can
see that they blow up and it's great, but
| | 06:47 | they first of all they last a lot
longer than they probably should here, so
| | 06:52 | maybe we'll go back to Opacity over
Life and just kind of make those die out a
| | 06:59 | little bit more there.
| | 07:01 | And click Smooth a few times after
doing that, and we might want to also take
| | 07:06 | down the Life down to like 2 or something.
| | 07:08 | And another thing that we need to do
again is open up the Physics section
| | 07:14 | and let's increase the Gravity, let's take
the Gravity all the way to up to like 500.
| | 07:19 | So that way these things explode out
and they fall down quickly, and that's
| | 07:25 | going to create the
result that we are looking for.
| | 07:27 | So let's preview this now, adjust the
sparks, boom, they shoot out, there we go.
| | 07:32 | I think we need the little bit shorter
Life span even because I don't want these
| | 07:36 | particles to still be on screen.
| | 07:39 | We talked about that earlier when we
looked at Life span, so maybe we can go
| | 07:43 | into particle and take this
back down either one or so.
| | 07:46 | So that way the other particles are
died out and we can also kind of fade out
| | 07:50 | the opacity sooner as well.
| | 07:52 | So this kind of blow up and
then die out really quick.
| | 07:56 | Yeah I like that, I like that.
| | 08:00 | I feel it, my gut says, yeah, those are
some good welding sparks, Chad, nailed it.
| | 08:06 | Boom, boom, boom!
| | 08:11 | Okay, so now we could do is unsolo
this so we could see all of our layered in
| | 08:16 | majesty and then we can preview
this and see what it looks like.
| | 08:19 | (video playing)
| | 08:26 | All right, looking fantastic.
| | 08:29 | So we created some great sparks, very
easily with this Particle Motion Blur
| | 08:34 | stuff, so really easy to create these
welding sparks, great little project.
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|
|
12. Project Four: Light StreaksCreating and animating the emitter| 00:00 | In this chapter we're going to look
at one of the most common Particular
| | 00:04 | projects, how to create these cool
little light streaks, popularized in an iPod
| | 00:09 | commercial a long time ago.
| | 00:11 | Now the reason why we are spending a
chapter looking at this effect when it's
| | 00:16 | such a ubiquitous effect, you find
tutorials on how to do this all over the
| | 00:20 | Internet, is that it's a great
education in how to use Particular differently.
| | 00:24 | We're also going to look at a few
extra bells and whistles that aren't
| | 00:27 | super-common and again learn some new
tricks about Particular along the way.
| | 00:32 | One cool trick is that you can take
what we learn in this chapter and apply
| | 00:36 | it in different ways.
| | 00:37 | So this is kind of the common way to
do things, like these little snakes of
| | 00:41 | light moving around here.
| | 00:43 | But one of the things I also did here
if you look in the Lights Streaks FINAL
| | 00:47 | Corkscrew project is that we have this
cool little corkscrew, and what I did
| | 00:53 | here is I created a null, I'll just
go ahead and press U to open up all its
| | 00:58 | keyframes and expressions here.
| | 01:00 | But I applied a time expression to the
Y rotation, so it spins around the whole
| | 01:06 | time, and then I animated its position
to go from the bottom of the screen to
| | 01:10 | the top of the screen and then I also
animated its anchor points so it gets
| | 01:14 | wired and then I attached the Emitter
which is actually a light which we're
| | 01:19 | going to make in this movie to that,
and so it kind of spins around and gets
| | 01:23 | wider out as such there and it
creates this kind of corkscrew effect.
| | 01:29 | So it has a lot more cool
implications than just these light streaks.
| | 01:35 | So there is a lot going on here.
| | 01:37 | So let's go over to the Light Streaks
START composition, which is a fresh empty
| | 01:40 | composition, and again we're going to
just going to start from scratch here.
| | 01:44 | So right-click here in the Timeline Panel,
choose New>Light and I will make a new light.
| | 01:49 | It's important that we call this
Emitter and make sure it's a point light, and
| | 01:54 | for color I'm going to
choose a dark color eventually.
| | 02:00 | But for right now just so I could see this, so
I'm going to brighten this up and then click OK.
| | 02:06 | The Intensity can stay 40 because we're
going to use this as a light emitter and
| | 02:10 | basically as we increase the Intensity
we're actually going to be increasing the
| | 02:13 | particles per second.
| | 02:14 | So 40 is an intensity, it works
pretty good for right now, you could leave
| | 02:18 | Falloff to None and Cast Shadows off and
click OK, and we can go ahead and click
| | 02:25 | OK on that if that pops up for you as well.
| | 02:27 | Now what we need to do is animate this
Emitter to move around like this, all
| | 02:32 | wild and crazy like, and the way that we
do that is by creating an expression on
| | 02:36 | its position property, so I could
press the letter P to reveal its position
| | 02:40 | property, and then on a PC you want to
Alt+Click the stopwatch, on a Mac you
| | 02:45 | Option+Click the stopwatch.
| | 02:46 | And we'll just make a
little wiggle expression here.
| | 02:49 | Wiggle and then open parenthesis, one
comma and let's go crazy here 600 and go
| | 02:56 | ahead and click outside of this to
accept it after you close the parenthesis.
| | 03:01 | Now what that's going to do is it's
going to wiggle all three values, X, Y, and
| | 03:05 | Z so that this thing goes all over the place.
| | 03:09 | It's going to go towards you and away
from you up, down, left to right, and it
| | 03:12 | creates the animation that we need
to create this cool particle system.
| | 03:18 | So in the next movie we will actually
create the particles and we'll show you
| | 03:23 | how to make these solid streaks, which again
is a great education in how to use Particular.
| | 03:29 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
select this composition, go to File, and
| | 03:34 | then choose Increment and Save, you
don't have to do this, but what that's going
| | 03:39 | to do, it's going to create Light
Streaks 02 which is where we'll start in the
| | 03:43 | next movie with this animated light.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the light streak| 00:00 | So we are going to continue where we
left off in the last movie with Light
| | 00:04 | Streaks 02.aep in the Light Streaks
START composition with this Point Emitter
| | 00:09 | that we have animated with a wiggle
expression so it wiggles around in 3D space.
| | 00:13 | Let's go ahead and right-click in a
blank area in the Timeline Panel here,
| | 00:16 | create a New>Solid, the size of the
composition and we'll go ahead and call it
| | 00:23 | Particular and click OK and apply a
Trackcode Particular to this layer.
| | 00:30 | Now before we really set this up, I
want to show you something and this will
| | 00:34 | make more sense later but before we set up
Particular, I need to show you what I am doing here.
| | 00:38 | So I am going to go to the Particle
section in Particular and under Particle
| | 00:41 | Type I'm going to change my
Particle Type to Streaklet.
| | 00:46 | And I am going to increase the Size,
super, mega, huge, big style and I am
| | 00:54 | going to open up Emitter and just
kind of get the velocity so I could see
| | 00:58 | what's going on here.
| | 00:59 | I am going to zero in on this
little streak there, right here.
| | 01:02 | I am going to select the region of
interest, click-and-drag and this ladies and
| | 01:08 | gentlemen is a Streaklet, and this is a
particle that we haven't really used too
| | 01:14 | much, we used it in intro project a
little bit, but I couldn't really tell
| | 01:18 | what's going on here.
| | 01:19 | But the Streaklet was created
specifically for this trick that we are going to
| | 01:23 | be looking at in this movie.
| | 01:25 | And we are going to take this
Streaklet and basically extrude it.
| | 01:29 | We are going to use some, so I am
going to be technically extruding, we are
| | 01:31 | going to use some tricks to get there,
but I think that's where we are going to
| | 01:33 | be doing it, extruding this shape and
that's what's going to allow us to create
| | 01:37 | those cool light streaks.
| | 01:40 | So just remember that this is what
a Streaklet looks like, kind of a
| | 01:43 | collection of small circles.
| | 01:46 | This is not several streaklets, this is
what one streaklet looks like, and again
| | 01:51 | that's very important.
| | 01:52 | Now I am going to turn-off the region of
interest and I am going to go ahead and
| | 01:56 | reset Particular and I'll zoom back out here.
| | 01:59 | And let's go ahead and change the
Emitter Type to Lights and so we get that
| | 02:03 | hooked up, and now instantly
our light becomes a 3D emitter.
| | 02:08 | Look at that, that's awesome.
| | 02:09 | Now just so we could see this a
little bit more clear, let's go ahead and
| | 02:13 | take-away the randomness from this
emitter, because everything is kind of
| | 02:17 | shooting out in all direction.
| | 02:18 | So I'll take the Velocity down to 0,
the velocity randomness down to zero and
| | 02:23 | the Velocity from Motion down to 0.
| | 02:26 | And that's a little bit more clear what's
going on there, it still looks a little wonky.
| | 02:30 | So let's go ahead and take the Emitter
Size X, Y, and Z, each one of those down to 0.
| | 02:38 | And now it's really interesting, this
light is kind of drawing a line here.
| | 02:43 | Let's make this line a little bit
thicker by increasing the Particles/sec.
| | 02:49 | Now as we do this we'll see that from
this point to this point, which is from
| | 02:56 | one frame to the next frame,
Particular doesn't interpolate very well and it
| | 03:00 | creates a flat line by default.
| | 03:02 | So we'll look at how to
fix that in the next movie.
| | 03:05 | So just kind of put that in the back of
your mind for right now and let's move on here.
| | 03:10 | Now I have a feeling we're going to come back
and add some more particles per second to
| | 03:14 | make this more dense.
| | 03:15 | But for right now let's just go ahead
close up the Emitter section and in the
| | 03:18 | Particle section, let's now change the
Particle Type from Sphere to Streaklet.
| | 03:24 | Because you see when we have the sphere
it's kind of making a tube, because it's
| | 03:28 | basically a bunch of spheres all
connected in a row when you turn up the
| | 03:33 | particles per second and take
down the velocity and all that stuff.
| | 03:37 | So as we take this to a streaklet and
increase the size quite a bit and we need
| | 03:45 | to go back and go back to the Emitter
and crank this up some more, so this is a
| | 03:49 | little bit more dense and
we have less holes here.
| | 03:52 | It's going to slow us down a little bit
and so I am going to leave it that there
| | 03:55 | for now, but just be aware that that's
how you get rid of these little dots and
| | 03:58 | spacing issues by increasing
the particles per second.
| | 04:01 | Now let's take down the Life to
about 1.5, so this is a shorter little
| | 04:07 | trail here, but already we are
starting to see the beginnings of these
| | 04:10 | really cool light streaks here.
| | 04:12 | Let's go ahead and play
with the coloring a little.
| | 04:16 | I want to just set the
color from the Light Emitter.
| | 04:22 | There we go, there is that green
color from the Light Emitter, let's also
| | 04:26 | change the Transfer Mode from Normal to
Add, now we get this cool overlap here
| | 04:32 | like these color burns, and because
there are so many particles close together
| | 04:36 | here, they are all kind of blending
together in the Add Mode, which creates a
| | 04:41 | really bright look here.
| | 04:44 | So what we can do now is go back to
our Light Emitter, double-click it and
| | 04:48 | let's change the color.
| | 04:49 | We can actually make this really,
really dark, and if you want to go to the
| | 04:53 | proverbial flash exposure color that's
really warm look, you can just take this
| | 04:59 | down to a red orange color and we
could take this down and you could see that
| | 05:04 | even though it looks almost black, a
really, really dark brown that because
| | 05:08 | these particles are in Add Mode and
there are so many of them, we get these
| | 05:12 | really bright vibrant streaks.
| | 05:13 | I am going to go ahead and click
OK there and go back to Particular.
| | 05:18 | Now another thing you could do here,
I am just going to zoom in so we could
| | 05:19 | see what's going on.
We can play with the Streaklet feather.
| | 05:23 | If we take this up to a 100 we'll
notice we get a much softer look, we take
| | 05:27 | this all the way down to 0 and to get
really hard edges these really beautiful streaks.
| | 05:33 | So we can play with this a little bit
more and again we are seeing in kind of
| | 05:36 | like ribbing here along this edge so
we could go back to the particles per
| | 05:41 | second, take this up to maybe
2000 or somewhere thereabouts.
| | 05:45 | And I'm actually going to take this
back up to the default 50 but just be aware
| | 05:50 | that the feather here, again because
these particles are so close together,
| | 05:53 | really makes a difference.
| | 05:55 | Also you could adjust the size to taste,
I actually used a pretty big size in
| | 05:59 | the example files, but we could take
this to anywhere we want 60, 20, somewhere
| | 06:06 | in between looks pretty good.
| | 06:07 | Now this looks really beautiful if
we play this, it's a little bit slow
| | 06:11 | because it's 2000 particles per second, but I
think I want to play with the beginning and end.
| | 06:17 | I really don't like
seeing these jagged edges here.
| | 06:21 | So if we go into Opacity over Life and
Size over Life, we can play around with these.
| | 06:27 | However, because there are so many
particles so close together, any little
| | 06:32 | change that we make here is really
going to be obvious, and typically when
| | 06:37 | we make maybe unsmooth lines in the curve
drawing interfaces when we draw that there.
| | 06:44 | Usually it doesn't make that big of a
deal, or that big of a difference but
| | 06:48 | here because everything is so close together we
really can see it when we have unsmooth edges.
| | 06:54 | You could see just kind of junk right
there, it's really not that smooth again
| | 06:59 | because of the way I drew this interface.
| | 07:00 | So what I am going to do is actually
use a preset, I am going to use the little
| | 07:05 | hill that goes up and down that does
create a little bit of a spike that you can
| | 07:10 | see as it moves around which I don't like.
| | 07:12 | So I am going to click this flat preset and
then click the Smooth button a bunch of times.
| | 07:17 | And what that's going to do is going to
just smooth out those sharp spikes and
| | 07:21 | then we could copy this and paste it to
the Opacity over Life, and now we have
| | 07:27 | these really beautiful smooth trails
that have small beginnings and small
| | 07:34 | endings, and just a really
beautiful elegant solution. Oh I love that.
| | 07:42 | Love it.
| | 07:42 | So if you like you can go up to File>
Increment and Save, and in the next movie
| | 07:47 | we'll talk about how to get
rid of these little kinked edges.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Smoothing with subframes| 00:00 | So we're continuing on where we left
off in the last movie with this Light
| | 00:04 | Streaks 03.aep project, and we have our
light streaks, they move around, it's a
| | 00:09 | beautiful, beautiful thing, except that
there are these weird little flat lines
| | 00:14 | here that looks like they are almost
like low resolution light strings or
| | 00:18 | something, it's really ugly.
| | 00:19 | Well this is happening because there
are some many particles crammed into this
| | 00:24 | that we can see on a frame-by-frame
basis that this is creating some kind of
| | 00:31 | weird transitions as we go
from one frame to the next frame.
| | 00:35 | So what we need to do is have
Particular smooth the results that happen between
| | 00:42 | these frames, and this is really easy
to do, open up the Emitter section and in
| | 00:46 | the Position Subframe we want to change
this from Linear, we are just going to
| | 00:51 | calculate frame-by-frame which is
great for most particle effects.
| | 00:55 | But for cases like this where we have
lines we might need to take this up to ten
| | 00:59 | times linear, and that
smooths things out quite a bit.
| | 01:03 | In extreme cases we can take this
to ten times smooth and we could also
| | 01:09 | even take this to Exact.
| | 01:11 | But this does slow things down a lot.
| | 01:14 | But from 90% of the cases when you
need something like ten times linear, will
| | 01:20 | get you there and now we have super
-smooth, beautiful light streaks.
| | 01:25 | In the next movie we are going to look
at how to enhance the look here with the
| | 01:30 | auxiliary system as we
add aux particles to this.
| | 01:34 | So let's just go ahead and save that up
one more time, File>Increment and Save,
| | 01:40 | and again we'll start here in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Enhancing with aux particles| 00:00 | So we are continuing on where we left
off with Light Streaks 04.aep with a
| | 00:05 | little light streaks project here.
| | 00:08 | In this movie we are going to add some
finishing touches, we'll start by adding
| | 00:11 | some Aux Particles and I'll show you
some extra tricks with Light Emitters here.
| | 00:16 | So let's get a frame on screen, now
that's actually pretty beautiful right
| | 00:20 | there, actually where we
can see our light streak.
| | 00:23 | I'm going to open up the Aux System,
and turn it on by changing the Emit value
| | 00:28 | to Continuously and we have these
particles that are kind of following along the
| | 00:34 | other light streak particles in the same way.
| | 00:37 | We are going to mix things up, so
that they don't look the same way.
| | 00:41 | I am going to change Emit Probability
to 20%, so it's kind of like look at
| | 00:45 | the draw, whether or not the particles
will emit, and let's change Particles
| | 00:50 | Per Second up to 20.
| | 00:52 | And I definitely don't want these
particles looking like Streaklets.
| | 00:58 | So I am going to change the type to Glow Sphere.
| | 01:01 | That might be kind of hardcore, but I
want to dial that back just to a regular
| | 01:05 | old sphere later on, but it will work
for just the time being. For Velocity;
| | 01:09 | I am going to take this up to 50, so
these particles kind of fly up a little
| | 01:13 | bit, and let's also take
the Size down to like 2.
| | 01:16 | We want them to be kind of
just like tiny sparkles here.
| | 01:19 | Now for Color Over Life, we want to
play with this here, I really don't want
| | 01:24 | these particles looking like a
rainbow, so I am going to maybe click the
| | 01:29 | white to black gradient, and we can
get rid of the black gradient, just drag
| | 01:33 | that color stop off a little bit and
then we can click here, add a new color
| | 01:37 | stop that's white and let's change both of
these to kind of more of like a orangy color.
| | 01:45 | Maybe this one too a little bit more
like yellow, really pale color though, and
| | 01:52 | that's looks pretty good.
| | 01:53 | And I don't want these particles to
emit the whole time, so I am going to
| | 01:57 | go into the Control for Main Particles and
change the Stop Emit percent of Life Value to 40.
| | 02:03 | So basically if the Start Emit value is
at 0, it means that the particles or the
| | 02:09 | lottery, the Hunger Games for the Aux
Particle System, for all the 20% of the
| | 02:15 | particles that get Aux particles.
| | 02:17 | And we'll start at the beginning of
their life and then we will end at the 40%
| | 02:22 | mark, 40% through their lives.
| | 02:23 | So that way we have kind of the tail of them
not getting particles, which is pretty cool!
| | 02:30 | Let's change the Transfer Mode from
Normal to Add and that looks good, and now
| | 02:34 | let's add some Randomness here.
| | 02:37 | I really don't like the way that
these all look the same, that's not what
| | 02:40 | we wanted all here.
| | 02:41 | So I am going to open up Randomness
Change Life randomness to 100 and I am going
| | 02:46 | to change Size Randomness to 50
and Opacity Randomness to 100.
| | 02:50 | And that looks a little extreme, but
let's see what it looks like in motion.
| | 02:56 | Oh yeah, I like that.
| | 02:58 | So as it's going here we got these
particles move in and we might not want them
| | 03:04 | to be born right at the beginning of the
Particle section, we might want this to be clear here.
| | 03:09 | So we'll go back to Start a Bit of
Life and change this to I don't know, 5 or
| | 03:14 | something, there we go.
| | 03:16 | And let's go ahead also, and if we
wanted to we could maybe give it like a
| | 03:22 | little 10% color for Main, so it
picks up a little bit of color from the
| | 03:26 | original layer and we could also take
down the gravity, so that these particles
| | 03:30 | are looking like they are kind of like
froth or something like that, just kind
| | 03:34 | of sparkling, just disappearing up
like that, like they are bubbling up.
| | 03:39 | And also I might want to take down the
Particles Per Second after all, maybe 15
| | 03:43 | Particles Per Second, maybe
the Emit Probability down to 15.
| | 03:48 | Lot of time I just go back and forth on
these, I just kind of play with it until
| | 03:52 | I get something I like, I'll go back
and further make the particles bigger and
| | 03:56 | smaller, and right now I am
filling smaller particles.
| | 03:58 | So and that's looking really good, it
just adds an extra little pizzaz and flare
| | 04:03 | to this light streak.
| | 04:06 | So we preview that, there
we go, that looks awesome.
| | 04:10 | Now here's another cool trick and we
haven't really talked about this yet, but
| | 04:15 | if I open up the Emitter section,
you'll see that the Emitter Type is actually
| | 04:19 | lights with the NS in parenthesis and
what that means is that it's going to
| | 04:24 | apply this Particular to every
light called Emitter in our comp.
| | 04:30 | So if I want more light streaks, like
in the example that we looked at before,
| | 04:36 | you'll notice here that we only have one
instance of Particular and just a bunch of light.
| | 04:41 | So I am going to go back to our
comp -- we have been working here on
| | 04:45 | Light Streak Start.
| | 04:46 | I am going to select the Emitter Layer
and I am going to press Command+D on the
| | 04:51 | Mac or Crtl+D on the PC to duplicate this layer.
| | 04:55 | And I'll just change its name to Emitter
just to make sure that's working right.
| | 04:59 | And if we want to, we can open this
layer up, and actually I'll just the press
| | 05:03 | the letter U on the keyboard and we
can alter its expression, maybe you take
| | 05:07 | this from 600 to maybe 550, and
it's just like a little bit different.
| | 05:14 | And then what we can do is double click
on the Emitter layer and click in here
| | 05:19 | on the Color Swatch and then change this
to like a blue or a something and click OK.
| | 05:25 | And now as we move around here, we
have these two light streaks, almost like
| | 05:32 | they are fighting or chasing each
others tail or something like that.
| | 05:36 | Now we might want to go back and
make the Aux Particles a little bit more
| | 05:40 | neutral, if we are going to use
something like this, so that way maybe they are
| | 05:44 | white or something like that, so they
look at home and every color of light
| | 05:48 | streak that we have, but in this case
we could just keep duplicating these
| | 05:52 | lights and because their movement is
being created with a wiggle expression,
| | 05:55 | their randomness is going to change as
we duplicate the layer and then we have
| | 05:58 | these cool random light streaks.
| | 06:01 | So let's go ahead and do a
ramp preview and see what we have.
| | 06:07 | And there we have it folks, super
awesome light streaks with some extra
| | 06:13 | cool, extras as well.
| | 06:16 | We got some Aux Particles, we got two
different light streaks going on with
| | 06:21 | different colors, all generated
from the same layer or Particular and
| | 06:26 | that's just awesome!
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
13. Project Five: Flock of BirdsExamining the bird particle movie| 00:00 | In this chapter we are going to look
another common Particular staple and that
| | 00:04 | is how to create a flying flock of birds.
| | 00:08 | So we have here this shaky camera
shot and we've tracked it, I have tracked
| | 00:14 | it already for you and got some nodes and
controllers with the position data and what not.
| | 00:19 | Now we are going to put this bird particle
in Particular and create this flock of birds.
| | 00:26 | But the cool thing about this is really
that we are using a movie particle, and
| | 00:32 | we are going to use the same technique
to not only create a flock of birds, but
| | 00:36 | to create a group of army men or
whatever we want to do for a group of people,
| | 00:41 | we can use this same technique.
| | 00:42 | So what we can do here, if we double
click this precomp bird flying layer, we
| | 00:47 | could see the very simple composition.
| | 00:50 | This is just something I made with shape
layers and masks, again, very rudimentary.
| | 00:55 | So it's good that they are
kind of far in the distance.
| | 00:58 | But I kind of wanted to create some
randomness so there is flapping wings and
| | 01:04 | the body goes up and down a little
bit and then there is some kind of --
| | 01:09 | sometimes where they kind of hold the
wings and they start flapping again.
| | 01:13 | And I want to make sure that the last
frame and the first frame were pretty
| | 01:17 | much the same, there's a little bit of
a jump in the body, but it's not very
| | 01:21 | detectable, especially when we have it up in
the sky kind of further away from the camera.
| | 01:25 | So now that we know what that particle
looks like, when we go back to our birds,
| | 01:30 | we can kind of see this in action.
| | 01:32 | And even though my bird particle looks
frankly kind of terrible, if I do say so
| | 01:38 | myself, it doesn't have to look great,
because it's so far away, which is I why
| | 01:42 | didn't put more effort into it than I
did, it still looks great for how far
| | 01:47 | it's in the distance.
| | 01:48 | So with that being said, knowing what
this particle looks like, in the next
| | 01:52 | movie we are going to make our own
Particular group of flying birds.
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| Creating the bird particles| 00:00 | All right, folks. Let's make some birds!
Go ahead and apply Particular to the
| | 00:05 | layer called Particular here. There we go.
| | 00:11 | Now initially you'll notice when we
bring in Particular, instantly, it looks like
| | 00:15 | its far away and lower, and that's
because we have a 3D camera in the scene to go
| | 00:22 | along with the camera shake of our
background, which we can't see because our
| | 00:26 | Particular layer here is soloed right now.
| | 00:28 | So we already have a 3D camera, so
once we bring in Particular to the scene,
| | 00:32 | it's already tracked and bouncy,
because it's being seen by a 3D camera, since
| | 00:39 | Particular is a 3D effect.
| | 00:42 | So we'll fix this in just a minute here.
| | 00:43 | Let's go up to the Emitter section in
Particular, change the Emitter Type to Box.
| | 00:48 | Point won't work, because we want to
have a flock of birds. And for Position
| | 00:51 | XY, I have some numbers for you to type in here,
so we can kind of get them in the right spots.
| | 00:56 | We want -663, and then for Y we want
1446, and then Position Z we want 7594.
| | 01:06 | Now, it's a little hard to see all the
way back there, so let's go up, jump over
| | 01:13 | the Particle section real quick and take
the Size up really high, so you can see
| | 01:18 | what we are doing. Well, not
that high, maybe about 80 or so.
| | 01:22 | And let's go ahead and take the
Velocity and Velocity Random and Velocity for
| | 01:29 | Motion all down to 0, because we don't
want our birds looking like they have
| | 01:34 | shot out of anywhere.
| | 01:35 | And let's go ahead and increase the
Emitter Size X really big. Let's take
| | 01:40 | this to 1400. And let's take the Emitter Size Y
to about 1000 and Emitter Size Z to about 2500.
| | 01:54 | So we have a nice little box for our birds.
| | 01:59 | Now, the trick here with these birds--
and actually any time you want static
| | 02:02 | particles--is that Particular is meant to
birth particles and then have them die out.
| | 02:09 | Now this might be a great place to use
Trapcode form, which is meant to have
| | 02:12 | particles just exist, and
then not be born or die.
| | 02:16 | But with Particular, we have to do
some fiddling to get this to work right.
| | 02:19 | So what I am going to do I am going to
hit the Home key or drag my current time
| | 02:25 | indicator with the first frame.
| | 02:27 | I am going to click the
Stopwatch for particles per second.
| | 02:29 | I want these to be 0 for right now.
I am going to hit page down or advance one frame.
| | 02:33 | Take this up to 1200 particles a
second and then go page down again and take
| | 02:39 | this to 0 frames per second.
| | 02:41 | The reason why I did that is I want
Particular just to shoot out that many
| | 02:46 | birds. It's not really 1200 particles;
it's really 1200 particles divided by 24,
| | 02:54 | since there is 24 frames in a second.
| | 02:56 | So we kind of want our particles again just
to exist. We want these birds just to be there.
| | 03:01 | So what I need to do in Particular is
press U to reveal all these keyframes.
| | 03:06 | Click and drag a marquee to select all
those keyframes, or alternatively you can
| | 03:10 | click the name of the Property,
Particles Per Second, and then drag those over so
| | 03:15 | that the 0 keyframe is at the first frame.
| | 03:18 | So these particles are just kind of--
they just kind of exist, and they are doing
| | 03:23 | some of kind of weirdness here.
| | 03:25 | So what I am going to do is go over
to the Emission Extras and increase the
| | 03:29 | Pre-Run until we have those on screen
here. And now we have those birds and
| | 03:34 | it's exactly what we want.
Pretend these little spears are birds. We don't
| | 03:37 | want them to be born or dying or moving
around as if they are being born; they
| | 03:43 | need to just exist.
| | 03:44 | And speaking of life, I want to make
sure that their lifespan is about 10
| | 03:48 | seconds--oops, not 100, 10 seconds--so
that's at least as long as the duration of
| | 03:54 | the composition, so that
none of these birds are dying.
| | 03:58 | So I want close up the Emitter section, and let's
play in the Particle section a little bit.
| | 04:02 | Now let's get these looking like
birds, by changing the Particle Type to not
| | 04:06 | just Sprite, because we want these to
stay flat with the camera, so we are
| | 04:10 | going to choose a Sprite.
| | 04:11 | We actually want to choose Sprite film;
I'll show you why in just a moment.
| | 04:14 | Open up the Texture section, change the
Layer to PRECOMP bird flying. And we are
| | 04:21 | going to change the Time Sampling from
Current Time, which would actually make
| | 04:25 | all the birds flap at the exact same
time--it doesn't look very realistic.
| | 04:29 | Change the Time Sampling to Random Loop.
| | 04:33 | So that way they are going to pick a
random frame. Each bird is going to pick a
| | 04:36 | random frame from the comp and then
they are all going to be flapping at
| | 04:41 | different times which is what we want. Perfect!
| | 04:43 | Now the reason why I chose Sprite fill
is because I want to be able to fill in
| | 04:50 | the color of these birds.
| | 04:52 | I don't want necessarily use the color
in the original comp, and here is why.
| | 04:56 | If I unsolo this layer, we can see our
birds. They are either bright white, if
| | 05:03 | we use this color, or they are black,
if we use the original color, and that
| | 05:07 | just doesn't blend well. Even things
that are very dark here in the background
| | 05:11 | are not quite black, because of the thickness
and the density of the air; it gets brighter.
| | 05:16 | So what I want to do is change the Set
Color to Over Life, and I want to open
| | 05:22 | up color Over Life.
| | 05:23 | I definitely don't want them to be
rainbow Over Life. And I am going to click
| | 05:29 | the white-to-black gradient here, so that
they will be born white and then die black.
| | 05:35 | But I actually don't want them to be totally white
or totally black; I am going to bring these in a little a bit.
| | 05:40 | I will double click the white swatch
and let's go over to maybe like a bluish
| | 05:46 | green, and we'll just get kind of a like
a faded grayish sea foam. That might be
| | 05:53 | a little bit too saturated.
| | 05:54 | Start there and then we'll double
click this, and we'll go back to that same
| | 05:59 | kind of sea foam green, but we'll get
really dark--not quite black, but really
| | 06:04 | dark there, and click OK.
| | 06:06 | So now over the life of the birds, we
are going to start this light color and
| | 06:10 | then go to this black color, because the
reason why is that we are going to have
| | 06:12 | these birds start over here--I'll
look at the position in the next movie.
| | 06:18 | But these birds are going to start
over here and they are going to fly over
| | 06:21 | here, by the time that the car is
closer to this tree, so they are going to be
| | 06:25 | closer to the screen and
therefore they are going to be darker.
| | 06:27 | So they are actually going to start in
the sky, kind of a brighter color and
| | 06:31 | they are going to get darker as they go.
| | 06:33 | And again, once we hook this up to the
actual position of the birds in the next
| | 06:37 | movie, we might need to go and then
fiddle with the colors a little bit, but
| | 06:46 | that's the ballpark of where
we want these colors to go.
| | 06:46 | Even though it sounds or it looks kind
of ridiculous right now, I think it's
| | 06:47 | going to look good once we
get these birds into place.
| | 06:50 | Now they are all the exact same size.
We do have some Z depth to our Box
| | 06:55 | Emitter, but let's go ahead and take up
the Size Random to about 10, and let's
| | 07:00 | also close up the Particle section, open
up the Physics section, and then Air and
| | 07:06 | then Turbulence field.
| | 07:07 | We want these birds to look like they
are kind of getting blown around a bit by
| | 07:11 | the wind as they are flying.
| | 07:13 | So we are going to take
Effect Position to about 30.
| | 07:16 | That gives them just a little
bit of wobble and randomness.
| | 07:20 | Now a couple more things needed to go down here.
| | 07:22 | I am going to close up Physics, open up
Rendering, and then open up Motion Blur,
| | 07:26 | and then I am going to change Motion
Blur to on, because as this camera jerks
| | 07:31 | around, these birds should look blurry as well.
| | 07:36 | And turning on Motion Blur
will ensure that that happens.
| | 07:39 | There we go. There is a frame with
a little bit of camera shake, and the
| | 07:41 | birds are getting blurred accordingly.
| | 07:43 | Now even when there is no camera shake,
such as right here, the bird should never
| | 07:50 | be this clear, because
they are going to be far away.
| | 07:53 | And if you look at objects that are on
that same depth plane, they are a little soft.
| | 07:57 | So what we want to do is add some
fast blur to this particular layer. Maybe
| | 08:02 | let's just add just half a pixel of
blurriness, just so that they are just a
| | 08:07 | little blurry and that's
really all that we need.
| | 08:08 | If you want to go a little crazy, you
can go all the way up to 1, but I think
| | 08:14 | that 0.5 does the trick just nicely here.
| | 08:17 | Now again, the elephant in the room here
is that these birds are in the wrong spot.
| | 08:19 | We want them to be over here in the
beginning and then kind of fly over to the
| | 08:23 | left of the screen over time.
| | 08:26 | So then the question, is why
don't we just animate the Emitter?
| | 08:29 | Well, the thing is we already animated
the particles to just kind of spread out
| | 08:34 | before the comp even started, so
the Emitter is basically dormant.
| | 08:38 | We could move the Emitter, but that's
just going to move all the birds over.
| | 08:42 | If we want to animate the birds moving,
we are going to have to look for a
| | 08:45 | different solution, and we will look
at how to do that in the next movie.
| | 08:49 | So just to make sure that we are ready
for that. Let's go up final step, go to
| | 08:55 | File Increment and Save, and then
we'll start with Flock of birds 03 next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using World Transform| 00:00 | In the last movie we made these cool
flying bird particles that you can see
| | 00:05 | here, but they are not in the right spot.
| | 00:07 | So in this movie we're going to
show you another awesome feature of
| | 00:10 | Particular that will help us to get
these birds in the right spot seeing as
| | 00:14 | how we cannot use the Emitter.
| | 00:17 | Now before we do that, I just want to
point out that we colored the birds in the
| | 00:22 | last movie and maybe some of you thought
I was a little crazy, because I started
| | 00:26 | these birds, almost they look like they
are white here in the beginning and then
| | 00:31 | we have them kind of fade to black,
but the whole time, they appear to be too
| | 00:37 | bright, but it's amazing what happens
when you look at color relatively and how
| | 00:43 | color relationships can
completely change the whole look of things.
| | 00:48 | So remember how bright these birds
looked almost white, and we'll see what they
| | 00:52 | look like at the end of this tutorial.
| | 00:54 | Now I have Particular here and what I
want to do is open up World Transform.
| | 01:00 | World Transform sometimes could be a
life saver, because it's just basically
| | 01:04 | additional transforms for
the entire Particular worlds.
| | 01:08 | If we want to rotate everything
along the Y axis or if we want to move
| | 01:14 | everything on the Z axis, then
we can do that and these are all
| | 01:18 | animatable properties.
| | 01:20 | So even if our Emitter is out of
commission, as it is in this case, and moving
| | 01:24 | it will not do any good, we still can
adjust things using our World Transform.
| | 01:31 | Now I have this Particular controller
here, if I press the letter U with it
| | 01:35 | selected, we can see its position
and this is animated for where our
| | 01:41 | particles should go.
| | 01:42 | So what I could do is select a
Particular layer and I want to Alt+Click on the
| | 01:47 | PC or Option+Click on the Mac,
this Stopwatch for X offset.
| | 01:52 | And that way we could see it
down here in our Timeline panel.
| | 01:55 | With this selected, grab the pick-whip
and drag it to the first value, that's
| | 02:00 | the X value of the position property of
the Particular controller layer, so not
| | 02:05 | the layer itself and not position
itself, but to the X value of position, and
| | 02:11 | then click in a blank area,
somewhere like right here, to accept that.
| | 02:15 | And do the same thing with
the Stopwatch for the Y offset.
| | 02:18 | So I Alt+Click or Option+Click, the Y
offset value and then use the pick-whip to
| | 02:22 | drag down to now the second value,
that's the Y value for the position property
| | 02:28 | of the Particular controller layer.
| | 02:30 | And now, the Particular controller
values are putting this World Transform where
| | 02:39 | it needs to be, which puts
our particles in the right spot.
| | 02:43 | And now our particles that did seem
white seem like the perfect color,
| | 02:49 | isn't that amazing?
| | 02:50 | And so now they fly at the right spot
and actually it seems as if they are too
| | 02:59 | dark, as we start getting into
the second half of the composition.
| | 03:02 | So if we wanted to go back to our
colors in Particular, a color Over Life
| | 03:06 | gradient and change those, we could.
| | 03:09 | But there are our flock of birds we took,
not perfect bird particle movie, and
| | 03:18 | used Particular to make a
fairly convincing flock of birds.
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|
|
14. Project Six: Logo DissolveUsing a layer emitter| 00:00 | In our final project we are going to
look at how to use a Layer Emitter.
| | 00:05 | Now we are going to use a Layer
Emitter to make this logo disappear.
| | 00:10 | So I have this logo, and it appears
on and then boom, it disappears.
| | 00:14 | So it's just kind of like a logo for
a fictional superhero movie, superhero
| | 00:22 | called The Vanisher, which the more I
think about it, the more I realize this,
| | 00:27 | not a very good power for a superhero.
Just disappears, it's not there.
| | 00:33 | So anyways, we are going to use
Particular to turn this layer into particles
| | 00:38 | and then dissolve it.
| | 00:40 | Now this is kind of a complex thing, so
in this movie we are just going to look
| | 00:45 | at the basics of a Layer Emitter, and
then in the next movie we are going to
| | 00:47 | look at how to do this particular dissolve.
| | 00:52 | So let's go over to the Layer
Emitter Start composition, where I have a
| | 00:55 | Particular layer set up for you, and
then just The Vanisher logo there.
| | 01:00 | So again, just Particular on top of this
Vanisher logo. And we want this Vanisher
| | 01:06 | logo to be the Layer Emitter,
so we want it to emit particles.
| | 01:11 | So what we're going to do is go up to
Particular and if we go to the Emitter
| | 01:15 | Type, in this dropdown you'll notice
that we can choose Layer, but before we do
| | 01:20 | that, what we want to do is make sure
that this Vanisher layer is a 3D layer,
| | 01:27 | because Particular will actually let
you choose it if it's not. So if we choose
| | 01:31 | Layer, and in the Layer Emitter section,
if you choose The Vanisher and it's not
| | 01:36 | a 3D layer yet, it will let you select
it, but then it will give you a warning
| | 01:41 | and say, oh, don't do that.
| | 01:42 | But then what you'll have to do is you
will have to come back and make this a 3D
| | 01:47 | layer and then change the layer back
to None and then back to The Vanisher.
| | 01:51 | So it's kind of an annoyance, so just
set that up right by making this a 3D
| | 01:54 | layer and everything will
be right with the world.
| | 01:58 | So as we do this, you'll notice
that particles are kind of spread out
| | 02:02 | everywhere. It's not really obvious
that it's emanating from this text here,
| | 02:07 | but you can see that the colors of the
particles are now coming from this text,
| | 02:14 | which is really cool.
| | 02:15 | To see this more clearly, what we need
to do is take the Velocity down to 0.
| | 02:20 | Actually, let's just take Velocity
Random down to 0 too, while we are at it.
| | 02:22 | We still can't see things that good,
because we actually need to increase
| | 02:27 | particles per second. Now with Layer
Emitters, this is one of the challenges is
| | 02:30 | that we actually need to increase
the particle count ridiculously high.
| | 02:34 | So I might take this up to like, I
don't know, 10,000 right now. As we'll see,
| | 02:38 | this really isn't even enough there.
| | 02:40 | And I am also going to turn up the
visibility of The Vanisher layer, so we could
| | 02:44 | see what we have. And you can see as now
these particles start being born and we
| | 02:50 | have more particles, you can
actually see the layer, so the particles are
| | 02:55 | forming the layer, which is kind of cool.
| | 02:57 | So again, we have to really
increase the particles per second.
| | 03:01 | But this layer is birthing the
particles, and it's being birthed by default with
| | 03:09 | the colors of this original layer.
| | 03:11 | So with this, we can do a lot of cool tricks.
| | 03:14 | Now, what we did here in my other
example is that the particles kind of like
| | 03:19 | dissipate and go upwards, and we could
open up Physics and then take the Gravity
| | 03:24 | to maybe like -30 or something like that.
| | 03:26 | And these particles do dissolve; it
looks really cool. But again, Gravity is
| | 03:30 | not animatable, so what we want to do
maybe is go into the Air section and
| | 03:34 | animate the Wind value.
| | 03:36 | So we could take that to a negative and
or a positive, if we want to have these
| | 03:40 | particles fall. And this is animatable,
so we can do things that way, or blow it
| | 03:45 | off to the side or
whatever else we want it to do.
| | 03:48 | So this is a great way to have a logo
dissolve. We could have a layer be on
| | 03:53 | the screen for a little bit and then
maybe use a Option+Right Bracket or Alt+Right Bracket on the PC to
| | 04:01 | stop that layer there.
| | 04:02 | Or we could drag the end point so that
way the layer is here and then it's all
| | 04:09 | particles and it can disappear.
| | 04:10 | There are a lot of
different tricks that we could here.
| | 04:13 | But the point is is that this is what
we do with a Layer Emitter: it emits a
| | 04:17 | particle everywhere where there is
somewhere with the layer, and it also emits
| | 04:21 | in the color of the layer.
| | 04:23 | Now you'll notice too, if I turn on
the Transparency Grid, that we have
| | 04:26 | transparency here. This is really
important because if we didn't have
| | 04:29 | transparency here, if this was all solid
black background, then Particular need to
| | 04:32 | generate black particles for this whole
background as well, and now it has slow things down
| | 04:38 | and also create lot of black
particles, which you may or may not want, so
| | 04:42 | just be aware of that.
| | 04:44 | And again, you want to watch your
particle count, so in the next movie we are
| | 04:47 | going to look at a couple of ways to
work around the situation, still get a
| | 04:51 | believable result and have a
little bit faster render times.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Dissolving the logo| 00:00 | In this movie we are now going to look at
using the Layer Emitter in our actual project.
| | 00:06 | But as we saw in the last movie, one of
the problems with the Layer Emitter is
| | 00:11 | that you have to generate so many
particles and it just kind of gets messy.
| | 00:16 | So here is a really cool trick.
| | 00:18 | What I have done, if you go to the
precomp vanisher mask animation pre-comp,
| | 00:23 | double click that to open it.
| | 00:25 | I've basically just taken our logo, and
taken a mask in the Add mode, so that's
| | 00:31 | all we can see what's in the mask.
| | 00:32 | We'll separate Particular mask and
animate it going upwards and what we are
| | 00:37 | going to do is we are going to use this layer,
the pre-composed layer as the Layer Emitter.
| | 00:43 | And so it moves up already, and so
basically like on this frame, these are the
| | 00:48 | only particles that are going to be
born, and so it's a really great way to
| | 00:54 | make a layer disappear.
| | 00:56 | So we are only going to be generating
particles here, so we don't have to have
| | 01:00 | as many generating, in
order to create the same effect.
| | 01:02 | So let's see what this looks like, and
again, we need to make sure that this is 3D.
| | 01:07 | I've already made that 3D for you,
just in case, and we could select the
| | 01:10 | Particular dissolve layer, which has
basically standard settings for Particular,
| | 01:14 | just the default settings.
| | 01:16 | So let's go over to the Emitter
section and change the Emitter Type to Layer.
| | 01:21 | Now let's go down to Layer Emitter
and the Layer setting, choose PRECOMP
| | 01:26 | vanisher mask animation and let's now
increase the particles per second a lot
| | 01:33 | and actually let's take this up to 70,
000, yes, that's the most particles I
| | 01:40 | believe that we have used in this
training series thus far, but now you see
| | 01:45 | what's going on here.
| | 01:46 | So the particles are now going along
exactly with the text there, very cool.
| | 01:54 | Now let's take the Velocity down to
about 50 and just to make sure that
| | 01:59 | particles are being born right in the
first frame, let's open up the Emission
| | 02:03 | Extras and take the Pre Run
to let's say about 20 or so.
| | 02:06 | So we have a few particles
right there when we start.
| | 02:10 | Let's close the Emitter section.
| | 02:12 | So go up to the Particle section,
take the Particle Lifespan a little bit
| | 02:15 | longer, maybe to 4 seconds, so they
last, again, a little bit longer here.
| | 02:19 | And let's also change the
Particle Type from Sphere to Glow Sphere.
| | 02:24 | Let's actually move it a little bit
further in time, so you can see these
| | 02:29 | particles a little bit better.
| | 02:30 | And we don't what that dark particles
generating too much here, so I am going to
| | 02:35 | change the Transfer Mode to Add.
| | 02:37 | Let's also bump the size a little bit
from 5 to 4, let's increase Size Random to
| | 02:42 | 100 and Opacity Random to 100 and we
could even feather the Glow Spheres just a
| | 02:49 | little bit more, take that
Sphere Feather all the way up to 100.
| | 02:53 | Now as we preview this, this looks
really good, I like the particles, but they
| | 02:57 | do kind of -- just kind of gather,
they just kind of stay there, so I want to
| | 03:02 | play with the Physics a little bit to get the
behavior of the particles a little bit better.
| | 03:06 | So I am going to close up the Particle section.
| | 03:09 | Open up the Physics section and
let's take Gravity to -300s, they kind of
| | 03:13 | dissolve upwards and they
are pretty fast spaced here.
| | 03:17 | I already have Motion Blur turned on
for the layer and for the comp, so we are
| | 03:21 | seeing some of that
Motion Blur which I really dig.
| | 03:24 | Now let's also open up the Air section
and then Turbulence field and play around
| | 03:29 | with that Fractal
Displacement that goes through here.
| | 03:32 | Let's actually effect the size, turn
that up to 15, so that fractal field will
| | 03:37 | make some particles bigger and some
smaller and let's actually affect the
| | 03:41 | position as well to 35, so they
actually move based on that pattern as well.
| | 03:47 | Let's make this all happen a little bit
faster, let's take Evolution Speed to 100.
| | 03:52 | Now if we start here and preview this,
we can see that it seems like the
| | 03:58 | particles here are just
kind of being eaten away.
| | 04:02 | Now we are still seeing the layer
beneath, because the visibility of this
| | 04:06 | layer is turned on.
| | 04:08 | Actually I just paused that to
stop it and play that back, ooh, it's
| | 04:13 | vanishing, looks great!
| | 04:14 | So what I want to do is turn off the
visibility, unsolo and turn off the
| | 04:19 | visibility of the PRECOMP vanisher mask
animation, and now we just have this layer.
| | 04:24 | Now there are enough particles, even
though we are going in 70,000 particles per
| | 04:28 | second here, it is still not enough to
really look like the layer, because just
| | 04:34 | not enough particles, it's not dense enough.
| | 04:36 | So what we are going to do is we are
going to fake this to make this render faster.
| | 04:40 | We are going to solo the vanisher text
layer, and the way that we are going to
| | 04:45 | make this disappear is by using a
Transition Effect, and the Transition Effect
| | 04:49 | that we're going to use is called Linear Wipe.
| | 04:52 | So apply Linear Wipe to the vanisher.
psd layer, we'll close up the other
| | 04:59 | effects, Color Correction Effects that
are on it, and let's move to the first
| | 05:04 | marker here, you could push 1 on
your keyboard to jump there, and let's
| | 05:09 | change the Wipe Angle to 0, and
let's click the Transition Completion
| | 05:14 | Stopwatch there for 0.
| | 05:16 | So what this is going to do, as we
increase Transition Completion, it's going to
| | 05:20 | eat away at the bottom of the layer.
| | 05:22 | So with the particles moving up from
this comp here, and with the particles and
| | 05:29 | with the main layer having this Linear
Wipe, you put those together, it's going
| | 05:34 | to look like the layers being
dissolved and it's going to have a lot less
| | 05:37 | particles, which is really cool as well.
| | 05:39 | And actually let's go ahead and Feather
this like 150 pixels and then let's come
| | 05:44 | over to number 2, push 2 on your
keyboard to jump to the second comp marker
| | 05:48 | here, and we'll take that Transition
Completion all the way to 100 and actually
| | 05:52 | let's goes back because I was fiddling
around a lot and let's make sure that is
| | 05:57 | -- no, no, I messed this up.
| | 05:59 | Let's go back to number 1, and take
Transition Completion to 0. There we go.
| | 06:05 | Now as we scrub this, this layer disappears
and it appears to be eaten by the particles.
| | 06:15 | Now one of the things we could do is
play around with easing and the curve
| | 06:19 | editor and really make this perfect,
but just for right now let's go ahead and
| | 06:23 | unsolo these, and we could see what's
going on with our layer, let's go ahead
| | 06:28 | and I'll go back to the first comp
marker, press B, to start the work area, and
| | 06:33 | let's go ahead and preview our
final results. So there we go.
| | 06:40 | I also added a little bit of a Flash, I
used a Glow Adjustment Layer and I added
| | 06:46 | a little bit of Glow and I also added a
Generic Lens Flare from After Effects,
| | 06:50 | which are not the best lens flares,
but I know that you would be able to have
| | 06:54 | them in your files, typically, I'd
used a third party lens flare effect for
| | 06:58 | this, but that worked for right now.
| | 07:00 | Another thing that I might want to do
just because there are so many particles
| | 07:04 | here, I want to go back to the
Particular dissolve and set a keyframe for
| | 07:09 | particles per second, advance one
frame, and we take this down to 0.
| | 07:14 | That might have been a
little bit premature to do that;
| | 07:17 | it might have been too early.
| | 07:18 | I still want particles to generate,
yeah, it looks like it still worked, but
| | 07:25 | that's another thing that we can do.
| | 07:27 | So there we go, there is our final
project, we make a layer dissolve using
| | 07:32 | the Layer Emitter.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | Folks, that is the end of Particular
Essential Training on behalf of lynda.com.
| | 00:04 | I want to thank you so much for watching.
| | 00:06 | This has been an especially fun
training series to produce and create for you.
| | 00:11 | So I hope you got a lot out of it.
| | 00:13 | And another thing you might want to
check out is on the Red Giant software
| | 00:17 | website, that's redgiantsoftware.com,
they have this thing called RGTV, it's Red
| | 00:22 | Giant TV and there are tons of great
free tips and tricks and tutorials on
| | 00:27 | advanced features and also just great
little tricks here and there for Trapcode
| | 00:34 | Particular as well as all
of the Red Giant products.
| | 00:39 | So it's a great resource.
| | 00:41 | And also if you click here, Red Giant
people, that's another website where you
| | 00:45 | can connect to other Red Giant users,
and you can also get a bunch of other
| | 00:51 | presets for Trapcode Particular from
gurus and other people that really know
| | 00:56 | what they are doing, and they
have a lot of those presets for free.
| | 01:00 | They also have some gurus that sell
their presets and you could buy those here.
| | 01:04 | So another great resource for Particular.
| | 01:07 | Again, my name is Chad Perkins,
thank you so much for watching!
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