Working with animated particles

- Particles, in particular, are not limited to basic shapes. You can also have animated particles. Animated particles can either be movie clips or full-on animations like a pre-composition that contains an animation. In this video, we'll focus on working with some of the pre-built animated particles in the designer and look at the time sampling settings for these animated particles. So to start, let's go down to the timeline and select layer one, and to look at our animation let's go ahead and press the space bar to preview things. And you can see, I have a bunch of spheres that has created this kind of deep, soupy sort of look. And, I want to change these spheres into something more graphic and animated. So, I'll press the space bar to stop playback and I'll move my current time indicator towards the end of my animation. And you'll see why we're doing that in just a second. But, once you have layer one selected, let's go to the effect controls panel and open up the designer. Once you're in the designer, let's go to the particle type by clicking on the particle type block here in the lower-middle area of the interface. Then, on the right-hand side, let's go to the particle type pull-down and click on that. If you're looking for animated particles, they're usually under Sprite or Textured Polygon. The difference being, sprites will always auto-orient to a camera. So, let's go ahead and just choose sprite for now. And we can click the Choose Sprite button right here, and that'll load up a bunch of different sprite options that we have, that we can kind of choose. I'm going to cancel that for a quick second, because I can also just browse over the right side here on the blocks button, and I can lock that out. And I want to go to the particle section and under Particle Type here, I want to choose a Sprite and then if we scroll down here under Sprites open up the 3D Geometric Shapes and make sure to choose this orange one, the Icoso 2. Once you have that chosen, you should see them populating the scene. Now they're kind of small so let's go to Size/Rotation and I'll make sure the size is the full size so I'll just click on the Default to make sure here. And I'll close my blocks and go here under the Size and change this to a setting of about 25. Now we can see these elements animated into the scene. Now I'm done with working in the designer so let's go ahead and click Apply for right now and now we can see all these particles popped up in the scene. I want you to pay attention to how things are organized in the timeline. With Layer 1 selected, you'll notice that I have Particle Type Sprite and I could click Choose Sprite and choose a different sprite if I wanted to. But with a sprite chosen, there's an option here called Texture and if I open up that texture option, and just make my effects control panel a little larger here, you'll see my particular sprite drop down and that's actually the Particular Sprite Master layer which is here. So when you choose a sprite, if you're working with one of the presets what it'll usually do is drop that sprite down into your timeline and, in essence, this texture is referencing this layer here so this animated particle happens to be a video file. So if you want this to play back more slowly, you could re-time this individual layer but I also want you to note as I'm scrubbing here, notice the particles don't disappear when the video ends. Well that setting is in a different place. So let's select Layer 1 here so we can see our particular settings. And you'll notice, in the Texture area, underneath Layer where it says Time Sampling, if I click on this drop down, I have a whole host of options. The Start at Birth options will start playing the video at the birth of the individual particle. So play once will play the animation once and then just stop. Loop will actually loop the animation so once it gets to the last frame, it goes back to the first frame and continues on. What Stretch will do is as the animation is playing, let's say my particles are set to live for 10 seconds but my animation is only three seconds, it'll go ahead and stretch the duration of that animation to match the life of the particle. Random chooses a random start frame for all the different particles. So if I chose Random - Still Frame, you wouldn't see any more animation. Let me go ahead and press the space bar here. You won't see any more animation of the particle itself, but notice they all have slightly different frames because it's randomly chosen a different still frame. If you don't like this layout, you could change the random seed here. So here I could change the Random Seed to two and then it should update accordingly. Here let me change the Random Seed to five. Yup, there we go. Now you can see how they all updated. Okay, let me click on this drop down here. Split Clip is kind of interesting. If you have a clip like this, that's three seconds long, and I choose Split Clip three, it asks me how many number of clips I would like to split it into. Well if I chose three as the number of clips, it's going to divide this up into three one second clips and then pull randomly from each of those new three clips to create my animated particles. As you can see there are a whole host of options when it comes to actually working with animated particles. The last thing I want to show you here is how to actually colorize these elements. So if I go to the Sprite area dropdown here where it says Particle Type Sprite, if I click on this, I could choose Sprite Colorize or Sprite Fill. So before I do that, I'm going to and change the size of the particle up to something like 50 so we can really see that these are large. Can you see there are black lines here on these particles? If I change my magnification up to 100 you can definitely see that. So if I go to Sprite and I change it to Colorize what it's going to do is it's going to colorize based on the color settings. So if I scroll down here, I could go to Set Color and I don't want to set it at the Start, I want to choose Random from a Gradient and if we open the Color over Life option here, you could see I have a gradient and it's randomly colorizing these, and it's still keeping the black lines that are the edges. If I click on this dropdown and choose Fill, it's going to look at the alpha channel of the graphic and just completely fill the entire graphic with a solid color chosen from that gradient. Same thing with the Textured Polygons, just the difference being sprites auto-orient to the camera and polygons will allow the particles to actually float around and rotate and not necessarily have to face the camera all the time. So if you're looking for animated particles, make sure to use either sprites or polygons and definitely don't forget to look in the designer for a whole host of presets.