3D Particle Explosion in After Effects

hi my name is oliver and in this video i'll teach you how to create a 3d particle explosion in after effects so let's jump right into it to get started we need a 3d model and as i quite honestly like modelling skills i grabbed one from today's sponsor yellow images yellow images is a huge marketplace of design assets to make your process much faster they offer more than 40 000 high quality premium mockups 360 images creative funds and a store full of amazing graphic assets such as illustrations textures presets and more yellow images has great subscription plans or you can pay individually for any item as well i've made sure to give you an extra discount so yellow images has hooked me up with 100 discount codes for 20 off but it's first come first serve get your 20 off with the code oliver 20 links in the description so one of the most annoying things when working with 3d models is that you most often need some sort of renderer it's very slow and takes a lot of processing power and also you need to get perfect lighting and you have to set that all up in order for it to work and sometimes you just have a very tight deadline and you just need to create this quickly but the 3d objects of course still have to look great so i found a perfect alternative for this and a great way to implement 3d into your work without having the hassle of modeling or rendering and everything like that so i'm currently on yellow images 360 images page and as you can see we have a load of different models here now to explain how this works we can go into one of the models here we have a royal crown and if we go down here you can see that we can click and drag to rotate it so we can actually rotate it in 3d space and you can rotate it up and down and you can get all of the different angles that you want and essentially this could be used if you needed to composite this into an image and you needed a certain angle but the smart thing about this when it comes to animating is that this is all png images which means that you can take a certain angle and download all of the images for that full rotation so that's around 15 to 16 images so when you sequence this in after effects you get that 3d rotation without having the hassle of going through 3d models renderers and everything like that so because we're working with a particle explosion i found it very fitting to use a grenade for this so i've taken this grenade from the 360 library then i've downloaded the 15 images needed for full rotation and as you can see when we sequence these we get that animation so when we get into after effects we double click the project tab then we find all of the images just click one of them and select png sequence so when we open this up we have the sequence and now we just need to adjust some settings then you right click the sequence go to interpret footage main here we want to change the frame rate so we want to change it to 12 frames a second just because we don't have that many frames for the rotation and then all the way down here if you're able to see it we just want to loop it maybe 15 times just so we make sure that we have enough to work with so press enter then we drag it into our composition and here you can see it's quite large but before we do anything we actually want to right click and pre-compose it and we'll just call this the grenade so now we can scale it down and as you can see i just have this very simple background it's just a gradient ramp effect set to radial ramp then we have the lighter yellow towards the sensor and it becomes darker towards the edges so we sort of want to use this as our sprite we want it to start from the sensor explode outwards and sort of slow down so imagine that when the explosion is happening it sort of gets out to a certain point and then it becomes slow motion and just sort of floats through space so to do that we'll select the grenade we'll open up the scale by pressing s then holding down shift and r for the rotation as well as p for the position now because of the way we're going to ease this we actually want to separate the position so right click and separate dimensions and we just want to add a keyframe to every single thing right here at the start we want it to be zero at the scale and then we can go let's say 10 frames ahead then we want it to scale up quite a bit so right around here we also want it to move outwards to one side so just move it out a bit and we perhaps also want it to be rotated then at the start here we of course want it to be rotated a bit more towards the left so we have a bit more rotation and as you can see when we just scrub through that you have this sort of grenade going outwards and you just adjust that rotation as much as you'd like so as you can see that should be fine and now we just wanted to continue in this motion just move outwards scale up a bit more and rotate a bit more let's go to the end of the composition then we drag it out to follow that same motion path right around here we want it to rotate a bit more and we want it to scale up a bit more so it could be something like this and now we just need to ease it so select every single keyframe press f9 to apply ease ease and then go into the graph editor so let's start with the rotation you can see that i have selected the value graph down here and that's just so we can see the value change over time so we want the value to change fast at the start and then deaccelerate then we want this last part to be linear so it's just sort of floating with constant speed it's right around here then we want this handle to sort of go into the next handle so you have a smooth transition here so that could be something like this that way you can see we have quite a smooth motion graph and it should rotate rather quickly at the start deaccelerate and then go into this constant speed so now we actually want to repeat this motion path for both the scale and the position so now you can see i've repeated the motion path for every single one of them and the only difference really is on the scale and i just have added a little bit of easing to the start and that's just because if i were to do this very steep curve you could see that it would scale up way too quickly and we just want it to scale up a little bit slower towards the start so as you can see it pops out rather quickly and then floats at a constant speed the next part of this is adding multiple different grenade particles in different sizes rotations scales and everything like that now you could go ahead and do this manually and just duplicate it and change everything one by one but this is very time consuming especially if you want to create somewhere between 20 to 30 of these particles so i'm going to quickly walk through how you can rig this up so you can actually just duplicate the composition and then you have a control layer where you can change the scale rotation everything like that so it doesn't have to be that hard now there's a bit of expressions involved with this but don't get terrified i'll walk you through every single part of it so you understand how you can create this on your own so the first thing we're going to do is create an exact copy of this particle by just rotating in the other direction so we'll go to the project tab here we have the grenade composition we'll press command and ctrl d to duplicate it we'll drag that into the composition and as you can see it's scaled up quite large and also this is because the 360 images are such a high quality so even though we're working in a 2k composition they still exceed that so what we're going to do is select the other layer and press u to see our keyframes then we can just copy them and paste them onto the other layer so that way we have the exact same animation then we double click that grenade duplicate comp select the png sequence right click then we go to time and time reverse layer so that way you can just see it's rotating towards the left instead of the right now we can also rename this composition by going to composition composition settings and just calling this the grenade reverse so go back into the main comp and we now have these two different variations and we want a control layer so we'll go to layer new null object here we'll just call this the control layer we'll go to the effects and presets and search for the checkbox control so drag that onto the layer and we can just call this the reverse so now we want to link up both of these compositions so when we have ticked the reverse checkbox it will only show the reverse animation and when it's unticked it will only show the irregular grenade so go to the grenade reverse press t as an opacity and alder option click to get the expression control up then we'll create an if else statement which basically just takes a look at the box and if the box is ticked then it will show the reverse grenade and if it's not ticked it will hide it we'll type in if make a parenthesis then we will pick whip up to the checkbox on the control layer and then we'll just say that if this checkbox is equals to zero we will output the value of zero and else we will output the value of one hundred so i'm just placing these values into these curly brackets then we'll click out of it and as you can see right now it's at zero percent because the box is not ticked but if we tick it then it becomes 100 percent so we just want to take this expression and copy it then go to the opacity of the regular grenade all the option click the stopwatch and paste it and here we just want to change the values so we'll put it at 100 l0 so we're just reversing them which means that you can see if the box is not ticked the regular grenade is being shown and that is rotating towards the right if the box is ticked it's the reverse grenade being shown and it's rotating towards the left so the next part is rigging the internal rotation of the grenade as well as the external rotation so we can rotate it around that sensor point so we'll take both of the grenades and parent them to the control layer so you can see then it rotates around that null but of course we want to counter this rotation so the sort of grenade keeps that upright position now we need a slider control so we'll search for slider control drag that onto our control layer then we'll call this the internal rotation duplicate it and call it the external rotation now to make this work we should sort of think about how the rotations should interact with each other so go down to the grenade we just take the reverse press r's and rotation and we'll all the option click the stopwatch to create an expression we'll start out by just taking the value of this rotation because it's already animated and we don't want to ruin that so pick whip to the rotation then we want to think about the internal rotation so we want to add this internal rotation slider to the rotation that's already applied to the grenade so just type in plus pick whip to the internal rotation and then because we have to counter the rotation of this control layer we have to subtract that so we type in minus and then pick whip to the rotation up here and as you can see nothing really happens but that's because both of these values are at zero and also we have to link the rotation of this control layer to the external rotation and that way when we start to rotate the external rotation you see it rotates around that null and also it maintains the internal rotation and if we want to adjust that we can do it up here so now we can right click and copy the expression of that rotation and paste it onto the grenade so that way it works both on the reverse and the regular one and now we can move on to the scale so if you're enjoying the video so far i really appreciate if you go down and leave a like and perhaps a comment and you can also subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with the new content so here we also have to alt option click this scale and because of the fact that the scale is in two dimensions the x and y scale we have to work with variables so we'll simply just type in s equals to and then we can just use the s variable both for the x scale and the y scale and this is just something that you have to do so as the scale is already animated we also want to take this value and keep it as we did with the rotation now the way that we do this is a bit different and we just want to target either the x scale or the y scale they're the exact same so we'll just type in value then square bracket and we'll type in 0 which refers to the x scale we could also type in 1 which just refers to the y scale and now you may be very inclined to just add the internal scale to this value but you have to stop and think for a second because if you add the value then at this very start when the scale should actually be at zero then all of a sudden maybe you have added 20 in the slider and the scale will start at 20 or maybe you have it at -20 and the scale will be at minus 20. so this doesn't work we want to multiply it and that way it will always look at this value and go from that so if you're at zero no matter what you multiply it with it will stay at zero and that way we make sure that it always scales from zero so we'll just multiply it and then by the internal scale and just to make it easier to work with we'll divide it by 100 and that way it's just easier to sort of adjust the slider value then we'll press enter and here we'll make a square bracket and we'll just tell the scale which values to use so for the x scale we'll use the s variable and for the y scale we'll use c s variable and then just end it with a semicolon now you can see that the grenade actually disappears but that's because we just have to set the internal scale at 100 and then you get the exact same scale so now to sort of prove my point we can scale this up but when we go to the very start it's still at zero in scale now if we change this to a plus you can see that it actually has that extra scale at the start which we don't want so we'll just undo that now we also want to take the scale of the control layer hold the option click and just link that to the external scale now we of course also want that to be at 100 so they both start at 100 and if we go a bit ahead you can see that we can increase the internal scale so the scale within the object and then the external scale if you want it to be out even further and you can just use these to sort of counter each other and get the perfect position of the grenade then we simply just copy that scale expression from the reverse grenade and paste it onto the regular grenade so now we can take a look at offsetting this 3d rotation and we also do that with a slider so we select the layers right click and go to time enable time remapping and here we just all the option click the first time remap and now we can type in the expression so we just keep the time remap then we type in dot value at time so with this expression you take time and then you add or subtract a value so we want to add a value in this case then we go and pick whip to the time offset so we're adding this amount to the time and then we'll just divide it by 12 and end the parenthesis and the reason why we divide with 12 is because the composition is 12 frames a second so this way when we go out of it you can see that if i change this by one it just goes one frame ahead and that way it's quite easy to control this and adjust how much you want it to be offset so we just right click the time remap copy the expression and paste it onto the other layer and now well we have the full control so let's take a look at everything we have done so far we have the grenade popping out and then if you want to adjust it we can reverse it so it rotates in the other direction then we can change the internal rotation a bit perhaps the external rotation if we want it to pop out from the other side adjust that accordingly then we perhaps want it to be a bit smaller but we want it to be further out we can do that and then we want it to be offset a bit in time and most of this just used to differentiate the different grenade particles from each other but that way you can just see that very quickly we have created an animation that is a bit different and we can go ahead and do this multiple times to create all of the particles so before we do that we want to select these three layers right click and pre-compose and we can just call this the grenade pre-comp and click ok so before we start going crazy and duplicating this grenade pre-comp we just want to do a bit of compositing on the grenade and that way it just sort of blends more in with the scene right now the highlights are all white but we want them to be more yellow so it blends in with the background and if we start doing that after we have created all of the duplicates then it just takes a lot of time so we'll open up the grenade pre comp go into one of the grenades and here with the png sequence selected we'll go to layer layer styles and we'll just select the inner glow so we can zoom in a bit so you can see what's actually going on here and we simply just want to select sort of a yellow tinted color sort of like this and right now you can see it's set to screen we want that to be at overlay and then we can adjust the size so just ramp it up quite a bit as you can see right here and you may have to adjust the opacity and the color itself maybe you want a bit more of an orange tint and really you just have to play a bit around with this settings here so you get a result that you like but you can see that already it's it looks like the reflections are a bit more yellow so then you can just copy that layer style then go into the reverse grenade and paste it onto that as well then we go into the main composition and you can see it already blends a lot better in with the background and it seems more as if it's part of the scene so now to create multiple duplicates of this we actually want to go up to the project tab select the grenade pre comp and press command and control d that way you actually create a copy of the composition rather than just working with the same composition down here in the timeline so we drag this in and now you can go crazy and you just have to adjust the particles as much as you'd like create as many duplicates as you'd like and you really just have to keep it random and make sure to get some different sizes some different rotations and everything like that because particles really tend to be random so now when you have a few grenades and you maybe find a hard time figuring out where to place them you can use a little trick you can go to layer new null object then you take these grenades within the comp and duplicate them just parent them to the null object then we go to scale set the x scale to negative 100 then we lock the constrained proportions again scale them up quite a bit and that way you just get a lot more variation and you can very quickly start to fill out the screen with these grenades so now i've tweaked these grenades quite a bit and placed them where i want them to be and the next thing i've done to really sell the effect that they're composited on top of this background is to add some blur so i've basically just used the gaussian blur you can either use the legacy one or just the regular one it doesn't really matter and i've just blurred out the grenades that are the closest to the camera and those that are the furthest away so this is just an approximation and just really to create some depth and with some of them i've even animated it so they start out at zero and blurriness and then they just become blurrier as they move even further out so within the main composition i have just added a grenade that sort of scales up and then down and that's just to sort of anticipate the explosion that we see here next so what i've done here within the scale is essentially this is just the the value graph i've just made it scale up rather quickly so it goes up and then i've made sure that it doesn't stop completely at any point of time so it gets this sort of elastic motion and you can see it's also as if it's being dragged backwards instead of just stopping and then moving back so this is just something that works quite great in this example and then we just see all of the grenades exploding outwards but now we really want to tie everything together and we want to add an adjustment layer with a few adjustments to to the colors and curves and everything like that so we'll go to layer new adjustment layer we'll just call this the adjustments and we'll start out with the curves effect so find that over here and drag that onto effects control so i just want to increase the highlights a tiny bit maybe decrease the shadows a little bit and then mess a bit around with the black point so we get this very cool effect as you can see where the blacks are sort of less defined so maybe around here then i want to go into the red channel so maybe i'll just add a point down here and add a tiny bit to the highlights as so and really you can just tweak this as much as you'd like so you can see this is a before and after it just makes it pop a bit more so that's the curves effect then i want to add a bit of grain because i really feel like this lower frame rate it works particularly well with grain for some reason it just ties it together a lot more it's not that clean it's kind of rough which also goes well with grain so we'll go add grain set it to the final output and here we just have to zoom in a bit so we can see what we're doing i just want to increase the size a bit so maybe 1.2 decrease the intensity to 0.8 and as you can see this is before and after it just adds a bit of grittiness and i want to take the animation and set that to zero i don't want the grain to be animated then i actually also want to copy the screen and paste it onto the background so we just get a bit more grain on that gradient maybe increase it to one even and now as a final effect on the adjustments i like to add a optics compensation and when i increase this you can see it sort of moves inwards but we just want to reverse it and you can just see that it becomes a bit distorted towards the edges and i just really like the the feel of this effect on this particular project so maybe around 40 to 50 whatever looks the best and now i want to add a vignette so we really focus on the center so i'll go to layer new solid call this even yet and instead of just doing the black one i'll do it a bit more interestingly and choose a bit of an orange so that's a darker color than the yellow we're using here click ok just place it under the adjustments then we go up here click and hold and select the ellipse tool double click so we get a mask and we can just subtract that and now this doesn't look that great but that's because we have to feather it quite a bit so just feather this mask out like so and now something i like to do is go to the mode and if you don't see that just toggle switches modes and we'll just find the multiply so this just adds a cool effect to it and we'll press t and just turn this down a bit so maybe around 40 50 percent really just play around with this and you can see that already it looks like this is more of a scene just than some random particles and just to quickly take a look at the before and after this is the before and this is the after so that's just some color correction and a bit more of compositing now we'll take a look at creating this shock wave so right as the first grenade hits here we want a shock wave because we have this sort of explosion now we want to make it 2d so we really combine the 2d with the 3d and get this cool effect so we'll go up to the ellipse tool then we will go down here and select the title and action save and here we roughly have to find the center so that's around here click and hold down command control and shift to get that perfect circle and we'll just drag it all the way up so it covers the entire thing then we'll select the pan behind tool and hold down command control just to make sure that that anchor point is snapped to the center so we'll call this the circle and disable the stroke and perhaps do this same orange color and we get to the point right here when the explosion is about to happen press s is in scale add a keyframe and drag that out a bit then we set it to zero select the keyframes press f9 to easy ease it and go into the graph editor here we have the value graph and we simply just want it to happen quickly at the start and then de-accelerate quite a lot so as you can see we just have this sort of circle explosion and you can adjust the timing if you'd like because we wanted to scale up even a bit more towards the end but that's just sort of the main idea like this then we trim it down so we only have that part to work with we press command ctrl d to duplicate it just drag it one frame to the right and then for the track matte we select the alpha inverted matte and as you can see it actually becomes a circular shock wave so now that we have created this we can apply a bit of turbulent displace just to displace it a bit so search for the turbulent displace here drag that onto one of the layers so we want quite a bit of size and the amount shouldn't be that much we just copy and paste that to the other layer [Music] and now it's quite hard to see but we'll just pre-compose the layer call this the shock wave place it underneath all of the grenades like so and here we'll also use the multiply so it becomes quite dark maybe we want it down at 20 or so perhaps 30 then we can just duplicate this move one frame to the right try to play a bit around with the opacity so for one of them we want it to be a bit lower for the other one a bit higher so we can see both of them and now we can play it back and you can just see we get that cool shockwave effect behind the grenades and that just adds a bit of oomph to that sort of explosion so what is an animation without text for the final part we want to add a bit of text and i've just written nade you can see i have it as a text layer here i've also placed a grenade on top so we get a bit of depth when we have sort of a 2d element and we place something on top that really shows some depth and dimensionality so that's great see if i select the text layer go up to window and find the character tab just drag it up here i'm using the gotham ultra font and to animate this i was just thinking of animating the scale and tracking so the tracking essentially decides how much distance there is between each and every letter so i want it to be very cramped together at the start and then sort of explode out so the way we do this is open up the layer go to animate and then we just find the tracking option so we will make it start where it's crammed all the way in the center right around here and add a keyframe then we'll go a few frames ahead like so just make it go to zero and then at the end of the composition we just want it to be a bit further out so we keep that constant speed as well as the grenades when they're moving outwards so now we want to add some scale go to the very start press s and scale then just shift u so we can see the tracking keyframes and here we want it to be at 100 at the very start we just want it to be at zero and at the end we just want it to be scaled up a bit further so now we press f9 on the keyframes to ease them and simply we just want to recreate the same easing as we did for the grenades and now that we have done that we end up with the final animation you can see that the text is also scaling outwards and we have the tracking and it just has that same exploding effect as the grenades do that's really all for this tutorial and i hope that you learned something new about adding 3d to 2d backgrounds compositing some particle explosion and everything like that if you enjoyed it make sure to leave a like also go down in the description and use the promo code oliver 20 to get 20 off with your purchase on yellow images i've also listed a few tutorials here that you may find useful you can also subscribe to the channel turn on notifications to get notified when i upload future videos that's all for now till next time

Channel: Oliver Randorff

Views: 6,342

Keywords: motion design, mograph, motion graphics, animation, 2d animation, 3d animation, animated, after effects, adobe after effects, motion designer, motion design process, motion design breakdown, 3d particle explosion, particle animation, 3d particle animation, 360 image, motion graphics tutorial, turnaround animation, spin animation, 3d in after effects, after effects 3d, 3d explosion, explosion, 3d youtube intro, animating a youtube intro, youtube intro tutorial, ident animation

Id: WNqaO1qfuM8

Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020