After Effects Tutorial - Colorful Magic Trails with Particular

hey guys this is Vox ID and this is the effect that we're going to be creating today all right so basically we are having a light emitter generating these magic magical looking thing trails and before we get started I just want to let you know that this project this exact project is going to be available for download so make sure you check the description of the video if you want to download this project in case maybe I forget the something or you get stuck so be sure to check out the project file if you encounter any problems and also we're going to be using trapcode particular so make sure you have the plug-in installed and we can get started so I will make a new project save this make a new composition let's make this just a regular HD just so it works faster and let's see the first thing we want to do is create a new background layer and for this background layer we're going to use a ramp so go to effect on the rate ramp let's use a blue for instead of our white color I'm gonna go with a sort of a dark blue over here we can always just come back and change this anytime in our project and let's see now we can create a new layer for our floor so I will name this floor enter and then we can use a generate ramp and we can use a radial ramp for this I will drop down my first the start of the ramp point I will make sure this is centered so or maybe just around the center let's change the color of this point to maybe something like a blue and then for our end color we can use a dark black and let's press f4 so we can now access the 3d options and I will make this 3d by clicking on this button here I'll press f4 again go to our mode and then set this to screen and now this will blend the by the black the part of it will be blended with the background and now with our layer selected we can pray we can press W to access our rotation tools and on the x-axis I want to rotate this 90 degrees so while holding shift I will just rotate this twice now with uh I will go to my normal my selection my selection tool and we can just place it down below and just make a nice-looking floor also this layer I will press s and I just make our floor a little bigger and we can also add a blur to this layer just so it's more blended with the background we don't have a sort of like these sharp edges right over here so you can see with the blur activated is so it's it's a lot much nicer effect more smooth the effect alright now we can add our text layer let's add a new layer text let's type our text magic intro and you can see for our text I already set up a sort of a desaturated light on pale blue color which was the same settings as the last project so just keep in mind the decision completely white this has a small subtle blue tint to it so just something to keep in mind and let's edit this a bit I will select my magic part of the text and I will just make this so sort of match the sizes the size of the the word so this looks good I mean you can know I'm not going to spend too much time formatting this text because this is in the point of the tutorial but just make something go look have maybe have decent and so here's a very important part whatever layer you may use for this technique make sure it is in now inside of a pre-cum so whatever layer you made might have here whether it's a text layer or a logo layer or whatever you import make sure we tell that the layer selector you go to layer we compose and then rename this let's see text pre-comp and do this so it's inside of a pre-comp which is very important later on in the tutorial so i will press f4 and make sure this is also a 3d layer and now we can add a camera to the scene let's go to layer new camera I will use an angle of 70 just so it's a little wider so the effect looks better and with our orbit tool which is C on your keyboard we can adjust maybe make more interesting angle so the effect is just will have a nicer effect to it so maybe something like this it should be fine alright so now we're ready to make our light emitter well probably the hardest and the most difficult part in this tutorial will be setting up the light so with swirls around our object or layer whatever you may have in the center so we basically want the emitter to just make a couple of swirls around our center of the scene and then sort of start below and then fly upwards and then some fade out somewhere around this part so it starts around here makes a couple of swirls and then fades out so the way we can achieve this look is let's make a new solid layer for now oh no no sorry let's make a new light name this light emitter and you can see the intensity intensity set to 100 the light type is set to a point and the claw reset from the previous tutorial to sort of a pink color so keep that in mind now I will hit OK to create the light and we want the line to be right in the center of our text or rather in the center of our scene I so in order to achieve this we can go to the position into our light layer so i will press p to give me the position and I will set the position to B so let's see our center of the screen is probably gonna be um o if I if you go to your composition settings it's going to be the width and right we'll give us the X and the y value and we will divide the value by two and this will give us the so you can see if I divide these values by two 640 by 360 is the values that we are going to use to bring this light in the center of our scene as far as x and y values go so I will cancel this and I'll show you what I mean if I said now the position to be 640 by 312 309 what was it 60 I think and oh actually no sorry let's try 960 by 540 and let's try a value of 0 for y so you can see this is an this is not matching the center of our scene so to make this easier I will just go in my costume view and here if I make this a background transparent let's see how we can Center the light then just so it's right in the center of our scene let's make a new null object actually and if I make this 3d and go to our position well yeah actually our initial values were right so sorry about sorry about going back and forward with this but actually just set the lights to the initial positions that we've come to so which is done have the value of the width and height of the composition so sixth what was it 640 by 360 and zero value on the echo on the z-axis so this is now in right in the center of our screen which is what we want and let's remain in our costume view for now and add a new null object and this null object and also I'm also going to make 3d so now they're exactly in the same position right in the center of our scene and I want to rename this node to be emitter target and now I will parent this light to the null and you can see what happens if I move the light in z space like this I will give you the Z value now and in our emitter target we go to rotation and choose why rotation and increase this you can see how the light is now orbiting around our null object which is exactly what we want so I've set this back to 0 and set the position back to 0 and in order to have better control over our Z value of the position we can right click this and choose separate dimensions and now we just have our Z value to work with which is a lot easier to animate and let's see well I want this the actual light trail effect to be 150 frames long so oh and also what you can do with this is if you go to your emitter target position so press P you can also right-click this and set separate dimensions and now if I offset the Y position you can see now we can make the light start from below and work its way up so which is exactly what we're going to do in our active camera now I can set the keyframe for the Y position somewhere around already near the floor so I will set the keyframe for this position right over here at the beginning of our time line move to frame 150 let's let's make make sure we're accurate with this so 150 and now I will drag the light just so it fades out somewhere around the top of our text so now you can see it's just this basic animation going from below and then towards the top so now the way we add our swirls is we need to create some distance between the light and the actual target so to achieve this we can offset the Z position of the light so let's see let's say I will go in my costume view and I want the light to start at the Z position of let's maybe say 250 and now if I go to my emitter target and press R to give us our rotation I can offset the I can animate the wire rotation so it creates the swirls around the text so I will go again to frame 150 and add a value of 720 degrees which is basically just going to give us two swirls so I will just set Dimes to right over here and add another keyframe and now you can see the light goes once and then another time so basically two times around our text and basically here if I go to my emitter and increase the Z position so it basically increasing the distance between the emitter target and the light then we can achieve a bigger swirls sort of and you can also animate this effect which is what I did in the original project I went sort of like in the middle of our light animation and I added a al-khattab keyframe for the Z position so this is going to be as big as the swirl with will get basically and in the beginning of our timeline I set it to a smaller value here so here so basically what this does is create a bigger swirl over time so here you can see the swirl gets bigger and bigger and then it gets smaller towards the end of the animation so I'm gonna add another keyframe here and this will be more apparent once we add our trapcode particular and we can create the trail so we can see exactly the trajectory the light is taking so actually let's do that right now in our active camera we can add a new solid layer this will be our particular layer and let's add our trapcode particular all right so let's set our emitter to be a light emitter and let's set the x y and z size to be zero and let's set velocity and velocity random and all these settings let's set them all to zero all right so now we can now check out and see how the light trail is actually affecting our light all right so it's starting right over there below it makes one swirl makes another swirl and then it just finishes off alright let's add animate the intensity of a light so if I go to my emitter light and press T this will give me the intensity I will set intensity to zero right at the beginning so I don't want any frames imitated the first frames we want them to sort of fading over time so with frame 125 I will add a keyframe for 100 and so this will basically just fade in all particles over time and now I want them to fade out as the light finishes its path so probably somewhere around here I will add another light another keyframe sorry for intensity and right where it finishes going in its path we can set the keyframe for zero then and this will just fade in our particles and then fade them out let's add more particles so we can see this more clearly all right and before we make any adjustments to our particles we want them to be obscured by this text layer so what I mean by that is you can see right over here basically our light and the particles should be behind our text right here in this part and in order to achieve this effect and this is why we actually precount our original text is if we go to let's see which was it visibility and then obscuration layer we choose a text pre comp you can see now it's a behind our text and it just gives it an overall more of a 3d feel and it just helps sell the effect more because it actually interacts the elements actually interact with each other which makes it a more of a realistic sort of effect alright so now it's behaving like we want and we can just make our adjustment for the particles so if I go in my particles tab let's start with maybe increasing the life two four and let's see we live the particle type two sphere let's add some variety to the life so every letter fifty and the size that will make this smaller for now so maybe two let's see what else I made in the original video well I added the gravity right off the bat so if I go in my physics tab we can set some we can give it some gravity or maybe made let's try a value of 22 for now and I will set this to have resolution so it works faster and we actually wanted the particles to sort of interact with our floor layer and speaking of which I don't want the light to be affecting our floor layer I just want the floor layer to remain constant as far as the lighting goes so if I go in my material options for the floor layer we can turn off except light so let's just set this stuff and now you can see the light isn't affecting go or a floor layer alright but we want the particles to be affecting to be interacting with our floor layer so back in my particular layer we can go to we can change the physics so the physics models we're going to change to bounce right and now in our bounce tab we can choose the floor layer which will be our floor and now you can see it's pretty much just bouncing of our particles but we don't want them to bounce so I've set the bounce rate the bounce value to zero a bounce random doesn't matter if this is the zero but I will set this to 0 also and I don't want them to slide so currently well you can see them sliding but they will slide once we add some velocity and we don't want that so I'll just say this to maybe 35 just so it's a little friction between the particles and the actual floor layer and let's add some velocity from motion let's say the value of 10 see how that works all right now you can see if I increase this value you can see it inherits some of the velocity from the emitter from the light in this case and you can see the fact that is just a spreads them out based on the velocity of this layer but we don't want those such a high value here I will just use then let's use some velocity actually maybe 25 value of 25 actually maybe 15 and add some velocity random 20 percent so now we have a more interesting effect on more interesting look for our our trails and let's see what else we can do well let's set this particular layer to add just so with the the particles blend better with the background and all the other layers and let's let's give it some color now I think I think this is a good time to add some color so the way we do this is if you go to which one was it set color I will choose over life and now we can edit the gradient over here so let's start off with this preset of the gradient and I want to add sort of like the pink look so I will just add some points on this gradient I just so it creates an interesting effect maybe something like a violet over here and this should be maybe more of a pink over here and though you can mess around with the settings as much as you want until you get a pretty interesting effect so you can see now we added some color and let's set our transform or two to add so you can see now right in the center where there are a lot of particles they actually overlay each other and with the transform or transform mode of add this will make them brighter so this is the effect that we wanted we want to achieve let's add more velocity maybe 20 just so there are a little more spread out and let's set some glow we can we can add some glow now so if I go to effect stylize glow and let's leave one layer of glow like this and I will duplicate this by pressing control D and now I can spread out the radius of this second layer of glow so you can see this so creates a nice glowing effect and the let's go to a full resolution so we're seeing clearly what's happening so this is pretty good I'm actually kind of satisfied with this but in our original example I actually made the particles flicker and the way we can achieve that effect is if we go to opacity over life so this gradient right here controls the opacity over life so basically if I let's just use a preset for this example you can see now they fade out towards the end by using this gradient right here and in order to make them flicker what I did was I created sort of like spike a gradient here so here's what I mean I created sort of like these spikes so basically what this does oh no I don't want them to be visible towards the very end so basically what this does is for a value of if a particles had a particle has a life of four seconds then basically the second second will be here right in the middle so this is going to be a zero seconds and then four seconds so it's basically over a period of four seconds it's going to go zero opacity 100 opacity 0 100 0 100 so it creates sort of like a flickering effect which which is a what I had in the original example I'm not sure if it's so if you can see that clearly maybe the life I think it's too big and actually I want the life random to be even higher and basically this creates a flickering effect and you can mess around with the settings and try out various graph graphics to achieve a different or rather more more of a look on your taste alright so what I want to add now is in our original example we had our original light so our main particles which is this trail right here I want I wanted to add another layer which basically emits from this main layer so I'll show you what I mean by that if I go to my hogs system which is auxiliary auxiliary system and turn the M it on at set this M it to be continuously so you can see this now but if I increase the gravity for this so I add the gravity of maybe 50 actually let's increase it even more maybe something like this you can see basically what this does is each particle that we already created is generating even more particles but we don't want all the particles to be emitting particles we only want like every four particles I want to have one particles which emit even more particles so I will just set up amid probability to be 25 percent so this is gonna choose one out of each four particles to emit even more particles and I will set the life to maybe one second see how that looks so they're longer now and let's set the size to be one all right so this is coming close to what we had originally we need some velocity so there are a little more spread out all right so this looks fine maybe maybe the life is even now maybe say the life to be 0.6 something like this so basically we have another second layer of particles which are emitted from the original layer and they're just falling down faster basically because I we have more gravity here but we don't actually want so such a high value for gravity so I'll just go with a value of 215 so something like this and let's now increase our life back to 1 our opacity over life I actually want these to fade out as they age so I will set the this preset right here and actually maybe even increase the life even more 1.5 and let's add some color for these particles let's set the transform or to add so they overlay each other and let's see color from life color over life let's use a actually just I think yeah for our original example I just use this white to blue to dark blue preset so this is coming up pretty close to what we have I think we are actually done with the particular layer so you can see now this over time they generate the particles are generating the the trail and right off where we set our intensity to zero they fade out and then they just drop on the floor something else you can create in our original example I actually had another layer for some ambient particles so let's create that I will add a new solid and let's see this is going to be ambient particles and for this I will just add another particular layer and let me just solo this so it works faster and I want the velocity of something really small maybe like five I want to set the emitter type to a box and then just increase the size of the box just so it the sort of fits the whole screen something like this and let's go in our particle settings and let's decrease the size a bit increase the size random and opacity random maybe something like this maybe the size even less let's add our color it just used a pretty light blue for this and if I set this particle to add so it blends with the other elements and turn off and just unsolo this well now you can see we have some nice ambient particles and for our original example I set the opacity over life to be this preset over here so they fade in and then they fade out over time so now you can pretty much to make whatever camera animation you want everything is a 3d which is which is great because you can have any kind of camera animation which is going to sell the effect even more and if we go to our with our camera selected if you go to camera alejo camera settings and increase the angle of view to something like 90 maybe and let's zoom in a bit you can see now the effect is even better because we have a wider angle for our camera and this will sort of create some distortions when you orbit around it which just create some more of a depth kind of an illusion which is you know it looks a lot better alright so I'll make sure you check the original project file which is available for download just check the video description and maybe I forgot something oh well in the original project I also used a layer for actually use the optical flare layer so just if you have access to optical flares then you can just set your optical flares to track lights set this to add and yeah this is pretty much it well of course the scale was a little on lower than that but I think I pretty much covered all of it and this is just the effect that I wanted to share with you guys so I hope you enjoyed it then I will see you next time

Channel: Voxyde

Views: 1,044,493

Keywords: after effects tutorial, beginner, particular, trails, light, emitter, color

Id: NATgpZNYPSY

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2016