Apple Motion: Landing Snow Tutorial

hi this is simon obstal and welcome to another tutorial for apple motion and today as winter is drawing in i thought we could look at this scene of snow falling onto this graphic object now the trick here is to how we get that snow to actually land where we want it and i hope this is going to be interesting quite a few interesting tricks that are involved in this process so let's get started okay so first of all let's check out our project settings i've got 1920 1080 for 24 frames a second and i'm choosing a duration of 18 seconds so now let's import some assets i'm going to import snowy background and rocks so select both of those and import you'll notice that the rocks layer has an offer channel so it sits in front of that snowy background and i'm going to call this group background and i'm going to make a new group and i'm going to call this one text so into that text group i'm going to import that text texture and we can turn that off and now in this same group i'm going to make a text object so grab the text tool and let's type the word snow and let's increase its size to say 500 let's set center alignment come to properties let's reset its position make sure it's absolutely in the center now i urge you don't use the position here to set the text position use the baseline so let's bring it down let's come down to say 120. the point of that is that when we're using this for various other operations it's going to keep this position whereas if we used the transform position it wouldn't so it's important to use the baseline position for that next what we're going to do is come over to appearance and face and instead of color we're going to select texture and we're going to grab that text texture and drag it into the source well like so now what i might do is i might just slightly offset this so i don't want it to be quite like that i want it something like that i want to see these cracks nicely positioned in relation to my text and i think that's quite good so negative 70 there obviously depends on what kind of font and text you're using how this is going to work out so then what we're going to do is we're going to make a clone of this text layer so right click make clone layer and we'll turn off the original so what we're going to do is we're going to make another new group here to put that clone into so make a new group object new group and drag the clone into that and i'm going to call this main so i'm going to take the clone layer and i'm going to come to filters and i'm going to grab keying luma keyer and what i want to do is i want to create some transparency here and i'm just going to drag the controls in a bit like this until we get something like that so roughly roughly that then to my main group i'm going to add filters stylize extrude i'm going to have an extrude angle of 270 and a distance of 15 and then i just want to come down i think the front brightness i'm going to set 2.4 and the brightness to 0.1 so you see now we've got this sort of eaten away text which is going to be quite useful for us because what i want to do is i want to create i want the snow to land in these sort of crevices here we need to do a little bit more work on this first of all though we're going to add color levels and we're just going to bring in the black and the white like that and then we're just going to bring down the whites till we get something like the white out there until we come to get something like this next i want to make another clone of my original text layer so right click make clone layer and again let's make a new group to sit this in so put that in there and then i'm going to call this dark extrude for one of a better name and to this group i'm going to add again the extrude filter so stylize extrude again we want an angle of 270 and a distance this time of 15 and let's have front brightness so those those other values are okay i think and what we want to do is the extrude style we want to switch to gradient and let's open up that gradient we only actually want one color so i'm going to click on to pull the other color away so it disappears and then i just want a kind of nice dark gray something like that maybe that's a little bit too dark let's click on that swatch just brighten it up a little bit something like that is going to work i think next i want to make some icy edges that we can bring up that look like they get getting frosted over as the snow falls so yet again i'm going to clone that original text layer so right click make clone layer the reason i'm using clones here is because we could ultimately come in and adjust that text and everything else would update so that's why i'm using cleanse so again let's make a new group to put that clone in drop that in there so i've called that group icy edge and let's add some filters to it first of all i want to add filters keying luma keyer and we can just leave that at the defaults then what i want to do is add an extrude so stylize extrude so what i'm going to do with this is i'm going to set the angle to 90 the distance to 5 and then the front brightness to 1 back brightness to 1 shading is going to be gradient and we just want white here so i'm going to remove the black and you can see what that's given us is this nice sort of bright upper edge but it's all it's it's much too clean so what we're going to do is we're going to add filters stylize crystallize now this is an animating effect so we want to set the speed to zero that size of eight is going to do just fine so as you can see we've now got the appearance of some snow having already fallen on this so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to duplicate this group so right click duplicate and i'm going to call this ic edge large and the change that i'm going to make here is to come to the crystallize and let's double that value so let's go for 16 so we have a larger size there but i also want to now blur that so i'm going to add blur gaussian blur and i'm going to set that gaussian blur to 16 just to take the edge off that so it's not so so sharp so those two together are working pretty well what i think i want to do here though with this group is to set its blend mode to add just so it kind of gives us a little bit more so what we're going to do over the course of the animation is is to bring these on so for the time being i'm going to just turn those off so they don't confuse the rest of our operation but just we need to remember that they're there so now let's come on to the bit that this tutorial is all about and that's how we create this effect of the snow coming down and landing in very specific places on our object so i wanted to be landing on the top of the letter well the top surfaces of the letters and in these cracks here that i've that i've made so to do that we are going to come back to our text object and we are going to make another clone and again i want to make a sorry new group to put that clone in and i'm going to call this edge for like capitals just so we know what it is so we don't actually need to see this um but i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag it out to the top here just so we can get a feel for it as we're working and i'm going to turn off that text layer so i've got that clone main and we also want a clone of the version of the text that's luma keyed so inside that main group to remember we had a clone and what we're going to do is we're going to copy that so copy and we're going to paste it into our edge group and we're going to call this clone cracks because that's what we were what we're going to aim for with that so let's select the clone main and we're going to come to stylize fill and we're going to select a full color of black then we are going to turn that off just so we can have a look at the luma keyer and what we want to do with this is we want to pretty much isolate just that just the cracks so it means bringing it all the way down to there and what we're going to do is going to invert it so you'll see we now just have the just have the cracks pretty much and what we're going to do is we're going to fill this now with white so select that layer stylize fill and we're going to make that white and now when we see the two of them together you can see we've got black for the text and white for the cracks then what we're going to do is we're going to select the master group so the edge group itself and we're going to add a couple of filters so first of all we're going to add stylize extrude and 90 degrees for the angle 10 degrees for the distance front brightness of one back and brightness of one extrude style gradient again we don't want black we want white so what we've now got is a map of where we want our snow to fall so we want it to fall in the cracks so that's why they're white and we want it to fall on the tops of the letters so that's why we've got this white extrusion and we've got black where we don't want it to fall now there's one other thing we need to do here and that is to turn this into alpha information rather than just black and white information and the simplest way of doing that is to come to filters color channel mixer and come down here to the alpha output set the alpha alpha to zero and then just select one of these channels it doesn't matter which and set that to one and now the luminance is providing the alpha and so we've got exactly what we need okay so now let's have some fun with this i'm going to turn this off and let's turn back on our main text group so we need to find a way of getting the snow to hit those target areas so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make another new group and i'm going to come over to the library come over to the library i'm going to come down to content are we content there type in the search bar the word blur and you'll see we've got a number of different blurs there i'm going to grab the one called blur 11 and bring it into this new group so i've called that group settling flakes and i've got my blur element there and what i want to do is i want to turn it into snow so you might think the obvious thing to do is to use an emitter but that's not going to allow us to get these flakes to land so here's the secret what we're going to do is we're going to come to object replicate rather than make particles so select replicate let's come to the inspector and let's set the shape to image and we'll use that edge group that we made as the source and then we'll set the arrangement to random fill and let's set the number of points to 500. i also want to set the blend mode of this group to screen and let's come back to the replicator so let's have a scale of 20 and a scale randomness of 10. now you'll notice it's sort of working but it's not out of register with our text and that's because we need to do one thing here with our edge group and that's to turn it to fixed resolution and when we do that and refresh the timeline you can see that those are sort of sitting more or less where they are meant to sit now let's discuss the control called emission alpha and you'll see that if i set that to zero the alpha is completely ignored but as i increase it it's more and more specifically targeting the areas that i've picked with my edge matte so i'm going to go for a value of 95 because i want it to be pretty specific so now let's talk about the all-important question of how we're going to get these flakes which are landing in the right place which is sitting in the right place i should say to come in and land in the right place and to do that we're going to use behaviors replicator sequence replicator and we're going to add parameter behavior position we're going to have it coming slightly from the left so it's slanting in rather than falling straight down so i'm going to have negative 150 and 700 on x now the reason for that is the middle of the screen is 540 but i've just added a bit of extra so it gets down to the bottom of our text or although it doesn't it clears the top of the screen rather i should say so i'm going to set the sequencing to from and the spread to 50. and now if we come back to our beginning of our timeline and press play you'll see that the flags come and they land in our designated areas so what we can do is we can come to our replicator and if we don't like where the flakes are landing we can just click on the replicate seed button until they land where we do want them so i quite like the way that's landing there on the o's for example top of the o so i'm i'm gonna i'm going to stick with that and then in order just to build up this effect we can duplicate this and each time we're going to click on the replicate seed to change the position of the flakes so let's do right click duplicate and then hit replicate seed and you see we've got more actually one other thing i want to do here is i want to increase the angle randomness so i'm going to go for 360 remember to do that on the first one as well because we don't want the flex to be too obviously the same particle element and so we can duplicate again and again we can just click on that random seed and each time we can just keep building this up so i'm going to do this i don't know probably a dozen times again each time clicking on the random seed and you could for example have some smaller flakes if you wanted they don't all have to be that same size really just sort of giving you the the overall idea you can finesse this as as you choose really so i'm going to just probably do a little bit more of that so now i've got about a dozen of these and they look like this and they're all landing pretty much exactly where i'd like them to land what i might do though is i as you see we're now at 12 seconds but i want to get them to keep going towards the end so what i'm going to do is select some of these later ones and just grab slide them along on the timeline so they land later we've got some landing much later down like that maybe even bring that even later still just so they're not all landing at the same time so once the snow is gone and what i might also do is with that very first one we wanted to do something different with this if we want to get that to land a little bit sooner i'm going to take that sequence replicator rather than the replicator itself and move the sequence replicator back so i'm going to move it so that first flake is just breaking the frame right at the head of the animation so just while i'm working on this tutorial i'm going to turn a few of these off because they're starting to text my system just a little bit while i'm screen recording as well so but normally you should be able to get pretty good results using this yeah so that's that's going a little bit smoother so now i want to have a look at german we made these nice icy edges see how that works if we bring those on so i'm going to come to four seconds on the timeline and with them both selected i'm going to come to properties and i'm going to hit an opacity keyframe set that to zero come forward to eight seconds on the timeline and set those both back up to a hundred although what i might do with that large one select that on its own just set that maybe just down to around 75 or even perhaps 50 just so it's not too obvious yes i think that's probably going to be better so all together that's looking like this and when the snow is falling in front of it you'll see you'll get much more of a sense of that sort of building up so let's just quickly look at creating some snow i'm going to turn off the settling flakes for the time being i'm going to just grab the blur elements there and copy that and let's make a new group let's paste that into that group there and this time around i am going to be making an emitter so let's select the blur let's make particles i'm going to set the blend mode of this group to screen and then it's come over to the emitter and set it all up the shape is going to be line so i want a line running across the top of the screen that that shoots them downwards so i'm going to have an x start point of negative 1200 a y start point of 600 x endpoint of 1200 y endpoint of 600 let us also change the emission angle to 15 because we want that sort of slanting effect but the emission range we want to set to zero because we just want them all to come down in the same direction let's increase the life to 20. first of all i just want to come down and reset our speed so our scale rather let's set the scale to 10 scale randomness to 10 just it's a little bit more comprehensible so let's have a look at the birth rate let's come to the first frame and let's set a keyframe of zero i want to come forward to seven seconds on the timeline let's set that up to 400 and then come forward to 11 seconds on the timeline oops 11 seconds and set that back down to zero and so now we've got them falling slowly so we need to adjust our speed so let's have a speed of 350 and a speed randomness of 150. let's give them a little bit of spin uh well first of all let's do some angle randomness so 360 for the handle randomness and 45 for the spin 45 for spin randomness and now that's looking a little bit better you can see how that the build up of the snow is actually working even without anything else so just that little little edge is actually working quite well and then they all die away so that's pretty good i'm going to call this main snow i'm going to duplicate it right click duplicate call this big snow i just want some really large flakes but i don't want too many of them so i'm going to come to that keyframe there at 7 seconds set that up to i think 10. let's come down to the scale i have a scale of 40 skull randomness of 10 i think it's still this we're going to be fine for this so we just have these sort of big flakes like that just helps to give us a little bit of depth i mean obviously the thing with with snow is the more layers of these you build up the better actually might just increase the scale randomness on this if you can build up layers it looks really nice so what i'm actually also going to do is i'm going to copy that main snow right click copy and i'm going to come down into my background group paste it just above the rocks like that so what i want is some background snow so call that background snow like that and this we can have as really quite small so i'm going to go for a scale of four scale randomness of one and again if we come to our seven seconds keyframe there i'm going to set this way up i think so like a thousand so we get that sort of slow the background effect as i say the more layers of that you could you could you could do the better you'd probably find that you'd want to actually render these out as separate passes rather than trying to run everything live but let me just turn back on our landing snow and see if we can actually get to get this to play that's praying yeah i'm getting 24 frames a second there but admittedly i've turned off a few of those layers so it's uh it's helping me a bit what else do i want to do i want to do something with this background here with these rocks so that to give the feeling of them actually also being hit with the snow as well so with that rox layer selected i'm going to come to filters color hue saturation so i'm going to come to six seconds on the timeline i'm going to hit a keyframe for the value i'm going to come forward to 10 seconds on the timeline and i'm going to set that up to about 1.6 i think and you can see how that it looks as though fresh snow has fallen on that very very cheap trick really there and i'm also just going to duplicate that layer right click duplicate i'm going to take off that hue saturation i'm going to set its blend mode to add what that does is it adds an extra layer of kind of oomph to it and i'm going to add filters stylize min max switch to maximum i have a radius of 4 and you'll see this is kind of just giving us a little bit of a sort of bloom on the snow so so sort of extra snow has actually fallen and i'm just going to just add on top of that an unsharp mask just to sharpen it up just a little bit now what i'm going to do with this one is i'm going to animate its opacity so i'm going to come to two seconds on the timeline and set its opacity to zero set a keyframe come forward to 10 seconds on the timeline and we'll just set that opacity there to 50. we don't want it full strength but it'll just give us a little bit of extra something so let's see how that works on the run and you can see as everything is building up by getting that sort of extra layer of snow in the background without without too much effort so there's one thing i noticed i messed up on as i was building this for you just now and that's i've got the layers of my elements here the wrong way around and actually i want those two icy edges to be above the dark extrude so if i move them above you'll see the difference that makes we now got the iciness on the inside of these cracks and that's a lot more interesting now i do need to make a little bit of an adjustment to that i'm going to turn off the top one as i do that and select the bottom one i'm going to come to filters color levels you'll notice it's a little bit sort of um gray there and we just want to come to levels alpha and just grab that black there and adjust it a bit and you can see we can just bring back more of the black we don't want to go too far we want to leave a little bit of sort of of lightening up in there so somewhere like that will do and let's turn the other one on and again we want to do the same thing levels switch to alpha and just adjust the black so we get a little bit more darkness in the crevices like that so that's that's looking a lot better but i think that's that that effect kind of gives you um makes it a lot more interesting because it looks like you know this the winter's arrived and the snow has finally landed in all those gaps so there you go that's more or less it i just want to make a point about if you wanted to add a camera to this i'd be very careful how you did it obviously it'd be quite nice to have a push in but what we need to do is to actually set the individual groups to um 3d separately and in actual fact let's put this edge group inside the settling flakes group and so we don't want the overall effect of to have gone 3d so obviously we do want all of these actual groups to be 3d but if we just added a camera they would become 3d inside there so it's kept everything 2d inside which is exactly what we want so now we could add a camera and everything is fine so we can take our background and we can push it back say 2000 pixels on z and then just scale it back up again we can take our two rocky elements let's increase their scale to one two five and again we can push them back on z as far as we need to around about there and now if we move our camera we'll get a bit of uh parallax so let's add a little bit of camera dolly and let's set a distance i'll say 400 probably too much but it gives you an idea so now we're getting kind of parallax on the on the camera differential movement between the foreground and the background so that's the way i would do it make sure you select the set the groups manually to 3d don't let the camera do it when it adds because it'll set all the internal groups to 3d and that'll really mess things up so i hope that's been useful thanks very much indeed for watching see you again another time [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 1,968

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Id: VoeZSpjzBG0

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021