Classic Tutorial | Autumn Mograph with Trapcode

[Music] hey Aaron Rabinowitz here for bread giant TV in an earlier episode of red giant TV motion graphics designer Owens Street showed us some pre rad and detailed techniques for creating cool lighting effects with trapcode 3d stroke in this episode Owen will bring it back to basics with trapcode particular this is definitely more of a beginner tutorial so if you're new to particular this will be a great place to get started for rest assured oh and we'll be introducing you to some of particular more advanced features one thing to watch out for here is the way in which one uses After Effects as always he uses a ton of great shortcuts and time-saving techniques that taught me a lot take it away Owen welcome to this tutorial for red giant TV in which we're going to be looking at particular and specifically we're going to be looking at creating a cloud of particles and those particles are going to be custom particles okay we're going to be creating a cloud of leaves that are animating through a scene and in that scene we're going to include some type which could be a logo could be anything you want it to be and what we're going to do is we're going to sandwich that type between two instances of particular now just to get you head around the kind of thing that we're going to be doing I'm just going to show you a commercial that I made here in the UK which uses a very similar technique okay so is this place true you'll see that what I did in this commercial was use petals that was the brief and so it made all these different clouds of petals and had to be animated in different ways revealed obviously by the character walking through most of the shots or in certain shots like for example this one which I actually I will freeze exists is quite relevant to what we're going to be creating in this shot what I've got here is foreground and background versions of particular so I've got two instances of particular running concurrently and what I did was a roto scoped out this actress here and obviously these hands as well in order to put her between the two instances of particular and that helps to really bed her into the scene make it appear as if these petals were moving through the scene when of course obviously they weren't and so it's just a little trick but it's quite an interesting one you can get quite a nice effect out of it and also you know in this where you seeing wind and various other techniques to create a bit of motion let's have a look at what we've got over here in our project window first things first inside the comms folder we've got this example which we've just been looking at and that is playing this TC commercial it's called TC commercial because actually for the Trafford Centre which is a massive shopping centre here in Manchester in in England in here we have footage and we've just got some useful elements here for example color palette which we just double click here bring up a fridge window come on - on your keyboard to bring that back to 50% and I just basically put together a tiff file with colors I think possibly relevant to use in this sequence inside this folder are images of leaves these are the images we are going to be using as particles inside particular if we just go through and take a look at them hitting command - to fit them to our window or command + to increase magnification if we need to you'll see that what we've got 29 shots that I took on my Canon 450d camera and I've already taken them into Photoshop I've cut them out and exported them as PNG files which means they keep their transparent backgrounds when imported into after-effects making them easier to use inside particular all right inside the precogs folder we've got the leaves particle PC PC just stands for pre comp that's why I tend to label my pre compositions we've just so I can keep track of what's going on and we are going to be looking at that very shortly as well okay so let's just close those down for now so that's basically what we've got and obviously I'm going to be supplying this project to you so you can just follow along now let's start creating this sequence first things first I'm going to hit new composition button here and I'm just gonna call this particles I'm going to make mine 102 4 by 576 like so and I'm going to give it a duration 125 frames now these settings are all UK settings there pal settings okay so if you're doing this in the States or wherever and you want to do different settings that's absolutely fine this is basically standard pal wide screen here frame rate 25 frames a second and obviously at 25 frames a second 125 frames a little five-second sting to work with okay so just hit OK on that and what I want to do is just create a background first of all we're just going to create very simple graphic background multiple ways in which to do this you can either contextually click by right-clicking or holding down control on your Mac keyboard and clicking in this empty space here and up comes a contextual menu so you may be familiar with contextual menus already you could also come up to here layer new what we want to do is be creating this solid here so we could go today and you solid or as you probably saw there on that menu you could do layer solid by pressing command Y on your keyboard so any of those is absolutely fine create yourself a solid make sure it's the comp size which this one is and let's rename this BG for background as simple as that okay so with that selected we want to create a little gradient here and I'm going to contextual II click this time I could come up to effect but I'm gonna just contextual II click here in the effect controls window that I've got open I'm gonna scroll down to generate and I'm gonna scroll down again to ramp ramp is effectively after-effects is gradient feature okay so again multiple ways in which you can adjust this ramp very quickly you could either you know move the crosshair by clicking the crosshair button here and then clicking somewhere here or as you can see you can grab the crosshair and move it around live with a live update which I think is probably the best way of doing it or you can dial in numbers here it's entirely up to you but I'm gonna just move them around myself here so I'm gonna take my start of ramp crosshair here I'm gonna take my end of ramp which just sat down here I'm going to pull it over to the right here so we've got a gradient running all the way across from left top left to bottom right okay so we're gonna bring in a first bit footage that I showed you which is this color palette and we're just going to literally drag that into our scene like so and let's scale it down yes on your keyboard bring up scale scale that down the reason I brought that in is so that with our ramp selected what I can do is I can choose a start of color and I can take it from this TIFF file like so and I'm going to choose that color there and our end of color I can again click on my little eyedropper I can choose that color there and then what I can do is I can just delete that Wharton palette TIFF and we've got a nice ramp running through our background like so I actually probably want to make that in color a little bit darker so what I can do just tap in my color swatch there and just drop it down towards black just that a little bit more hit OK on that and maybe just pull that around a little bit there you go that's perhaps a little bit nicer come on - again something along those lines is fine now very quickly the reason why I've created a ramp like this in the background there is a reason for it there is a bit of design going on through this project and that is that we are going to ultimately have a light source set top left off-screen shining down onto our particles alright and that's why I've done this because it's kind of mimicking the idea of some light fall-off which is that the light will be brighter top left and then as the light kind of dissipates as you know if you will and we move into a kind of a shadow area here so the light only reaches a certain distance and some of us will become slightly clearer when you see how we're going to be lighting our particles but this is just kind of a 2d equivalent a very quick 2d solution to creating the idea of some lighting ok so with that done let's create our next couple of layers what we're going to do is we're just going to create some text so new contextual II click there and in the gray area new text like so and let's type in the word autumn all right so let's move that over and by the way actually I've got my character palette open here you can see that the typeface I'm using actually is Gotham it's actually I think Gotham black that and that's a 90 point if I'm gonna scale that up a little bit I'm gonna make it 110 points something like that a little bit bolder okay and context you to click again new text and I'm going to type the word colors okay just drop that down and actually I think we're going to make that Gotham round it and let's just scale that down at autumns a little bit bigger and let's take that down to ninety point and just a tiniest bit of time design we just can arrange the L of colors the center of the first stem of the M of autumn and that's it that's as far as the design is going to go as far as to typography is concerned just Center those up in frame like so we may as well choose some colors maybe while we're here so again grab our autumn palette bring it over scale it down again to get out of the way like so and I think autumn probably can stay that color but let's make colors something else let's again click our dropper and let's choose let's keep colors that way actually and let's make autumn this bolder Orange okay that will do for now you can make these any colors you want in fact you can do you know any of this is totally editable obviously and totally tweakable to whatever you want to do so what I want to do actually is I want to continue the theme of some lighting being up here although we obviously create any lights yet and so one way in which to do that to add a little bit of the idea of depth to this type without going into a 3d application is to use layer styles so after selecting your layer you can either go up to layer drop-down menu at the top here and select layer styles from there or we could contextually click on the layer in the timeline to do that simply right-click on your PC or control click on your Mac to bring up the layer menu and selected layer Styles now navigate to bevel and emboss and let go the mouse to select it and perfect this style has been applied and as you'll see here in our timeline window is a layer Styles dialog box and bevel & emboss if you just open up those options you'll see we've got style technique depth etc well let's just increase the depth to say 125 percent let's take the size down a tiny bit and we won't soften it I think leaving that hard-edged on this particular part the type is fine and again can you see what's happening and there's like a glint if we just zoom in command + on the keyboard you'll see that there's like a little bit of a glint now highlight running on this sort of the left and top edge of this type and then at the bottom and to the right slightly the type has been darkened down so again it's a very quick Toodee solution to creating the idea that there's some light up here being shown down and hitting these these elements and that's precisely what we want here I'm relatively happy with that again I'm going to context really click on colors I'm going to go up to our layer styles and I'm gonna select bevel and emboss again and in this particular option I'm going to increase my depth 250 I'm gonna zoom in again so I can see what I'm doing and I think you know that's that's pretty nice I'm gonna soften it maybe a little bit something like that and that just I think with this kind of rounded type actually it probably works even slightly better and again it echos the lighting which is which is really the key the key point at the moment so with those done what we want to do is now pre compose these these layers and the reason we want to pre compose these primarily is because we've used layer styles I know that shortly in this sequence we're going to be animating a camera really up closer towards these as we move really really close to type what happens is especially when we have depth of field switched on which we will be doing the layer styles kind of freak out a little bit because it's to do with the way and effects so ordered inside After Effects and basically it tries to apply a layer style to the layers after the depth of field that has been applied that's at least how it appears to me when I'm when I did a bit of a trial run of this and it just it just looks messy it just doesn't work so the best way I think to deal with that is to pre compose these layers so quite simply command shift + C to bring up a pre compose dialog box and what we'll do is we'll just rename this type PC it's as simple as that ok hit OK on that and we know we've got that safely stored away we may as well make that a 3d layer because we know that shortly we're going to be adding a camera and we're going to be wanting this to respond to our camera we don't however want this background layer to respond to the camera so we're just going to leave that as a 2d layer so why don't we create a 35 mil camera and why don't we just name it 35 smil camera and of course what I did there was I just control clicked or right-click on a PC in order to bring up my contextual menu go to new camera of course you could have gone to the top of screen and gone to your layer drop-down and gone to a new camera that way of course used a keyboard shortcut here okay now we're going to get into the real meat of the tutorial so let's create a new solid and let's let's not contextual click this time let's use our keyboard shortcut this press command Y command Y brings up a solid settings dialog box and let's name this particles like so and let's color it slightly differently rather than being on the black side let's make it purple purple particles and let's hit OK on that now in effect controls I'm going to contextual e click again and I'm gonna bring up our effects menu I'm gonna scrub all the way down till I see trapcode and I'm going to go across to particular so there we go that's the last we'll see of our purple screen the reason for that is as soon as you introduce an instance of particular into a solid the solid becomes effectively transparent and all that is sat on it is whatever particles you create and to prove the point if we just scrub down our timeline a little bit what you will see is the default instance of particular doing its thing if you've ever introduced particular into a project before you are I'm sure you'll be familiar with this what it is is a single point emitter emitting uniformly the default sphere particle so you can see it's going off in all kinds of directions now we want to get in and we want to tweak this we're going to tweak it quite heavily obviously in order to create our cloud of leaves so as I say we've got our particles like so and what we want to do is very quickly get into here and we want to change this whole particle set up now particular what it has is it has this kind of menu set up where you can actually open up you can twirl down using these little arrows here and you can reveal various menu systems within particular and I like to keep things neat and tidy if I can and try and not have them all open if you for example were to scroll down and open up all of these different settings and you know you're looking for something in particular you can find you can get a little bit lost within the menus because it yeah there's a lot of stuff inside particular and you know it can look a little scary if you allow it to but it doesn't have to be scary if you just keep it a little bit more contained and this is one of the best ways I think to learn it is to start to think well what is it I want to adjust and now this as I say is a point emitter we want this not to be a single point we want this to have depth we want this to have some space in the X the Y anisette so if we open up the emitter settings all right it's most them like I'm stating the obvious but believe me if you get a head around all of this the way to deal with it then you know you're halfway there open up the emitter setting and you'll see here straightaway labeled for you emitter type and they're putting its point emitter as I mentioned earlier what if we track that down to be a box emitter like so now did you see these and just keep your eye on these actually when I do that if I go back to point emitter like so they're grayed out and that's because a point doesn't have any depth okay doesn't have anything in the extra Y and the said is just a single point from which all the particles are emitting if you scroll that down to eat the box or sphere what have you you'll find bang they become available all right so this can actually have dimension that's precisely what warm because we want a cloud of particles one you have it's a have some dimension so I'm going to create box I'm going to create a box that's bigger than our scene I'm gonna create box it's 1500 by 1500 by 1500 like so okay so what we have now is this box of particles and as you can see they're sort of floating around in space and actually there's none here at the very beginning of the sequence and as we move forward down the timeline you'll see they kind of come into life and then actually some of them come into life and some of them then disappear again and you'll see if you watch maybe him there you see where my arrow is pointing just at that particle there if I scroll back you'll see he kind of comes into frame he's come into life and then he disappears there and there's a reason for that because these particles all have a particular life span at the moment and that life span is shorter than the duration of our sequence so we need to adjust that you'll also see that they're kind of uniformly kind of animating around screen and which actually we want to adjust that as well they also have they have some velocity at the moment we want to amend that so you can see there's quite a few settings that we need to amend and all of that is really relatively straightforward let's first of all describe what our goal is our goal is to create a big cloud of leaves that are just frozen in space and memos to look at what we want to do in terms of animating them through the scene so we don't want any velocity at the moment so keeping within our emitter setting of the particular dialogue we can see here we've got these velocity velocity 100 well let's just take that down to zero all right so let's just zero that out and you'll see that okay brilliant we've lost our velocity which means they all just attack in space but you can see that again they'd sort of twinkling on and off a bit like a kind of a crazy kind of night sky kind of effect and we don't want that so again I mentioned they have a life span well yeah they do so what we need to do actually is jump out of our emitter settings all right and because now we're talking out each individual particle each particle has a life span all right it's not to do with the emitters life spans to do with each particle so we open up the particle settings all right and we can see here yep it's got a life span of three seconds well you know this whole sequence is only five seconds long but let's play it safe let's make all of them last for 10 seconds all right now what you should know is is that they all ping on yep fine none of them ever die none of them ping off again which is precisely what we want but what have we got here we've got another problem and that is of course that we don't have any leaves at the beginning and they all just kind of while sorting they're not leaves at the moment we don't have any particles in the beginning and they just kind of all ping on to frame well we don't want that do we kind of want this effect don't we want all of these like this right at the beginning of our of our sequence well there's a quick way of achieving that it's just a little quick workaround and let's just close down particle a moment and we're talking about the particles being emitted aren't we so again logically we go back to our emitter settings all right and what we can see at the top of emitter we can see that there's 100 particles a second are being created or being emitted so logic tells you doesn't it that if you're at zero frames of sequence it's had no seconds from which to create any particles as it as you go down by the first second which 25 frames it's had enough time to generate a hundred particles okay you don't see hundred particles here but that's because remember our emitter size actually goes beyond this screen so therefore there will be a hundred particles created it's just you can't see them all in the particular window of a view that we've got so how do we create a whole bunch of particles really early on a sequence well what we can do is as a classic little trick is we can keyframe a massive burst of particles let's type in 20,000 all right at the very front there we've got a keyframe if we hit you now on our keyboard you will see there we go particular particles a second 20,000 there's a keyframe and just press page down on your keyboard once like so to move forward one frame and what we're going to do is we're going to zero that out at that following frame and what that basically has done is there are no particles on this very first frame but there's a keyframe saying generate 20,000 particles a second so by the time it's moved forward one frame its generating that many particles and I think that's going to be enough particles for us and then after this frame just don't generate any more so as you can see there we go we've got our frozen cloud of particles that's exactly what we wanted the only issue is that here if we move back to the very first frame we've got no particles at all well what's the easy way to deal with that the easy way to deal with that is just to maybe grab the tail of this layer pull it forward one frame and just drop it back so that this this zero out keyframe is actually on the first frame of our sequence and particular is clever enough or after effects is clever enough to realize that this keyframe here you can still just about sieves with fully zoomed out on our timeline this keyframe is still doing something particular has generated if effectively is generated all these particles yeah before our timeline has started all right it's clever enough to understand that it needs to do that and that's just perfect so we've got our cloud and all we need to do actually is down the end again extend that out by by frame stops we moved it back one frame need to extend it out by one frame so it reaches the end of our secrets but that's how we set up our frozen cloud of particles now let's get into one of the more exciting parts of this and that is to replace all of these and default sphere particles by the way let me let me just show you where it tells you that because this is going to be particularly relevant to us if you look inside the particle section here you'll see that particle type is sphere that's the default particle the particle that always starts with okay so let's move across to our project panel now I've created a pre-comp if we just open this up called leaves particle PC if we just click on that once you'll see up here in the project information panel 30 it's 150 pixels by hundred 50 pixels and he's 29 frames long now let's double click that let's take a look at what it is or what this is is all of those leaves that I showed you earlier sequenced in a pre composition so that they exist for one frame and one frame only and they're literally sequenced like this and it's very very easy to do this if you were to report your own stills that you want to use as particles all you need to do is import them all and stills like this select the first one shift-click to select the last one get hold of them drag them down to your new composition icon choose single composition choose sequence layers and make sure you're still duration is at 1 if you hit ok to that and let's just come on - out so we can see that properly there we go sequenced all our layers now I've taken it a little a stage further what I've done is I've reduced the size of it all right 250 150 like so and in order to fit them in you just click one of them command a to select them all and if you can textually click on these you will find there's a useful little contextual menu comes up transform fit to comp like there's actually keyboard shortcut as well but I thought I'd show you where that is in the menu system if you do fit to comp and you've selected them all all of them will be very neatly fitted into our composition size which is you know precisely what we want now like I say I've taken things a little bit further let's say command+ into that you'll see that actually some of these were shot at a slightly different distance or the believes were slightly smaller than others so actually that as a particle perhaps it's a little bit small compared to that one so I went through and I altered each one individually and if we just close this out actually for now because we don't need this example was just to show you I'm gonna get rid of that for now I'm gonna close my leaves fold it up I'm gonna show you the pre composition that I have pre-prepared you'll notice that I've actually also all be made into 3d layers which is just by clicking on this icon here and I have rotated them all slightly in 3d space to add a little bit of extra dimension to them because with this kind of work this kind of particular work I think the variety is a strength and especially something organic like leaves so if we scroll through you'll see that I've scaled them up and I've kind of added a little bit of extra dimension to them okay it just adds a little bit of interest bear in mind the reason I've made this composition just 150 by 150 pixels is that particular doesn't like unnecessarily large particles as that can slow it down and of course just to be clear this composition will be what particular looks at in order to generate its custom particles so this could be whatever you want it to be it could be typography it could be some photographs you've taken it could be some illustrations that you've done it anything you want it to be you could create your own pre composition and get particular to look at that and generate particles from that or how do we do that really really simple I'll show you let's jump across to particles again and let's grab our pre composition let's drop drop it into our comp like we can drop it into underneath everything because we don't really need to see that in fact you can even turn its visibility icon off because the way we're gonna see those leaves is via particular okay let's click on our particles layer and with particles still open here if it isn't just twirl it open you will see the section I was talking about particle type is currently on sphere if you drop that down to sprite okay what you'll notice is all of those spheres disappear all right we've got a blank canvas right don't worry that's that's absolutely what should happen if we then open up texture under layer if we choose our leaves particle PC or whatever pre Composition you've chosen and we move over a point in time at which this leaves particle PC exists you will see that those spheres have all been replaced with quite small versions of the leaves let's have a look at increasing the size here because they are too small the moment let's take that from 5 up to 25 okay and let's zoom in command + my keyboard and there you go you can see that all those spheres have been replaced with leaves and as we move through the timeline frame by frame we will notice that particular is using a single leaf to create all of our particles there is of course some simple logic to this if we double click on up pre-comp and take a look and then go back to our main composition we will notice that whatever is on the current frame of the pre comp is being used exclusively by particular to create its particles then if we move forward another frame double click on up pre-comp again to see what leaf is there now then go back to our main composition we will see the particular is now using what is on that current frame to create our particles and so on and so forth this will carry on sequentially until the pre comp runs out of frames which would be frame 29 in this case and the reason for this is the way particular is referencing our pre composition so if we go back up to our particular settings and take a look we will see that just underneath the texture layer option there is another option called time sampling you will notice that it says current time and this is pretty self-explanatory in that it tells us particular will use whatever is on the current frame of the pre comp and use that to create all the particles for that frame we want to amend this and get a more random distribution of leaves across our scene now if you drop that to random still-frame okay let's just open this up a little bit let's just in fact you know let's just zoom out a bit there we go look at that that is far more what we want is near what we've now gotten just to kind of explain this to you a little bit more what we've got is we've got particular looking at this pre composition which is 29 frames long and it's now looking at a random frame for each individual particle so if you had maybe 54 frames in this pre composition it would look across all 50 frames and randomly place what's on those frames across all of the particles that is generated so in this instance it is able to look at 29 different frames and distributing those 29 unique frames across all of the particles it's generated of course you will still have some repetition because there's far more particles being generated then there are frames to be distributed but what you are getting now is a far more organic feeling random cloud particles what we can now do with this is start to add some dynamism to this and start getting into some really cool effects that are sat with in particular so we sort of done with the emitter for now we're done with particle for now we maybe will revisit them shortly but for now what we want to do is we want to get into the physics section of particular now you know the word physics sounds a little bit scary I know I know I wasn't particularly good all that sort of stuff myself but don't worry about it it's far more friendly than you think if you open up new physics here you'll see the physics model is air there's only two options air and bounce today we are looking at air okay and because we're looking at air this option is available to us here it's for all the arrow open now when you first see this it can look a little bit scary but really don't don't worry about it we're only going to be amending a couple of these options here and you know most of its reasonably self-explanatory for example we want these particles to move across the face of this type or at least I want them to and you know so that's what we're going to do and the easiest way to do this really is see here you've got wind X Y and said well basically it kind of does what it says there if you apply a value twee X it will place basically blow the particles in the X so it will blow the particles across our screen from left to right as it happens and unless you were to go into negative figures obviously they would go from right to left but we're going to go in positive figures we're going to go from left to right I think that's going to look nicer and I'm gonna dial in a wind setting of 75 you'll see they jump across because we've we sat down the time line here the way that these settings work actually is rather than keyframing it's in the way you would normally do with positional data so you would keyframe something at say an x value of zero and then you would keyframe further down time line at an x value of say 250 and then it would move between 0 and 250 the wind here you can do to create different effects but you don't need to because as soon as you've dialed a value up it will apply that over time so as you scroll across the time line there we go it's applying that 75 value over time so our leaves are being blown across the screen so it's kind of generating animation for us for free effectively and you know that's just a really nice and easy way to get our particles animating across the screen now hopefully you're picking up on a couple of things here which is that you're getting a really nice sense of parallax where leaves some leaves are passing in front of others some are further away from the camera obviously some are closer so you getting that parallax effect which just really helps to create that kind of idea of a 3d scene so you know we're beginning to get some really nice results okay so that's applied there and why don't we add a little bit of spin amplitude to it as well and what that does this is just going to add a little bit of jostle to the leaves and again we're gonna try and create some kind of real-world effects on this project and so if we type in something like 75 and let's see what that does okay there we go we're getting this nice Clannad jostling feeling each each particle moving each leaf moving kind of independently from its neighbor and randomly as well if I just take that down again to say 50 I think 50 is a little bit more of a sensible amount for that so I think that's looking really nice and what we want to do actually add a little bit more randomness by opening up turbulence field option now turbulence field is essentially a bit like fractal noise if you've ever used that at all if you haven't don't worry about these slightly complex sounding names it's actually a very simple thing to use it is basically a customizable noise pattern or field which particular generates behind the scenes and you can use it to influence the size and the position of your particles what we actually need to do is just dial up some effect position here and you'll see that the leaves are kind of just being pushed around a little bit just darling something like 45 and again let's have a little look at Hill and yeah great you know that they're really beginning to pick up this kind of feeling of randomness which which I really really like like as if someone an updraft some are getting blown down so yeah towards camera a little bit away from camera it's starting to look really interesting so actually now I think we are done with the physics section so let's close that up let's keep things neat it's close up and it's close up physics and what I want is I want each individual particle to have a little bit of rotation so you know again logic tells us we want to go to the particle section a particular so let's open that up and here we have a rotation option so if we open that up as well you'll see that we've got a rotating set now you can just apply a general rotating set but do you see that each one is rotating although of course they're in all its slightly different angles because the way to photographs were taken and everything you'll see they're all rotating the same amount so actually maybe that's not what we want what we actually want is this let me just pull this box open so you can see what they say we want random rotation okay now why don't we type in a random rotation of 15 something like that you see it's they've all been offset slightly differently and that's great because what it means is if you've got a repetition of say this leaf here you know somewhere else in the in the composition and hopefully it's going to be rotated at a different angle so therefore it will look more like a different leaf which is kind of look we're trying to get here what we can do is well if we can add a bit of random speed rotation to everything and why don't we just type in quite a small amount something like point two because believe me these figures you don't need a lot a lot goes and go a long way in this type maybe maybe point two into this one as well which is going to be enough in fact it's probably time isn't it that we actually hit a preview on here so I'm going to hit zero I'm a numerical keypad and I'll see you in just a second that's our cloud of particles at the moment you know perhaps we could tweet them a little bit perhaps they could have a little bit less for some reason that leaf seems to have a bit of a kick in it and I'm not entirely sure why at the moment because everything should be happening relatively smoothly but it's probably just a few random factors just kicking in at the same time so you know please feel free to to come in and you know open up things like the light physics section again and tweak it until you'll be happy with the setting that you're getting I'm gonna reduce its bin amplitude down actually a little bit I'm going to increase the wind up to say a hundred maybe actually have a look at turbulence field and maybe take the complexity down to see if that still got that kick to it again let's do another quick preview zero no numerical keypad and again I see in a second and I think you'll agree that looks a lot smoother there doesn't it I'm a lot happier with that but there is another little problem that has appeared here and some of you may well have noticed that because the leaves are being blown across in the x-axis and they're traveling across the screen the scene as we as we wanted them to well you'll notice here on the left hand side here is as she starts to thin out and that's because of course we've created a sort of a finite sized cloud of particles in our 1500 by 1500 per 1,500 emitter and all those leaves are being blown across the screen and actually it's running out of leaves so one the ways to get around that would be to either increase the size of the emitter or to blow it across the screen less with the with the wind setting I'm actually going to go for the former I'm going to increase the size of the box emitter so again if you recall that's in the emitter settings quite hopefully fairly obviously and what we're going to do is we are just going to go down to our meter size X here and we're just gonna scare that up until on our last frame we are happy that there is enough particles and what that's done is it's actually reduce the density of particles through the scene because of course we've expanded the size of the emitter and so that means that there's more space in which these particles need to be distributed and so therefore it's slightly thinned out now if you want to you can go ahead and increase the amount of particles and the way in which you would do that of course you would go all the way back to the beginning have you seen here press you after you've selected the particles layer to reveal its keyframes and of course you've got the particles per second keyframes here just these two and if you've right out of your timeline you should still be able to see them like this and you can just about click here on this keyframe and if you just double click keyframes what it does it actually brings up a value dialog box like this and what you can do is you can literally just type in maybe I don't know 25,000 something like that hit OK and there we go it's just added a few more particles in you can do that if you want you don't have to do that of course it's entirely up to you you know at this point it really is at your discretion yeah how many particles you want to be in the scene and the way in which you were just set of course is by adjusting this first keyframe here it's really as simple as that okay so I want to do one more general alteration to this whole scene of particles here and I want to go into another part of the particular dialogue which we've not yet looked at and so if we just close down emitter section of the particular dialogue menu here and if we have a look at this one which would not let yet looked at which is world transform we open that up and what you've got here is basically you've just got these six settings and they pretty much do as you would expect really with a name like world transform what they do they transform ie they either rotate or they move they offset the entire world of particles so the entire scene of particle so very simply let's find which rotation we want and I think we want this we want the X rotation because what I want what I want to kind of get across is the idea that these are caught in obviously in wind they're being blown and you know when you see leaves on the street and they've been picked up by the wind and they're kind of swirling well I want to kind of indicate that a little bit more so I'm gonna set a keyframe here at the beginning with 0 X rotation I'm going to go all the way down to the end of my secrets and by the way you don't have to scrub here like this we do is you can press the end key on your keyboard and you can press the HOME key on your keyboard to get to the beginning in the end of your sequence like so and then what I want to do is I just want to dial in not a massive amount but you know a certain amount of X rotation let's say something like 25 degrees and let's have a look now at that let's see if we just scrub do you see how they've all got that see that to me adds just that extra little bit of reality I suppose to it and you know I'm really happy with that but again this is this is up to you how much you want to adjust that by you can add it in or not as thick as you see fit in your particular project okay so let's close down the world transform section okay and what we actually want to do now is start adjusting the look and the feel of the scene and so what we're going to do is we're going to get into doing some lighting now very simply we can either go up to layer here new and we can create here new light there's actually a key combination here a shortcut combination if you wish or again you can control click on your Mac or right-click on your Mac or your PC and you can get your contextual menu up and you can go to new light like so okay so the first thing we want to do is we want to if if this is a non spotlight we want to change that to spotlight and what I'm going to do is I'm going to name this spotlight and the reason I'm going to name it is because we're actually going to have two lights and anyway it's just a good good practice to to name layers as much as you possibly can just you know what's going on and you're going to notice that the only thing currently affected by this light is our 3d type layer and the type is actually the one thing that we don't want to be affected by the light in this project so what we're going to do is we're going to come down to our type layer we're going to select it and we're going to hit AAA on our keyboard so basically hit the key a quickly in succession like so and that opens up your material options and very simply what we're going to do is we're going to go to where it says accept lights and we're going to click on the obviously it says on at the moment we're going to click on that and we switch it off and there we go is returned our type back to the colors that we've chosen and I'm happy with that okay now why isn't our particle officer why aren't our particles being lit by our light well the reason for that is because inside particular we have yet another setting and you know probably quite logically you'll have a look at these various menu options you'll see the words shading and yep you've guessed it that's the one we want so if you open shading up very simply it's off at the moment and all we want to do is we want to switch it on now you'll notice that it has some settings here which might look a little bit confusing but don't worry they're not too intense and we've got this option here light fall-off and at the moment that is selected by default at natural lux you've only got two options you've got none ayyyy or you've got natural lux now we want to use natural lux and light fall-off nominal distance all this stuff what what does this mean well in simple terms what's happening is the light is emitting light which is hitting our particles and that light is kind of distributed and up to a certain sort of distance okay so the fall-off okay is where you can see this leaf here is very bright because it's closer to the light and you can see that these leaves further off to the distance are darker because they're further away from the light and that effectively is controlled by this nominal distance okay so the light falls off across the distance that you have selected okay so if i dial up nominal distance you'll see you'll see what I mean okay do you see how the leaves are now getting brighter and in fact actually the one closest to the light here that's getting really really over bright I mean that's that's you know peaked out at pure white there and that's not the effect we want and so let's let's take nominal distance back down to 250 for the moment but what we want to do and if you remember back in the beginning of this tutorial I talked about how we'd set up this gradient and of course actually the beveling on the type here in order to indicate that there's a light up here top left off camera lighting I've seen well okay we've created our light now so what we want to do let's press command - we've selected our spotlight hit peak position and what we're going to do is we're just gonna scrub our light into a kind of a sensible place to suit the scene that we've built alright so here we go up top left like so but actually what I want to do as well as I want to pull it back in Zed space and so this actually it's actually kind of aiming in into our scene sort of pointing slightly at our particles and actually also slightly above and to the left okay so let's pull it back further further further like so and you'll notice that because we've pulled our light away from the scene that our leaves are now virtually unlit so again what we need to do is come back to our shading options and we need to increase our normal distance now as we as we do so you'll notice here we go okay that's great this leaf actually is in darkness still so perhaps we need to pull our pull our light further back there we go that's now being lit and the reason so I don't mean to select the light there there we go we're back to particles the reason I like using this natural lux option if the light fall off is because it does it does what it says it falls off across the scene and if we just dial up nominal distance maybe a little bit more okay what we've got I think is a really really nice effect where these leaves are brighter because they're closer to the light source and these leaves are darker because they're further away from the light source and I just think it adds a really nice natural feel to the scene what you also have here as well as this normal distance if you want to adjust the brightness of the scene you have two settings if your ambient and you have diffuse now a spotlight or I think a parallel light or what have you that will come under the diffuse option and what you can actually do is rather than if we just double click our light here rather than messing around with the intensity of the light here which is what you would normally do to affect the brightness of the light being cast in a scene let's cancel that instead of adjusting it there what you can do is you can globally affect all of your lights that you've created inside the particular dialog shading option which is great and this spotlight comes from the diffuse option and so if you increase that guess what yeah you get more brightness and if you decrease it of course it becomes darker so it's a really nice useful way to be able to alter your lighting actually within the particular dialog now you also have here this ambient option now I think I am going to create an ambient light because perhaps some of these leaves you might feel are slightly too dark I I don't want to mess about with our nominal distance and a few settings anymore quite happy with the way these are working but maybe some of these leaves I here just want to be I just want to have a little bit more light apply to them you know perhaps it's not quite realistic that if you had a you know sunshine coming over from the top left or whatever these would be in total total darkness but as dark as they are so let's contextually click again go up to new create new light and what we're gonna do is we're gonna create an ambient light again you can leave the intensity at a hundred percent because were going to adjust the intensity options here in the dialog box a particular by the way something I should have mentioned previously when I created the spotlight and you'll notice perhaps here again the color I have actually chosen a slightly warm color again going with the design of the scene I'm choosing a kind of a warm or tunnel type of color to actually use for my lighting and that's something you can use to create a certain feel mood in your scene you can actually choose to use cool lighting or warm lighting depending on what you want you can choose any color and that will tint the light and therefore that will then tint what is being lit with that color that you choose so I'm happy with this color anyway I think it's going to suit the scene let's hit OK on that and you'll notice that that's just kind of given the rest of the leaves here it's everything's actually been affected by the by this ambient light which by the way I should have named I'm going to do that now let's just so we know where we are okay that's our ambient light and maybe maybe it's a little bit too much maybe we can take our ambient lighting down to say 15 ok I'm quite happy with that I like the way we've got a little bit of brightness on these closer leaves here but I also like the way that these haven't gone into complete sort of darkness here everything's got a little bit of lighting applied to it I'm really happy with that scene now okay so we are really getting there now we're nearly at the end I think at the tutorial but what I've left till till the end is perhaps one of the slightly trickier sort of parts to get your head around although don't don't worry it's not it's not too crazy this what we're going to do we're gonna create two instances of our particles okay if you remember back at the beginning I showed you that commercial that I'd made and I talked about how there was some background particles and some foreground particles and how I'd sandwiched the actress by rotoscoping her out I'd sandwiched her between those two particle layers in order to make it really feel like she was sat in the scene well we're gonna do a similar thing with our type here so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to name this layer here particles front a sham law I'm gonna name the particles near and there's a reason for that it will help you perhaps see what it is we're doing in just a moment can i duplicate that layer by pressing command D and I'm gonna drop that underneath my type layer and I'm gonna call that layer particles far okay now what I want you to do is just solo this particles near layer like so alright so we're just looking at this particles remember this is just this particles for at the moment is an exact duplication of this layer here all right at the moment they're exactly the same thing what we're going to do is we're going to alter the visibility of some of these particles so that what we have it only the nearest particles to the camera visible in this layer and we're just going to have the farthest particles from the camera visible in this layer okay and how do you do that well don't worry you don't have to get in there and start rotoscoping all of these different things out or painting them out or getting into some crazy kind of workload it's it's quite simple to do inside particular itself and you know logically again if you look at the particular menu system what we have here is a visibility option if you open that up what you have is something again can look a little confusing at first don't worry we're not gonna look at all of these settings okay we don't need to the only settings we need to look at are this far vanish far start fade near start fade a near vanish now again the clue is kind of in the name here all right what this is this is the vanishing point for the particles that are farthest away now what that means is that twenty thousand pixels of leaf from the camera all right and this is this is actually where it takes its measurement from it takes its measurement from the camera lens if you like how far away would the particles vanish how far away do they have to get from the camera before they vanish and at the moment twenty thousand pixels you probably you know you wouldn't even notice and vanishing I think they become so small Bo so and they've reached that distance so what happens if you bring that measurement down well at first if you've ever messed around with this you might thought well nothing we just keep going and have some patience and what you'll find is when we get to around about the kind of mm ish here we go I expect to see there we go what happens is you're bringing the point at which the particles vanish closer and closer to the camera okay so you keep going oh maybe hold down command to kind of you know slow the scrolling of those figures down a bit let's say something like I don't know let's say 700 all right what we're saying now is that 700 pixels away from the camera any particles that reach a further distance than 700 away from the camera will disappear so all we're left with are the closest particles now this fast start fade what that means is if we Charlie and say a slightly lower figure than 700 say 600 you'll see that what's happening is at 600 pixels from the camera these leaves are starting to fade away until they reach the vanishing point now as it happens in this instance I don't want than to fade I just want them to vanish at that point at 700 and let's say for now okay so there we go quite simply we've created our nearest particles now what of course we want underneath because we're creating a little sandwich here if you imagine this is our top layer of bread all right the type is our filling and this particles far is our kind of our lowest piece of bread in the sandwich that we're making these need to be the exact opposite of these particles as in we need to be showing all the rest of the particles in this layer and so what we need to do is take this measurement of 700 all right and very simply we go across to our particles far layer open up visibility and instead if the farm vanished and fast start fade being 700 we want the near start fade and the near vanish to be 700 and just to prove the point let's unsolo on near layer let's solo our far layer and let's type in 700 here and 700 here so do you see what's happened what's happened is of course it's removed anything that's nearer to the camera than 700 pixels okay so we've created a perfect sandwich of our father's particles than 700 away there and our nearer than 700 particles here if we add them together we have our scene perfectly spliced at this 700 pixel point right perfectly spliced together and if we switch our type on what we will find is do you see here let's just scrolled forward a bit till we see what's happening we have now got all of these particles sat perfectly behind our type player and all of these nearest particles in fronts and we've created far more believable scene our type is sat in the scene really nicely however we want to do a camera move through this scene and by doing camera move we do open up a little bit of a gotcha because these settings do correspond to where the camera is so as we move the camera through the scene the particles are nearer and father to the camera change and it can create a little bit of an issue there is a workaround to that and I am proposing to do another tutorial in which I discuss that because it is to be fair a little bit more of an advanced setting but you know let's add a little camera moving because we you know we have created our camera so let's go back to the beginning of our scene here let's hit peak position and let's keyframe it and if we go up to our scene here we press C to cycle through our camera tools press it again press it again press it again and here we go we've got our zoom tool let's the zoom because you know I want to do this because I really want to show off particular ability to really you know fly through this this scene here and I just loved the way the particles you know show off their kind of relationship in 3d space let's set a keyframe where we zoomed all the way in front of the type here let's go to the end of our scene what we're going to do is we're going to ctrl click on position and we're gonna hit reset and that's that's great that's lovely and what we've got is really nice move here through the scene okay I'm really happy with that B you'll notice this is the this is the sort of gotcha that I'm talking about some of these particles that should be further away because we've resumed our camera towards these particles they're now closer to the camera than they were so therefore they've popped into our near layer here okay now don't worry if you don't get your head around that at the moment what we're gonna do is a quick workaround which is this we're going ghetto player and quite simply 70 frames if we hit T to reveal opacity we are going to mix our type down and a hundred here which actually I think I think let's say we don't want our camera to to be moving all the way through the scene let's give ourselves a second hold at the end here let's move our camera position keyframe to 100 frames okay and actually while we're at it let's also press shift F 9 and what that does is that create an easy ease keyframe which just buffers our our camera move just slows it down to just create a little bit of reality to the camera move which I think definitely definitely adds to to the to the feel of the piece and what we're gonna do is we're gonna mix our type layer up to 100% at that same keyframe point there at frame 100 okay and what we've got here is a lovely move back like this really showing off those particles that we've created and then at the end here we've got our autumn layer mixing up and you haven't got any sort of confusion between these nearer and further particles having a kind of an issue as we move the camera through the scene alright there's a little bit of a cheeky workaround but you know I think for this tutorial it's the appropriate thing to do okay we really are very very nearly there all we're gonna do now is we're going to add a little bit of grading to this scene we're going to add some motion blur we're gonna round some depth of field and then we're going to call it a day so let's let's move forward let's double click camera and we're going to bring up these camera settings again and quite simply let's enable depth of field and let's hit OK and what you'll notice here you see how this leaves a little bout focus okay I'm quite happy with how that's looking in fact I should I want more I want more than that so let's double click our camera again alright and let's increase our blur level to say 150 okay yeah that's created a really nice depth of field to to the scene you see these see these as they come in really nice bit of depth of field to those to those leaves there just adds a little bit extra to our scene I'm really happy with that okay I think that will do for now and what we can also do is we can add a little bit of motion blur to our scene as well why don't we do that because everything's on the move isn't it and so let's select our soar a global motion blur icon up here and then what we'll do is we'll select sorry that's not the motion blur button is it motion blur is here let's select our motion blur icon for are appropriate layers which are tight and particles cool because although remember we're not animating our type in that we're not we're animating just the opacity we're not moving it but we're moving the camera so there will be some motion blur applied to that type of subtle probably but it will be there and you know subtle is good in our field you know it's the subtle things that if you take care of those really does help with creating a you know a really nice piece and you'll see though look look how long it's taken to process this now that we've switched our motion blur one you know and our depth of field really does slow things up which is why it's good to do this there you know at the end if we can I mean you know it's it's gone a little crazy perhaps on these maybe the maybe the depth of field is a little high maybe turn it back down to a hundred but you can treat these settings to suit you you know I'm showing you how to do it up to you how how much of a flavor you give this so now we're gonna do is a little bit of grading so if we can't actually click again and we go across to new adjustment layer alright and what we're going to do in fact actually for this let let's be sensible let's switch our motion blur off for the moment okay inside our adjustment layer and this gets the end of our scene here like so we're going to contextual II click again in our effect controls panel and I'm gonna scroll down to Magic Bullet Looks okay now if you haven't got looks don't worry you could do this using levels curves tricks like that but you know let's show off what magic look a bullet looks does shall we for the sake of this tutorial it creates this little as dialog here now if we hit edit like so what it does it brings up separate kind of application which sort of sits alongside after-effects and what you can do if you just roll over the looks type here it brings up all of these choices and what I want to do as you'll see I've already selected one of these menus all you do is you just you know twirl them open find one that you like the look of and you can choose to apply it and I'm gonna choose to apply subtle film there we go okay and I'm happy with that so all we need to do is click on finish like so and I think that's added a really nice feel it's just kind of gelled it all together it's reduced the sort of orange saturation of the autumn time it's just kind of blended everything together really really nicely I'm really happy with the way that looks now and by the way if you hit T on your adjustment layer okay bring up opacity you can control if we scroll it down yeah look at that you've got perfect control over how much of that effect is applied which is really really nice and you I think don't don't you think that that's much nicer I I personally do I think that's fine I think that she looks quite nice I think that's just got a little bit more class about it alright I just think that's and it's such an easy way to grade that is neat just open up looks open up that particular preset and bang there you go I think that's a really really nice way of going about things and if your clients happy with it well you want to a winner aren't you so let's now create our final stage which is create solid we're gonna create a black solid like so and why don't we name this vignette because that is what it's going to be will okay that they're actually while we're here let's rename our adjustment layer as grade and we'll even call it looks so that we know what's going on in there and with our vignette layer selected what we're going to do is grab our little pencil we're gonna just very very quickly draw out and it can be rough this it really can it you know because we're gonna really really feather this out there we go that's create a sort of a mask kind of like this that'll do it hit em to reveal the mask properties and we're gonna swap that around from being an additive master or subtractive so that what we're left with are these kind of corners here and what we're going to do is hit f4 feather and let's dial feather up quite a lot you know really quite a lot and now what we can also do is just twirl open your master settings like so and let's expand the mask until you're happy that we've just got this kind of nice vignette going on maybe increase the feathering a little bit more increase your new expansion just a little bit more now click away beautiful switch that off to see the difference I think that's absolutely what we wanted and I'm really really happy with that and I hope you are too I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial let's do a little preview shall we let's press bring us up to hundred percent and if you hit the tilde key on your keypad what that does is it just concentrate on what you're hovering over inside After Effects if you were to do that with the timeline it would just concentrate on the timeline on the project panel for example really nice way to get in and focus on a particular part of your After Effects application so let's hit the tilde key and I'm gonna hit 0 on my keypad and we can have a lovely little render to have on the car and I'll see you in just a second ok guys so I really hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and I hope you liked the end result I think we've covered a lot of ground over the last hour regarding the particular menu system and we've covered some interesting topics such as using custom particles lighting visibility physics a whole range of options but of course there is much more to be explored please Barry this is just one approach of an almost infinite variety as particular is a very versatile tool once you get head around the menu system particular opens up a whole world of effects it is well worth learning honestly try playing around with it dial values in to see what happens just mess about have fun try to take a logical approach to it as well if you can I've tried to demonstrate in this tutorial that the menu system is there to help you things are named sensibly so if you need to adjust the emitter look under the emitter menu if you need to adjust the particle size or the life or the color of a particle then those options are under the particle settings now this might seem like I'm stating the obvious but really it took me a while to get around to this structured way of thinking and once you do you really start to be able to get results quicker and when you do make your own version this project hopefully you will or you create your own unique designs or special effects with particular I'd love for you to post a link in the comment section below I'd also love for you to post a comment let me know what you think of this tutorial also if you have any questions please far away and I'll check back when I can so thanks for watching my name is Owen Street and I'm pleased to be making this on behalf of red giant TV I hope to see you next time thanks Owen great stuff we hope to have you back again soon to share more of your techniques as I mentioned earlier Owen is the motion graphics artists positive and designer and he works at a company called 422 based in Manchester England you can find them at 422 TV also you can see more of Owens work at both WWE hands net /om street and @ww mo comm /join street don't forget you can download a free trial version of trapcode particular and the entire trap code suite at red giant software comm and you can get tons of free presets for red giant plugins at red giant people calm finally I want to mention that if you're looking to keep up with what we're doing at red giant whether it's a tutorial contest product release or whatever just follow us on Twitter Facebook and on our blog once again I'm all Rabinowitz for red giant TV I'll see you next time you [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 22,984

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, gaming, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, how to, diy, maker, iron man, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, vlogger, vlogging

Id: -TTBzn0Fqgo

Length: 65min 22sec (3922 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018