Classic Tutorial | Music Visualization with Trapcode Suite

[Music] hey our own Rabinowitz here for red giant tv.com recently there have been a ton of really cool videos produced using trapcode particular and trap code sound keys such as this one called silky way or this one called let yourself feel they use music to drive the creation of particles in a beautiful and artistic way in this episode of red giant TV Harry Frank is going to talk about music visualization and he'll show you how you can do it with the trap code sweet take it away Harry hi folks Harry Frank here and today I'll be showing you some musical visualization ideas you'd attract to a particular and trap code sound keys this has been a popular topic lately so I hope we have some fun with it I'm going to start with one of my favorite pieces from Claude Debussy and the piece I'll be created was my visualization okay first things first let's drop the music into a new composition and I'm going to work with a 720 by 405 16 by 9 composition so first thing I want to do is create my key frame data from the music so I'm going to use trapcode sound keys for this which is an awesome visualization tool so it's under check code sound keys and in the audio layer settings I'll set my music layer to be the audio layer input and I'm going to use all three ranges here let me go open range is 2 & 3 and I make both of these active and essentially what I want to do is make sort of a low mid and high set of ranges and eventually what I'm going to do is have sort of the lower notes drive my position a little bit the mid-range notes will drive them even more and then the higher notes will drive them even higher so it's kind of like the higher notes will push the position of the emitter higher in the air and the lower notes will push it push it a little bit less so I'm just going to tweak these so that we've got things on the right position here so I've got some of the melody going on right here I'm just going to kind of isolate that narrow little spot and then push this down here we have a little bit of a lower range going on so from here we have to have sound keys right these key frames there's no way to make this sort of a live output that we can use with expressions or whatever we actually have to go through and hit apply and what this is going to do is calculate the music look at the ranges and write keyframes to this sound Keys layer that I've created so it just takes a minute and now we've got all three outputs output one two and three created with our three different ranges now next I'll just turn that off we just need the key frames you don't need to see what's going on okay when you say what I'm doing and then create a placeholder solid let's make this perhaps 50 by 50 pixels and we just want to create our position movement with this so I'm going to do this with expressions because that's what you have to do with sound keys you have to do some very basic expressions and I found very complicated we're just going to use some addition subtraction and a little bit of multiplication so if I create an expression the first thing I need to do are get all three values of these outputs from sound keys so I'm just going to use variables a B and C so pick whip this first one put a semicolon I'll make B output number 2 and C is going to be output number 3 I'm going to take all of these and add them together and assign them to a value of Y these are just variables variables are just letters or words that we can use to assign to calculations or otherwise very long sequences of code that reference a value now when I've used Y here again this is just an arbitrary variable it doesn't really matter that I've used Y but I've used it because it's going to be the Y value next I'm using the word value value is equal to the position or the existing value of the parameter that I've made the expression for so in this case value is equal to the original position and then to that position I'm going to add this value here to the Y value of my position so essentially it's going to leave the value alone so I can freely move this around but on top of that existing value it's going to push the Y position up and down along with the data of the sound keys so the way I need to do this is by taking into consideration the X and y values this is called an array and array is a single value position or perhaps scale or rotation or anything like or I should say orientation anything that is a single value that contains multiple values this is called an array so when I want to add something to an array apt take both of those into consideration arrays are written inside brackets so we always have a start and an ending bracket my x value I don't want to change so I'm just going to add 0 to that my Y value I want to add this Y value right here which is a compilation of all the output values of sound keys so essentially I'm adding 0 to the X and a B and C to the Y now what's kind of happened though is when we add values because 0 is up here on the top left and we add values to that a positive direction exactly downward so I need to go in here and set this to subtract like I said I wanted to have outputs 1 2 & 3 have sort of a different effect I wanted to to have a greater value and 3 to have a greater value so what I'm going to do is just multiply the values here so I'm going to multiply output 2 by 2 and I'm going to output output to 3 by 3 so those higher values are going to result in a higher position so sort of an alternate way of doing this and because like I said I've added this to the position of it I can actually modify even though there's an expression in there so let's keep this down here towards the bottom maybe I'll set this mid-range to 1.5 [Music] so it's kind of working like I said it's a little bit of a well there's a little bit of a fudge factor going on here because we're not really measuring pitch we're only at measuring amplitude and I'm just measuring amplitude in different places but ultimately we're not really going to have this raised in Y value along with the pitch because we just don't have enough ranges in sound keys to do that so I'm just kind of approximating it but I think it works fairly well for what we're doing here so now that I've got my expression created for my placeholder here I'm going to apply that to a light it's just easier to see with a white solid not as easy to see with a after-effects light so I'm going to go in your under new light we'll call this emitter and create that now it's going to give us a warning saying oh there's nothing for this light to be doing right now which is just fine so I'm going to copy and paste this expression into my light this will admit our particle selecting get rid of this placeholder now and just like that solid I can move this light around as I need so let's create some particles here so I'm create a new solid I'm going to make several layers of particle so this is going to be a particular one this is going to be kind of a smoky shape coming off of the light emitter and of course let's make it the size of the composition this will work a lot better and just for organisation's sake and I make that black so let's apply chocolate particular and set the emitter to be a light in there because I've called this emitter the light will now take over the position of where the particles are generated now you can see we've got a long way to go but we've got the basic setup of a light emitter and we've got particles going that's a good place to start now let's go through and zero some things out we don't want any velocity going and I'm also going to zero out some of these things like velocity from motion which sort of throws the direction or throws particles in the direction of the emitter and I'm also going to set the velocity random down to zero so we just have a numerator moving up and down and sort of leaving particles wherever wherever it is what I'm going to do to create the motion of this is actually go into the physics section under air and set the wind to carry the particles in a certain direction negative Direction is going to carry them off to the left not very exciting they look a little clunky right now so let's go in or drop the size down we'll say to actually let's break it down all the way to one and let's raise the particles per second count way out I'm going to set this to 2000 so let's just kind of drawn them in midair so here's where we get it feeling nice and organic and very flowing we're going to go to the turbulence field section and don't let me drag this open so you can read this stuff the turbulence field essentially is a fractal noise map in three dimensions you can sort of think of it like a fog if you're walking through a fog and fog is a little denser in certain areas and less dense and other areas fractal noise and three dimensions is kind of the same way these denser areas or less dense areas are luminance maps that we can use to assign to things like particle size or position so if we affect the particle position in three dimensions with this fractal map in fact if I set those all the way up to maybe 250 we're going to see quite a bit of displacement going on here okay there's still a lot that we have to do but it's kind of getting there and you can see where this is going one thing I want to do is turn this evolution speed down this is sort of the cycling of that map the practical noise map with a 50 it makes it feel I think a little bit wobbly if I turn this down it feels a lot more smokey now one of the things we zeroed out at the beginning was this velocity from motion I turn this up so as my emitter moves in certain directions it's actually going to toss the particles in the direction that it's moving now I'll set that to a pretty extreme value let me bring that down [Music] so it's feeling fairly smokey or organic this is one of the things I kind of tell people like when you're really looking to create something smokey feeling in particular I don't really think that the trick is to go in and create sort of a you know cloud look particle make a big blob of smoke it just kind of shoots by the screen smoke has a lot of detail in it and you're really going to have lot more interesting results with a higher particle count and turbulence than you are with big chunky cloud particles now from here I also would like to do a little bit of tweaking to the octave scale and active multiplier now if I were to explain these it would actually take about 15 or 20 minutes and I'll spare you on this if you want a better explanation you can go to the trapcode particular support or you can also check out my trek code particular DVD and I want to make this into a commercial pad I just want to explain that I know for a fact that it takes quite a while to explain the multiplier and scale ultimately it's just one of the things you kind of play with to get the right results [Music] I'm going to turn this fade in time a little bit higher what this is when we emit a particle there's a certain amount of time that the particle will wait before it starts assuming the properties of the turbulence field so in terms of its position being affected it won't be affected by the turbulence in this case 0.65 seconds after it is born so basically it's sort of a time it tells the particle weight before it starts moving around with the turbulence field and I'm going to turn the velocity for motion up just a little bit more well maybe I'll set that to about thirty now one thing to make you aware of not that we need to change it but by default particles are going to emit and is 50 by 50 by 50 area around the light we actually have control over that with this setting right here so we can have a greater Z depth from that a better or Y or X depth [Music] now we're seeing the particles sort of die off as they hit the edge of the screen I'm going to push the particle life up to about six seconds and let's add a little bit of size random to these and I'm gonna set the transfer mode to add and change the color to something just a little bit bluish and I'll turn the opacity down so we get a little bit more of a smokey kind of feeling [Music] it feels like the velocity promotions probably a little bit too high so I'll set that back down to 10 just to make these particles settle down just a little bit they seem to be getting a little unruly now depending on the look that you're going for we could bump up the size of these just a little bit let me show you some alternates here so if we turn up the size maybe to about five or so we go into the shading section turn on the shadow let which adds just a little bit of a shadow behind each particle then go in the shadow settings and turn that up just a little bit maybe three is a little bit better of a particle size we bump up the particles just a little bit and add some shading we can get a little bit more of a kind of a fluid behavior rather than the smoky feeling that we're having before sorry bubbles underwater kind of feeling [Music] one other thing I want to do is go into the particle size over life and have that sort of scale down after the life of the particle now overall because I'm driving this with an expression I think this is really cool I can do this I'm going to drop these values down a little bit more maybe one point two and we'll try to for the time being so that the we don't have such an extreme change in values here [Music] so here I'm going to do a little mix of the two I'm going to leave this smoke the way we've got it just a couple changes here I'm going to take the opacity down quite a bit I'm going to duplicate this will call this particle smoke small and make a set of this with those smaller particles that I had before let's turn up the opacity and raise the particle count a little bit so it's feeling kind of smoky and watery and bubbly and I know has a nice kind of feel to it really it's up to you there's so many settings here in so many possibilities that really think you should go through and explore your own looks and ideas with this so I'm just kind of showing you the basic framework here when I was going through and setting up this lesson the choice of music and what the particles were doing sort of became an obvious pointer to me that this would look really good sort of hovering over the water and kind of a lunar ocean kind of scene so that's what I wanted to kind of set up here I'm going to add a little bit of a colorful head on the set of particles here so make a set of particles and it is our third set we'll just call this the head here and we'll make this very short and lifespan 0.5 seconds let's turn the size up and I don't know if we need shading on or not that's kind of well we'll figure that out I want to set the color over the lifespan so it's going to change colors over its lifespan and I actually kind of like the look of the spectrum look and yeah I'm actually going to turn off the shadow light here and let's turn down the opacity because we have the set to add together we have this blending modes to add and nudge this up just a little bit so we get a little bit more of a trail now to create an environment for this like I said I was sort of envisioning an ocean floor for this and I really tried with tsunami you seem like an obvious choice but I ultimately decided on doing this in trapcode form and I'll tell you why it integrates with camera a lot better and it's also easier to texture map so track court forum is going to create a body of particles that have no emitter but rather than emit have a birth life and death cycle they simply are there they're always there and we tell the whole body of particles what to do so in this case I want one single flat panel of particles and so oops I need to create a camera for my compositions let's go up here create a let's say a 28 millimeter camera and if I jump to the side view here is say we got three sets of particles and I go to my setting here you can see that I've got three sets of particles in Z so if I drop this down to one we've got one flat panel of particles and I'm going to rotate this on its side so let's go to the X rotation flip this down 90 degrees and move the center down like that now I'm going to extend the size outward in X&Y remember that this is y here this will come back to even though this is Z depth I'm actually using the Y size so let's scale that out and then we can squeeze these together with more and more particles and how many particles you want is up to you how much detail and how much patience you have for rendering now if you check out the red giant quick tips I go into a quick tip of how to set up a quick drafts which to sort of scale these down on on the fly as needed but well I'll just keep this with a simple set of particles let's say 600 by 300 now the trick to making this look like an ocean surface is to go into the fractal field this is very very similar in trapcode particular to the turbulence field in fact they almost could have the same name it's the same idea sort of fractal map in three dimensions and it can affect the size of the position or the XYZ displacement as well as the opacity in this case i'm going to use x y&z linked displacement and I need a few more particles in Y so well let's just set this to 600 by 600 and I'll see you is about a displacement sixty already looking like kind of a watery surface if I go to the fractal sum here and set this to absolute noise it starts looking even more like a watery surface again what we're really lacking is the detailed squeezing these together to look at make it look like a solid surface rather than a series of dots but that is really where the rendering process flows down so I'm going to leave that for one my last steps so from here I need to make a color map so I'm going to make a new composition and I'll call this I should call this color map and let's make a new solid go up to effect generate I'm going to make a ramp here that is a radial ramp and when they get sort of a blue like a dark kind of watery blue to a very very dark almost black kind of blue so over in my main composition I need to drop this color map inside my composition I turn that off and go into my form settings here going to my layer maps which are external maps go into the color and choose a color map to map the RGB to the RGB values of my comp and map it over x and y so to create a reflection with all this stuff in it I need to make a copy of this project so I'm just going to go to this main composition here duplicate it and we'll call this the reflection map now I'm going to open this up I can get rid of the color map and the form ocean and I can probably get rid of most of these not sure if we'll need those in there or not I'm just going to turn them off for now but we do need the the emitter and all that now we don't want this up-and-down motion going on for a reflection map so what I'm going to do is go into particular all the way to the bottom here underworld transform and transform my whole world 90 degrees so that we can just see it from that different perspective in fact I can offset this in Y from this angle you can also see that I widened out that the emitter size in Z quite a bit just kind of fudge it and bring that back in to about 25 for now so this is my reflection map I'm going to drop this in and I use that in that color map now to make this easier I'm actually going to split my comp view here so and I click on my comp window to make it active go up to new viewer and that's going to lock this into this view right here and I'm going to drag this tab over split my views and then I'm going to open this color map up here and lock that one so now and go into this reflection map and drop that in there and we should see that apply to my form color map there let's just give us a little bit more room to work with looks like I need to move this up the other way and also I need to make sure it's scaled properly perhaps I need to scale the X in just a little bit and why we'll call that good for now we can always go back and tweak now we've got sort of a projected reflection in that surface if I want it I can actually go back into that layer turn on some of these other layers here actually I need to match the transform world settings here so it's going to world transform set this to 90 and that's that offset value which was 160 which was negative 160 in the Y there goes so there we can see those smoky particles having sort of a reflection in that surface all right nudge these all up just a little bit more get a little more more detail on that watery surface and go this color map here and darken things up just a little bit more just bring this darker areas a little closer together and darken this blue up there we go and actually also in that color map we can add a little bit of that moon sort of reflection just by adding a simple solid and I'll smash that off and bring the opacity down so it's just going to add sort of a white reflective shiny streak down the surface like it was sort of reflecting the moon and bring the camera up just a little bit and sort of angle it downward okay so I can see I need to move that reflection map over just a little bit and let's start adding some finishing touches here I'm going to add a star map in the background again this is something that forum is really good at so let's create the form stars I don't like this being whitening and set this to black and let's apply trapcode form and go into our base form settings and set this to a layered sphere I'll set this to choose layers so it looks like that I'm going to set these to be really large 3000 by 3000 3000 sphere let's add more particles in X and actually we can have fewer particles and why we don't need that menu go another particle section turn up the size and turn up the size random now this point is saying well it looks like a perfectly grid organized set of stars but what we can do is go into the disperse and twist function and just disperse these particles randomly now dispersed is not animated so fortunately for us it works in three dimensions but the disperse is not going to randomly move unless we animate it over time or have something else control dispersion like audio reactor but in this case it's just going to have them well dispersed randomly which is pretty cool now right about that horizon line and the halfway point if you'd like the verticals to disappear from the halfway point below we can go into the quick maps and map opacity and draw a map that kills the opacity of all the particles beyond that halfway point or approximately in from there so again we still have all of our particles so let's get into adding some finishing touches to this I'm going to add some shine using an adjustment layer in fact I like to name my adjustment layers will make this shine using cope shine and I'm going to use a position from 3d space so what I'm going to do is create another reference layer a little light it's not really going to do anything it's just going to be a reference point of where the moon should be which is kind of like up and out of our line of sight here and we're going to use that position to drive the shine location now I cover this cover this a few times actually but there's a red giant quick tip where I covered this in a lot more detail about using shine in referencing and 3d position but if you follow this verbatim it should work just fine for you what we're going to do is create a source point expression so alt or option click the stopwatch there pick with that 3d layer and type a period lowercase T au uppercase e OMP so to comp parentheses start bracket zero zero zero so we're basically putting three dimensional zero array inside parentheses next to function called to come essentially what this does is convert the equivalent to D location of a 3d layer and we can use that to a sign of a two-dimensional source point so if we added some movement to our camera in fact I'm going to do that right now let's just go through and a little bit of wiggle to our camera we'll just have it kind of wobble around a little bit so I'll just use a simple wiggle command one comma 12 so this will wiggle one time a second as far as 12 pixels in in all directions of x y&z now let's go into our shine layer here set the transfer mode to let's say add and the colorized setting I'll just set this to a single color and we'll use kind of a warmer color like this like something maybe a little bit orange or maybe blue I don't know we'll see how it feels and I'm going to go a little bit more of an aqua color let's go go on that blue a kind of feeling and I like to have my camera a little bit lower of a view so on this shine layer we go in boost light a little bit and more importantly going to the shimmer settings and crank these up down a little bit of shimmer and interest to this now one thing I did that I looked really nice or at least interesting was use free well plug in or it's actually a pixel bender script called amino glass and essentially what it is is a chromatic aberration effect now before I let you preview it I'm going to set up a couple things right now I haven't set a background layer so everything I've set like the ocean of the particles and all that has all been on top of transparency so I haven't really had anything to create sort of a solid background so I still have some transparency behind everything so I'm going to create a black solid and put that way at the bottom below everything I'm also going to create a map here so I'm going to create a new comp and this will be my map connect typing around my microphone which sits right in front of my face so it's kind of hard so great a black solid great white solid let's mask off this white solid to create kind of a fuzzy oval map layer and let's drop this in we just need it as a map we don't need it to be visible let's turn that off go back to our Oh Manoa layer here and select this map layer Chrome add map if you want more information on this you can go to Amano calm it's too simple search for that Amin Oh glass and it'll come up with this pixel bender filter so what it does is create some refraction and aberration now the reason I find this interesting oops I need to make this into an adjustment layer is that as you state's another blog chromatic aberration actually comes from a lot of different light layers separating or different colors of light separating not just RGB which a lot of chromatic aberration simulations do so if we turn these up you know it's a bit extreme but let's I'm going to leave it right around three it makes this sort of dreamy feeling kind of look that I I thought was pretty cool and on this shine here this sub saturation is a little bit too high on this color so let's turn that down and give a little bit more chromatic aberration to things I'm just going to duplicate this adjustment layer and we'll also make another one for starglo anytime you've got water like this I think star glow is a very welcome addition so let's go in go trapcode star glow and let's not be afraid to use something other than the default settings so I'm going to go into this grassy star setting which gives a nice sort of greenish blue kind of setting take the street clink down as well as adjust the threshold upward so it's a little bit more subtle not hitting us in the face so I'm going to take this final composition go and do this it's called as Claire de Lune final and a little bit of color correction on this and use Magic Bullet mojo it's actually a really good tool for color correcting I shouldn't say correcting but stylizing motion graphics it just gives it some nice punch cooling warming whatever you need it to do so let's let this render real quick there so we could tone a few things down here turn down the Mojo a little bit maybe warm it up just to touch bleach is going to take out some of the saturation maybe I'm going to warm up that shine just a little bit so let's go to my shine layer go to the color there push it down a little into a warmer color and go into the star glow and reduce the opacity of that layer there we go now one thing I didn't do just to give the sort of feeling of motion was that in this form layer in fact let's do a temporary drop of this down to 100 by 100 pixels and turn up the particle size again this is just temporary so we can see it so this is a very low resolution approximation of what our surface is doing but what we can do in this fractal field is set some flow to move the displacement along so if I set this to a very fast value it's going to make these particles sort of feel like they're moving along but the reflection is staying put so it's going to give the illusion that our camera is sort of drifting along the surface of this motion I think that's pretty good so let's set our particle size back down to one and crank these back up to 2 5 by 2500 jump to our final here and let's do a quick ten-second preview [Music] thanks Harry as always beautiful stuff if you've enjoyed this tutorial you should check out Harry's work his website gray machine calm Harry is arguably one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to trap code particles and he has some great red giant guru preset packs like video rock that utilized his serious chops and if you're into presets check out red giant people calm where there are hundreds of free presets and templates for your red giant products including trapcode particular and Magic Bullet Looks don't forget you can always download a free trial of any of the red giant products that are used in this tutorial at red giant software com once again I'm Allen Rabinowitz for red giant tv.com see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 37,054

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

Id: 1U8KzRL77Ik

Length: 41min 24sec (2484 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2017