Create Particles Along a Path | After Effects Tutorial (No Plugins)

hey what's going on Internet in this video we're about creating a quick technique which is creating particles along a path hope everyone's doing well today my name is Josh Noel and I'm from Sun duck film so this is gonna be a really quick video I'm creating these awesome particles by a path a custom path that you can create and customize yourself and this is great for revealing on titles and logos and also great for creating subtle particle backgrounds that you can easily control there's a handful of options here and is a really cool quick technique to help you enhance your After Effects projects and Before we jump into our tutorial once they thank you to premium beat for sponsoring this video premium B is a royalty-free music provider for your creative video and motion graphic projects they have an extremely popular library with thousands of songs to choose from and they have a very easy in depth search in menu filter system so you can quickly find the best songs for your video so for your next video project be sure to check out premium beat.com for your royalty-free music so let's go ahead and start creating our custom particle paths right now all right we got After Effects loaded up and we have a tutorial composition all we have in here is a background just a title animation but we're gonna focus on the particles and we're gonna get started on it right now so in order to create particles along the path what we're gonna do is go to layer new null object and we're gonna grab the pen tool right here and we're gonna draw out our path and this can do anything that we want it to do so so I'm simply gonna like zoom out here and I want my particles to start over here on the left side the composition and I'm just gonna draw out like these nice you know vertices and you know we're just gonna say hey this is where I want our particles to go and simply is just gonna follow this path that we just created like so and also you could have just created a circle with the ellipse tool as well it doesn't matter what path you create you can use any you know tool to create a mass and when you have your path ready to go you open up mask 1 and you go to the mask path and you can copy it so ctrl C on a PC command C on a Mac and then you hit P Arnn keyboard for position and come here at the beginning your timeline and paste in that data so ctrl V and I complete the mask man because we don't need it and now simply our no object will follow this path like so and the best thing about this is you get these keyframes that allow you to stretched out the animation to be however long you want to be sleepy drug that last keyframe out and you know it's no problem at all and now let's go to layer new solid and we'll call this particles and then we'll go to effect simulation cc particle world and the first thing I want to do is get this to follow our path so what we'll do here is we've come here to the producer and we're gonna come here to the position XY and Z and we're gonna create an expression for these to follow our you know our no object path so I have these expressions right here I'll drop these in the description so you can copy them as we go so simply what we'll do is we'll copy the first expression here and I'll come here to position X and we'll alt click the stopwatch and we'll paste that expression in there now the only thing you might have to change is the null object so my null object is set to no 11 so I was going to type that in there so probably no one just make sure depending on your null object number this is where you know it says it right here so no one loved in my case then we'll go ahead and copy the second expression and we'll all click the stopwatch for position Y we'll paste that expression in there and make sure that there's no eleven as well grab the last expression copy it and then we'll all click stopwatch for position Z at the top and we'll paste that in there and make sure it says to correct a null object and then on that last expression you'll get an error just make sure the null object is a 3d layer and you could put the particles underneath the null object and now the particles will follow the path and this looks you know terrible but we got the right idea going here and now we can start adjusting the particles to make this look really good and turn this into an awesome composition and of course we're gonna do a lens flare as well here built inside of After Effects to add on to this so let's go ahead and work on the particles first and then we'll jump onto like a lens flare to you know make this look awesome so it's go ahead and open up the particle world and let's go right into the particle go right into the good stuff and here's the particle type we can change this to whatever we want I want to do a faded sphere you know you can do whatever you want try polygon cubes those are really cool but here is our faded sphere and then let's come here through the burst size and I want to set this to point zero eight I'm gonna come here to the death size and set this to point zero four or you keep it at point zero eight it's up to you I'm the size variation up to 100% and the max opacity up to 100% and then I would come here and I could change the color of our birth color I could change the DEF color if I want to okay so now we got the particle ready to go let's go ahead and maybe increase the birth rate up to about six and then we could also increase the longevity up to about four seconds or so and this will allow us to keep more particles on as you know over time and this will allow us to eat more particles up over time now this is still looking pretty bad but this is all in the physics now so let's go ahead and open up the physics and come here to the animation and we'll set this to twirly I really liked his animation it's really nice alright and we're still a work in progress so go ahead and bring the velocity down to 0.06 and they'll kind of contain the particles a little bit but they're still going crazy so let's go ahead and set the gravity down to zero we don't want any gravity and you know things are looking a little bit better and come here to the inherent velocity percent and it's let's just up to five percent and then it's come here to the extra let's set this down to zero and now we're really starting to see that trail of particles and starting to look really good and one thing we can do here is animate the extra angle and this will kind of rotate the particles if you will so what we'll do here is okhla the stopwatch for extra angle and we'll type in time asterisk 100 and we click off this and this will add a little bit more animation to our you know particles like so okay so now let's go back into the producer and let's set the X radius down to zero the Y radius to zero for the Z radius this sets us up to like point four kind of moves us out by a little bit and you see that kind of creates a little bit of depth to our particles and a little nice wave so it looks pretty cool so let's go ahead and continue working on this real quick so let's go back into the particle and come here to the volume shade and it's up to about 40 percent and then I'll come here to extras it's come here to depth cue and it set the type to fade let's go ahead and bring the volume shake down it's like 40 percent there you go so now we have our particles in here and they look pretty cool so we kind of have a little bit of you know design here with our you know animation along a path and then what we do here is turn on motion blur for our particles and turn on the top so you have extra blurriness in there and that looks great so now let's go ahead and work on our lens flare so go scope to layer new solid and we'll call it flair and if you have to plug in optical flares I would suggest using it at this time but if you don't I'm not gonna use it we're going up to effect generate and we're gonna add lens flare and I'm gonna go right to the 105 Prime preset I really like this one and simply all we're gonna do is alt click the stopwatch for flare Center and we'll go to our knoll 11 or whatever no objects you're using we'll hit P on keyboard for position go right into that expression and we'll just grab the pick whip and bring it to the position and now the lens flare will follow our path like so very easily toggle switch the modes and set the blend mode to like screen so now we'll see our particles in flare and all that bring down the flare brightness down to like 20% and then you can also go up to effect color correction curves and we can change the color of this so you know start optimizing our color correction all right when you have something you like and you just stop there and now let's go back to our particles layer and let's go to effect stylize glow so let's increase the glow radius up to maybe about 60 and then it's a glow intensity up to like maybe two to three intensity there and now our particles are beginning to pop and then one last touch that we can do this is go to layer new adjustment layer go to effect noise engrain and let's add noise and set the noise up to maybe like five or six percent your nunchuck use color noise and this will add looks like a little bit more you know dimension to our composition and when soulsand done you should have a composition like this and then what I added on top of this composition was an extra lens flare and some dust that in helped enhance this composition and I got this asked us from a awesome 8,000 asset pack called cine punch I wish obviously range from the lens flares to the particles all the way to you know transitions for Adobe Premiere 2300 sound effects and tons of other elements like fractals fire and fog and since there's over 8,000 assets in this pack it just brings tremendous value to every project no matter what you're working on there's always gonna be elements that you can use across any type of project so if so if you want check out sending punch in all eight thousand plus assets you check our links in the video description will take you right over to City punch and also for our title animation I use an extension for after fair Skol toka which has over 1300 elements inside of After Effects with his own user interface I'll just go ahead and drop that link in the description if you want to learn more so this you can create your own custom particle paths using the built in the particle system inside of After Effects so I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel we post to post-production tutorials every single week right here on the channel you can also hit me up on my Instagram and chat with me along with many other creators on our discord those links are in the video description and always be creating [Music]

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 263,289

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial Particles, After Effects Particles, After Effects Path Particles, AE Particles, Create Particles After Effects, After Effects Tutorial No Plugins, Create Particles in After Effects, Particle After Effects Tutorial, SonduckFilm, SonduckFilm Tutorial, Particles Along a Path After Effects

Id: -m1TRt4pubM

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019