Falling SNOW Particles in After Effects

that's right we're finally doing an After Effects tutorial [Music] hey guys your teen town ski the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial we're going to be jumping into After Effects and learning how to create a falling snow effect all from scratch now I know a number of you have been asking for After Effects tutorials for a while and the reason I've done it sooner is I've just not been as proficient in After Effects as some of the other Adobe apps however there are some awesome tutorials out there on YouTube that have really helped me develop my skills so without further ado let's jump into it rightio so we're now in After Effects we've created a new document and the first thing to do is create a new composition so a composition is similar to a sequence in Premiere Pro and you can have multiple compositions in one After Effects document and each composition gets its own set of layers down here and its own timeline over here so first of all let's go to composition at the top and select a new composition and you've got lots of settings here I'm going to give this the name snow and you can set your width and height to whatever you like it might be 1920 by 1080 I'm going to go with 800 by 600 the size of a high-res dribble shot and something a bit smaller so my laptop doesn't melt so the frame rate 30 that is good you can choose which resolution you preview playback in so we'll leave that set up full for now you can also set the duration so I've got 30 seconds here in the background color but I'm just going to go with black and click OK and if you need to edit any of those settings just go to composition composition settings and there you go you've got all of those options there so it's created the new composition and if I go over to the project panel here you can see we have that new comp and it's automatically added it down here as well so you can see snow is listed and as you add or open more compositions they just run as tabs across this section here now if you're looking at this thinking my screen doesn't look like this that's fine just go up to window down to workspace you've got lots of different workspaces to choose from I'm using the standard one and I've it a little bit by introducing a few extra panels but similar to the other Adobe apps you can turn these panels on and off drag them around until you customize your workspace exactly how you like it okay so we've got our new comp created we've got our layers section and our timeline here ready to go we're just going to import one more thing file import and file and that's going to be an image here so I'm just going to import this image of a photographer with these settings and click open and if you'd like to download this project file I will also link this in the video description so you can see it's imported the photographer above our composition we're just going to drag this image from the project window inside that snow composition and you can see it adds it as a layer and then we now have some stuff on our timeline now of course this image is quite high-res so it's far too big so if we just click the arrow here and just twirl this down we get a few more settings we can change positions scale rotation opacity loads of stuff we're just going to click and drag to the left to bring that scale down now you can click and drag or you can simply click enter a value and press return and it will scale to that size so let's collapse those panels okay so we've added an image this is kind of a nice to have a a bit of icing on the cake but we'll turn that off for now and actually start creating this particle effect so first of all let's go to layer new and solid and I'm going to very appropriately name this layer particles effect I'm going to leave all of the sizes the same and the color yet black is absolutely fine click OK and you can see it now adds that solid to our snow composition and is also listed up here as well so with this particles effect solid has selected we're going to go up to effect down to simulation there's lots of fun to be had here playing with all these different effects but the one we're going to be using for this tutorial is cc particle world and you can see it has this to the effect controls panel and we can turn this off and on by clicking the effects icon and the first thing I'm going to do is 12 down the grid and guide section and just turn off all of these grids and guides especially at that perspective grid next what I'm going to do is just twelve out all of the other panels now there's a lot of settings in here and it can be quite intimidating at first but don't worry we're going to go through them in a moment so we can preview the default particle world effect by pressing the play or stop button here or just spacebar on the keyboard and you can see what we get is anything but snow but that's fine and we can scrub through this by just clicking where the playhead is on the timeline and just dragging to the left and the right so first of all we have the birth rate this is the rate at which new particles are spawned and if I bring this all the way up you can see it becomes considerably more dense and if I drag this to the left it becomes a lot more sparse now the longevity below is how long each particle lasts for so I could drag this all the way to the left and you can see the particles are spawned and they disappear very quickly or you can drag it to the right and they will stick around all the way to the edge of the composition but again we can go and adjust that a bit further in a moment so let's collapse those next we've got the producer section we can adjust the position we don't want to do that but we do want to adjust the radius because at the moment our particle effect is in the center and we're creating snow so we want this to fill the entire composition area so let's drag radius X to the rightness value here radius X is the horizontal axis and then below we've got radius y the vertical axes and then underneath we've got radius Z which is depth that is bringing out towards you to create more depth and we can go and tweak all of these a bit more in a moment because having depth when you've got snow is really really useful because you've got some particles in the foreground somewhere in the background so it really does help create depth within a composition okay next onto physics animation explosive well that doesn't sound right to me but we are going to use directional axes so you can see now that changes the animation style and it comes in from the left all the way to the right now the velocity is set to 1 this is the speed effectively if we change that from 1 to 0.01 you can see it's now considerably slower but it's also just falling from the top to the bottom and the reason is because we've dropped the velocity or the speed so much these particles are being spawned and then they're literally just falling if I crank up the velocity to 10 you can see they're just firing across the screen so we go with naught point naught 1 for the velocity and you can adjust the gravity and the resistance as well if you want but we'll leave those as they are for now the next one we're going to pay attention to is the gravity vector now at the moment the gravity y is 8 at a value of 1 X and Z is at 0 if we adjust the X you can see we start to create an angle so if I go let's say minus 1 or - not 0.5 just so we have a slight angle on our Pascal's this just helps simulate snow a bit more effectively as if there's some wind moving the snow because of course snow doesn't just fall perfectly vertically straight to the ground ok there we go so we're pretty much finished with the physics section next we're on to the particle section and the first thing we're going to do is change the particle type from line to well have a lot of fun with these there's lots of different particle types here you can create all manner of crazy things but we're going to be using faded sphere for this tutorial so we have those circles with a nice nice soft glow around the edge now here it says birth size and death size so the birth size is the size of a particle when it is born when it's spawned in the death size is when it leaves so if I bring this down so it's nice and small so particles spawn in really small and the death size is a little bit larger and I can also crank up these size variations so if I bring it down the particles become a lot a lot more similar in size if I crank this up it creates a lot more variety and because snow and the size of snow and all that is pretty random we want to get something that is as random as possible and you can change the opacity as well I like the fact is that 75 I don't want everything to be a hundred percent just because it just looks too too fake but we'll set that to 75 and of course you can set the birth and the death color but because this is snow we're going to go with white white throughout so there we go we can preview some of those changes now and we've created something that is a bit more reminiscent of snow now we can go back to some of these settings that we changed at the beginning so the birth rate if we crank this up we're getting much more towards a blizzard so you can see something like this and we can bring it down and it's a lot more subtle so I'm gonna keep this quite low and the longevity of course if you bring it down these particles they don't stick around very long we want our snow to run through the entire scene so if I just bring this up somewhere like this that looks pretty good to me so we've created the snow particle effect but at the moment is just too fast it's still way too fast so what we're going to do is right-click on the particles effect layer and then go precompose make sure you have this one here selected move all attributes into the new composition and you can give this a name if you want to click OK and it effectively turns this into another composition so we can double click this and go inside it and we've still got our particle effect there and you can see it just appears here as another tab and we can close that back down to go back to our main composition but now what we can do is now we've precomposed that we can right-click it and select time and go enable time remapping now just make sure that your playhead here as you can see it's created two keyframes one here at the start and one at the end just make sure your playhead is on that first keyframe at the beginning and you can see time remap as appear and it starts set at zero so if we click on this here we could change this to let's say we'll type in 15 seconds and press return and if we now play through this you can see our snow is a lot slower and you can see it's just trying to render that there so let it play through a couple times and it will slowly get a bit smoother there we go so that is much more like real snow and something else we can do is we can select this particle effects layer as well and here we have motion blur so if I just check this box here it means our snow will also have a very subtle motion blur effect applied to it which seems very relevant as the snow does have motion and the last thing we're going to do is just switch back on our photographer image then we have our particle effect comp on top of that image and we can play it through and there we go that's how to create falling snow and After Effects or from scratch I think that went rather well so if you'd like to download the source files for this they are linked in the video description there is also a link to my patreon if you'd like to find out more information if you've got any questions or comments about anything we did today in the tutorial please do and drop them down below but as always liked this video if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Dansky

Views: 163,493

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Id: JQLc21R8uws

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018