Glitter Text | After Effects Particle Tutorial | No Plugins Needed

oh ho hey guys and welcome to another fun After Effects to trial it's almost Christmas and I've realized I haven't really done an After Effects tutorial in a little while I also haven't done anything with particles or with text a little advance so I figured particle text genius now jokes aside in this tutorial I want to show you how to create all sorts of sparkly title text reveals in Adobe After Effects Ben out using any third party plugins now when it comes to particle effects I love red giant trapcode particular which is probably my favorite particle generator or boris FX particle illusion but they are paid third-party plugins or not everybody wants to shell out the additional money so in this tutorial we will be using CC particle world which comes included for free in Adobe After Effects CC just be whether it does have its limitations but that won't stop us from creating something pretty festive anyway now this is going to be an intermediate level tutorial and it will assume that you have a pretty good grasp on the fundamentals of how I do the After Effects works if he new to everything I've got a ton of beginner turtles that I'm going to link you down below so go check those out first before you come back here but now let's make it Sparkle and jump right into the tutorial welcome to the exciting world of Adobe After Effects I have a brand new empty project here and I've just imported a single file called flat cult or JPEG into my project this does this gradient golden background that I've created and as always if you do want to follow along with this tutorial you will be able to download this file from our website so simply go to surfaced studio.com ford slash downloads and you will be able to grab this file for free so you can follow along but let's get started and create a new composition I'm going to call this one included text leave the resolution on 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames per second and I'm going to set the duration to exactly 10 seconds but as always just feel free to tweak anything I'll show you in this video T you liking to create your own little glitter text title let's hit OK let's come up to the toolbar click into our composition and let's simply place down some text let's position it in kind of the center upper third of our composition and you can always use the align panel to make sure that that is perfectly centered if you can't see any of the panels that I'm showing you here you can simply come up to your main menu and under window you can enable or disable all of these different panels now it doesn't matter which one you use the one I'm using is called Berlin sans FB which is this nice solid text right here it's going to scale up my text just a little bit then I'm going to grab my flat gold JPEG image and drop that right into the backdrop now this will fit exactly on my composition at 1920 by 1080 if it doesn't you can simply kind of scale this down or hit ctrl or an F or command option + F if you're on a Mac to fit that image right into your composition so that's not kind of our backdrop but I kind of want to stencil this text out of this backdrop and for that with my flat gold layer selected that's coming to the effects & presets panel and search for this easy glass effect let's apply the effect to the flat gold background layer and in the effects panel let's pop open the surface settings let me just make this a little bit bigger so you can see let's change the bump map from flat gold over to glitter text because we want to stencil our text out of this golden layer now let's go to create this little bevel I'm actually go to hide my text layer so I can see there's a little bass going to create this little golden bevel stencil out of this background layer let me just zoom in a Loomis you can see this a little bit clearer in the CC glass effect settings mode to lower the softness to probably around six or so I want this to be just a little bit more solid kind of stencil I'm going to check the height up to maybe around 90 or so and then just set the displacement to a couple of hundred maybe 300 or so so that's going to offset the actual displacement along the edges a little bit and yeah that curve looks nice however I don't actually want the rest of this background to be visible so in my layer window I'm going to press f4 to review my track matte options I'm going to set the track matte on a flat gold background layer to alpha matte so essentially cutting this text out of the backdrop and now if that is really nicely stenciled gold glitter text that we're going to use let's select all layers with ctrl or command + a ctrl shift + C to pre compose those layers let's call this one text comp and hit okay so now I've got this little and tax credit but let's give it a little bit of a background to rest on for that let's simply create a new solid layer let me call this one background and I'm going to change the color over to black hit OK make sure the background sits below our text comp in the effects & presets panel let's search for the gradient ramp effect let's apply that to the background layer and the zoom out and just a tad in the effect settings for the gradient ramp I'm going to change the ramp shape from linear ramp over to radio so we end up with this little radial gradient here the start color I'm actually going to change to like a really dark ish blue that's not a very faint blue background because I think the yellow on blue will look quite nice and color I'm going to change to black I'm just going to drag the start point down and the end point uptick red is really really soft rather faint little blue gradient I think that kind of looks nice and to reduce all of this ugly banding that we have make sure you increase the RAM scatter Buddha Jack this up too and no cluster 200 or something it introduces a little bit of noise into the background but that also then gets rid of all of these ugly gradient bands so that actually looks pretty nice and let's get started adding some of those cool particles for that let's create a new solid in our composition I'm going to call this layer star particles hit OK I'm going to place this layer at the top so it's going to cover up everything else so now in the effects & presets panel let's search for the CC particle world effect and this one comes in built with Adobe After Effects let's apply this effect to our star particles layer and if you scrub through composition this is just a very simple particle emitter that spews a whole bunch of particles out and we now need to customize and tweak this to make this little star that kind of start emitting the around the shape of our text first off how are you mouse over the exact center of this emitter here and attend to this little pointy cursor I hope you can see that and that allows you to change the position of the emitter let's grab that pull that up right into the center of our text then come into the effects settings for the CG particle world effect and expand the producer options and this is where you can tweak the position as well if you're having trouble grabbing it with your mouse increase the radius X a little bit to make the particle meter a bit wider to spare just a little bit more than our text make the Y radius just a little bigger as well I think that's actually not too bad in terms of where the particles will be emitting let's check this out and yeah that's not too bad but let's change the actual particle type from these lines oh it's something that looks a little bit more glittery so again in the settings for the CC particle world effect let's expand the particle tap let's change the particle type from line to textured quad polygons now all of our particles have vanished because we haven't actually assigned a texture to them yet so right now they're all invisible in the particle settings under the particle type you now have this texture tap enable if you expand that that's actually going to ask you for a texture layer to define what those particles look like we don't have one yet so that's great one let's return to our project panel and let's create a new composition I'm going to call this one Stockholm I'm going to change the width to 400 and height of 400 and you can create whatever texture you want for your particles you can import images or even videos anything you want really let's just hit OK so this is going to be our particle and I'm just going to use the shape tools to create a little stance so let's come to the toolbar and here under the rectangle tool if you click and hold there's a bunch of other options let's select the star tool over on the right-hand side under the option for the shape tool I'm going to set my fill to white just make sure that your stroke doesn't the color doesn't really matter just make sure that it's set to zero pixel width because we don't want an outline around our star itself I'm also going to press alt and single-quote or option and synchro to show this grid so I can see the exact center of my composition I'm going to click into that and drag out to create this little star shape by the way while you're dragging you can actually scroll your mouse wheel up or down to add and remove more spikes to it if you hold on control and move your mouse you can actually control how spiky the star is going to be now I want a fairly cute round the dish Salam's gonna pull this out a little bit let go of control okay Matt and zoom in just kind of get this little nice little star shape right in the center that actually looks quite nice so this is now our star alt option and single to hide that grid again and that actually looks pretty nice now we could add all sorts of animations or effects right here and all the star particles would follow those animations and effects but let's just keep it nice and simply for this tutorial let's return to our glitter text composition grab the star comp we've just created and drop that into our glitter text so we can actually hide the visibility of that we don't actually need to see it let's reselect our star particles layer come to the effect controls we have the CC particle world effect we select the effects and now under the particle settings we can actually change the texture layer here over to be our star comp and now we have all of these cool star particles let's rewind and play this back and that actually looks pretty good now it's way too fast I also don't like that all of these particles I can't flipped on their side a little bit and that's because we have rotation and able to write here the rotation axis is any axis now let's change this any axis over to the z axis which is actually the one that's pointing into the screen so now these particles will only rotate around you know the axis that is facing the viewer so they'd always be facing the camera the sky looks a little bit nice it looks a little bit more cute but again just customize this in any way that you want now let's tweak the emission itself it's a lot too fast then this characters I don't know it just doesn't look very festive so let's come into the physics tab let's change the animation from explosive over to fractal Omni just a little bit more of a gentle emission also not like they're shooting out a little bit too strongly some go to lower the velocity to maybe 0.2 or 0.3 somewhere around there and I will to lower the gravity so they feel lighter like they're just kind of floating down rather than just dropping like a rock so let's lower the gravity to maybe point 0.1 or something let's just rewind and play this back yeah that's that's much nicer I could almost go a little bit lower on the gravity maybe point six or point seven cool and that actually looks pretty nice now let's tweak their look a little bit because they're just a little plain looking it's just that's just not as nice as they could be so let's come down to the particle settings again all of these particles have a birth size and the death size which is kind of the change in size to the particle over the span of their life I actually want all of these party to come off fizzle out and get really small towards the end so I'm going to change the death size to zero it's all going to fade down to like zero size but I'm going to bring the birth size up a little bit maybe point three something around there let's rewind to play this back cool that looks really good and we actually got to bring up the size variation to maybe around the 70% or so so you get some bigger and some smaller particles max opacity I'm going to jack up to a hundred because I want them to be pretty bright and strong and solid now you can actually transition your particles color from its birth to death right now all of these are disabled because we are using a textured quad polygons if you want to enable these options here to control the color over the life of the particle you can either change them in your star particle comp or you can change the particle type over to textured square or disk or faded disk and these allow you to then control the color with this color map down here but you lose some options around rotation cell you can't you win some you lose some for now this white is just fine with me now I do want these particles to come in a little bit quicker they're kind of fading in right now for that I'm going to expand the opacity map inside my particle settings you got a little curve that describes how the capacity of these particle changes over the size of their life now I'm actually going to redraw this curve just click and hold and drag and repaint this graph kind of want them to spike up and become opaque quite quickly I'm just going to drag all the way over to the right I can keep them fully opaque until the end of their life because they're going to end at the size of zero so they're kind of fading out just because they get smaller they don't actually need to get less opaque so let's rewind again and play this back cool that's looking really nice now these particles just keep on coming and keep on coming all the way through to the end but actually want them to appear slowly and kind of start coming in and they're around two three four seconds I kind of want them to fade back out and stop emitting just so we can actually have this text appear so let's come to the beginning zero seconds come up in our cc particle world effect and let's place a keyframe on the birth rate so staff is out at zero let's go forward to about a second in and set the birth rate to maybe two with the star particles layer selector press you to reveal all of the properties that have keyframes elements so you can see the keyframes right here let's select both of them press f9 to enabled Bezier interpolation let's move forward to move from four to five seconds we're gonna have to fade these ones back out so let's place another keyframe at about four seconds come forward to five seconds let's bring the birth rate back down to zero so the particles are going to stop emitting just around that time this gives us plenty of time to have the text appear and then come to stand on its own for a little while so the particles actually look pretty nice I'm quite happy with those the last thing I want to do is enable motion blur on them so for that in our layer window let's press f4 again to reveal the layer switches enable motion blur for the star particles comp and in newer versions of art effects that will automatically enable motion blur on your whole composition as well if you own all the versions make sure you enable this switch as well so you get motion blur on the stars and you just get a little bit as they're dropping here just looks a little bit smoother and nicer that way and now we need to create the effect of this text actually coming in and there's lots of different ways to do this but I kind of want it to be revealed as if you know the stars were kind of leaving imprints on this text and so the text kind of slowly comes into being from that for that bagatti we use the star particles layer but we're going to tweak it a little bit so let's select the star particles layer ctrl or command + D to duplicate it let's rename this layer to text mat drag it below the star particles layer we wanted to sit right on top of the text that we want to reveal I'm actually going to temporarily hide the star particles layer on top as well I just want to see the particles from the text matte here let's reselect the CC particle world effect now on this emitter to be a little bigger to make sure we're covering the entire area of our text so let's expand the producer it's going to jack up the X radius and the wire radius a little bit just so we have enough area covered to create our stars also I don't actually want these stars to be falling I want them to be spawned in one position and the contrast expand and start filling in this area of the text so let's expand the physics let's bring down the velocity to zero and set the gravity to zero as well now I also don't want these stars to ever vanish I want them to kind of stick around forever so I'm going to come up and set the longevity from one second over to ten now while the rotating worked really nicely for the star particles that are falling for these funds I don't actually want them to rotate otherwise it's going to constantly create some movement in how this text gets revealed so let's expand the particle options and change the rotation speed to zero and I'm also going to set the initial rotation to zero so they're all kind of nicely lines now I want to make sure that this essentially becomes solid white so our full text is revealed and for that I think I need two small particles so with the text mat layer selected press you to reveal of like all of the keyframes press J to jump to the second keyframe here let me change the birthright to maybe 20 or something I do want quite a lot of particles being emitted and that might make the rendering a little bit slower let's come to about four seconds here and again let's make sure that is 20 as well so throughout this time we're emitting a lot like a lot of particles it does look pretty good now we can either add more particles to fill in the rest of the holes or we can just make these star particles grow a little bit rather than get smaller over their life so let's change the death size on these particles to maybe maybe one or something again I do want this to be solid white at the end also I don't think what must starts to fade in actually want them to appear from a tiny size so let's bring the birth size down to zero and you know opacity map they can actually see solid so we want to paint this out so they're always solidly visible there's going to start really small and then just kind of keep growing and growing and growing and probably around here is when I'd want the full text to be visible so let me bring up the death slice a little bit maybe to 1.5 1.6 or something so I think that actually should work pretty well let's come back to our layers again make sure the text mat particles layer sits right above your text comp press f4 to reveal the modes and the track mat and then on the text comp that's changed a track mat from numb over to alpha mat and now what should happen is essentially you get all of these tiny stars appear and then they kind of grow and fill this text to reveal our glitter text and this is actually a pretty cool effect especially once we re enable all of our star particles so reenable those let's rewind and check this out cool I think that's looking really nice now I do want the color of all of these particles to match and I wanna add a bit of a glow and there's different ways of doing this personally I recommend just select your text Kampf the text mat as well as the star particles ctrl shift + C or command shift and see if you're on a Mac this is going to pre compose those layers let's call this one glitter text comp let's hit OK double click at the glitter text comp that we've just created to jump into it and in older versions of After Effects just make sure you select the motion blur switch is enabled on your particles as well as this composition I think newer versions of After Effects automatically retain this option but all the versions may have to drop that one let's come back to our project panel and wrap another copy of this flat gold layer grab that and drag that into this composition place it at the very top make sure you can see your mode and checkmate option so press f4 if you can't and this is a little column here T that actually means to preserve the opacity of the layers below so if you disable this and enable your transparent background you can see that most of this compositions actually transparent is just the stars and the text itself that aren't so if you now re-enable this flat gold at the top and check this little option here to preserve transparency on it you're essentially stenciling out this layer we disabled the grip again so now this layer is essentially it's like you've precomposed all of them and use them as a track mat on this but this is just kind of an easier way of doing just that now we've lost a little bevel on the text so let's change the mode on this flat gold layer at the very top from normal over to multiply let's remind and check this out cool that's looking really good let's return to our glitter text comp and this is kind of almost at the final effect lets us come into the effects and presets panel and let me search for a glow effect now let's just use the one that comes with After Effects is the stylize glow effect let's just apply that to the glitter text comp well a bit too strong let's bring the threshold up to maybe around 70 80 and tweak this to you like and go to bring the radius up a little bit and the intensity down because I think it's that's just a little bit too much you can go too strong pretty easily and it looks nice it's just a little bit too saturated so let's just search for another effect let's use the color correction hue and saturation effect let's apply that to the layer I'm just going to bring the master saturation down a little bit I just want a subtle like I like some colors don't want it to be too much so that I think looks pretty nice maybe just a little bit more color there I'm going to do as well as this once these stars start fading out I'm actually going to fade off this glow intensity so maybe around three and a half seconds or so let's come up in the settings for the glow effect and able keyframes for the intensity has come to maybe about five five and a half seconds lower the intensity to zero so the glow is actually going to fade out right there press u to reveal the keyframes select them f9 to enable Bezier interpolation so you can end up with this final you know what maybe it'll leave a little of glow maybe point one or point two I just want a little bit of glow still on it just not a lot just a little bit so this looks a little bit more lively and yeah maybe a little bit too oversaturated so again saturation down a little bit but as I've said tweak this to you like and you can do whatever you want with this and now let's rewind collapse all of our layers let's play back our final gluta text effect and that's all there is to it if you enjoyed this tutorial please hit that like button if you knew you hit that subscribe button I don't forget to enable the little belt so you actually get notified if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the comment section below and as always thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 63,620

Keywords: after effects, tutorial, particles, glitter text, sparkles, Christmas, festive, adobe after effects, motion graphics, title reveal, how to create a title, track matte, surfaced studio, how to, help, intermediate, particle effects, vfx, visual effects, CC Particle World, How to add glow, trapcode particular, glow, masking, video compositing, text animation

Id: G2-_KK93NRU

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019