Particle Earth HUD using Stardust - After Effects Tutorial

[Music] hello and welcome everybody this is Roland Hartman from graphic in motion comm and this tutorial time again in this tutorial we're going to create this scene here you see we have this particle globe here and all these lines moving around it and all the particles here floating around creating a really complex and nice looking hot effect and we're going to use After Effects and the Stardust plugin if you do not have to start as plugging yet you can get it from superluminal dot TV and there is also a free trial version available so let's jump right into After Effects and get started in After Effects first of all I will create a new composition and I will take the HDTV 25 preset and it will make the composition 20 seconds for now and it will name it my main comp ok and now we'll create a new layer by pressing ctrl Y on the keyboard and a book call this Stardust and let's apply the Stardust effect here so I already planted in Stardust and apply to our layer if you're not familiar with starters Stardust is a particle system and it is a node-based particle system so this is pretty revolutionary for After Effects and you will see throughout this tutorial what advantages you have within a node-based particle system in After Effects so first of all you realize that Stardust will open up a new additional window here and I will reorganize my windows a bit to have a little bit more room to work here so I will shift my effect controls panel over here and then just line these up like so this should do first of all what I want to do is I want to create a particle grid to create a grid I will select my emitter and then change the emitter type in my control here from point to grid now it will emit particles from a grid but I do not want my particles to fly around I want them to create a static grid so I will change the speed here from 100 to zero and now I want to change the size of my particle grid so I will change the size in X to 1000 sizing Y to 500 and size and C to 1000 as well and to make it a little bit more obvious what we have here I will add a camera so let's create a new layer and let's add a new camera make the 20 millimeter preset camera and then let's add another layer and now I want to create a new map object and I will just use this to control the angle of my camera so let's make this a 3d layer let's link my camera to this null call this can control and let's also colorize these two just to make these a little bit more obvious that these are connected now when I reveal the rotation properties in my cam control I can now rotate through my grid here and you see what we have got I also want to change the particle amounts of my grades so I go back to my emitter here and then I will apply under the grid properties I want to apply 10 particles in X 5 particles in Y and 10 particles in C we can change this later on if we need but for now this is exactly what I want now we want to turn this simple particle table here into a nice-looking grid setup to do this we have to use one of the effects you can access all the effect in Stardust right here you see you have all these symbols here and each of these symbols will add a new node to our system and we need a replica node so let's click on this symbol here and see now we get this replica node if I link this up now nothing happens because we have to import a few settings here what the replica node does is it replicates the products system as it is in the standard settings for example if I put in here 10 replicates and then offset DMX you see that we get just replicate that our setting in a certain direction which is already pretty cool but to create our corner setup there is a special replicator type so let's choose instead of offset corners and then we choose replicate values for T and we put in an offset value of 15 and now you see what's happening now we have a really creative looking setup and this is because I have to turn down my particle size so let's choose our particle node and then let's open up the particle properties and change the size here from 3 to a very small amount like 0.3 something like that because I actually want to have really fine grid lines and now if i zoom in here baby see that it's not really a line this is because we have not enough density so let's go to our replica setting and let's increase the density to a value of about 800 and now you see we have this really nice-looking grid system but for my purpose this grid system is still a little bit too complex there are too many corners in here and I have setting down here which is called corners properties and here I can define a next number of corners so if I turn this down to 2 you see that now our grid is not that complex anymore they're not that many corners if you want to have something more complicated you can of course come in here and always add to this you will see that the more corners you add in the more complex the grid system gets but for me a value of 2 is fine ok so far so good now we have a really cool looking grid and you can also colorize this very easy so let's do that quickly I just select my particles and instead of this solid color I would like a random color from gradient and then I can open up color gradient and choose one of the many presets that come with Stardust and just for now I will select this preset that's pretty cool and then apply energy now our grade is a little bit colorized okay so far so good what I have to do now is see that after two seconds now my paws excrete disappears and this is because the particle life is set two seconds and I want to increase this to 20 seconds that they stay visible for the duration of our conversation and one more thing I want to change in my emitter settings I do not want to emit default this will emit 100 particles per second I want to emit once so it changed this from emitting defaults to emitting ones now it will emit one time and then the particles will be visible throughout the whole composition now it's time to add a few more particles to my system so add new particles I simply click on this symbol here which says particles and now I get a new particle note now let's link this notes to our emitter and let's select this particle system and also change the lifespan to 20 seconds and then you see we have another set of particles and this set of particles is now aligned with our emitter grid I will quickly rename these nodes because otherwise it will get a little bit confusing so let's rename this we can't leave the emitter as emitter I will call the first particle node Corner particles not great coroner articles and this is my corner replica so let's type in Corner corners replica just that I know what is what and I want to call these particles here my circles so these will be just circles and I want to change the properties a little bit so for the circles let's add a random size here of 100 let's say and let's turn down the overall size something like 5 or even further we can do this later on for now I will turn this down a bit maybe the liberation is not that big around 50 and 5 this looks pretty good for me now now let's add in another particle note so let's add a new particle node diagram here and link it to our emitter and these particles will be rectangles so let's rename this two rectangles and instead of circles I want the particle shape to be a rectangle here and the rectangles should have the size of 12 in X and 6 and Y so let's change the size here and I also want to apply a random size of 100 and just for now I will turn off my circles I will just select the node and then turn it off here in the effect controls panel that I see what my rectangles are doing so let's select the rectangles again and let's lower the opacity here a bit so that they are not that opaque like so and actually we can also change the transfer mode we should do that for all our particles let's select the corner particle and select transfer mode of add and we can do the same here for our rectangles because this will look a little bit cooler a little bit more like a hub setup and now I want to add numbers to each of these rectangles to do that I will simply duplicate my rectangle no than to duplicate a node I can come in usually if I controls panel press ctrl and P on my keyboard of course with the nodes selected and then you see it will create a replicate or a duplicate and that will just change it and I will change the name here two numbers let's line this up a little bit better here like so bring this bit closer together so you already see the advantage of this node system so you can use one emitter and with this one emitter you can create multiple kind of different particles referring to this one emitter and of course if I come in here now and change the emitter properties this will have an influence of all our particles here so with our particle node selected I will now change my shape type from rectangle to texture so I want to use a texture for this article setup and by the way I forgot to increase the lifespan here to 20 so let's do this quickly the rectangles and numbers as well the other settings are exactly the same because I created a duplicate of two rectangles so this should work fine but what I have to do now is I have to create a texture for our numbers therefore I will create a new composition and I want to make this 200 pixels wide and 100 pixels high it will name these numbers and let's make it two seconds long and click OK within this new conversation I will create a new text layer so let's add a new text layer and then I will use a font that is called our wrote know if you have it not installed maybe you can find it or you can of course use any font that you like make it a little bit smaller and add the text I will use an expression to create random numbers throughout the whole composition so it would open up my layer here and I will open up my text source hold on hold and click the stopwatch and let's type in an expression that's called random parentheses we want random numbers between 10 and 99 and we want these to be fixed so to fixed and thanks again to and what this does is it creates random numbers for each frame between 10 and 99 and they only have two numbers behind the comma and this is exactly what I want so that's aligned these quickly like my thing here and my aligned window I align these in the middle and I think that this looks pretty good now let's go back to our main composition and from the project window I drag in my numbers let me close my Stardust layer for now and drag in the numbers just to the bottom of my comp and make this invisible now let's select Stardust again with Y effect controls panel and with the numbers note selected I will come down here and there is this texture tab and in the texture tab I can now specify a texture for my particles so let's select the layer numbers here and also for the dark side here so that we can see the numbers on both sides of our particles and instead of current time I want to change the sample to random still-frame and if we take a really close look you see we see already something here it's a little bit too small for now so let's come into our particle property here and let's increase the size maybe - let's see how far we can go here not too much a little bit so maybe 14 looks quite good and now we have I will deactivate the rectangles for a moment now we have these numbers on each of our points in a grid and I will change the opacity of these to 100 they're a bit more obvious now you can see them a bit better okay so let's activate our acute angles again the next step will be to add a little bit of motion into our system here so to add a little bit of motion I can use another effect and this effect is called turbulence and if I click this waves icon here then I get a turbulence node in this case now I want to animate my numbers and my rectangles together so these two should have exactly the same motion and I can do this by just linking these two nodes to my turbulence node now this turbulence node will affect both of these particles here let's select the turbulence node and let's call it non-words animation and what the turbulence node does is it applies the turbulence to our particle system so if I just change the position offset for now you will see what they start it will just yeah scatterer distribute our particles in 3d space and of course using turbulence or noise effect but I do not want these to scatter through our 3d space I mean it looks but I want to keep a little bit of the grid system here so instead of choosing the turbulence type of normal I will choose the turbulence type of X's and now you see what will happen if I now change the apps that you see that the offset is limited to a certain axis and in this case I want access to be our y-axis so let's change the axis here from X to Y and now these will only move up and down and this is exactly what I want so let's put in a offset value of about let's see how far we should go maybe 750 here and now they are of course not moving I also want to add a little bit of motion to these I want to create a bit of motion I can use the flexible speed here and we do not want to increase these two marks so maybe let's see a value of 2 or 3 I will import a value of 3 now and create a quick round preview to see what's going on and now you see that they are animating moving nicely not too fast I think this is pretty cool ok perfect now let's select our circles and let's activate them again and I also want to animate these and when I look at this now I see that they are way too big so let's turn the size down to something like 3 maybe 4 like so and then I will just reduce the opacity a bit and it will set the transfer mode to add actually let's see yeah the others are set to add perfect ok so back to our circles I also want to animate the circles and to animate the circles I will again use a turbulence node I can simply select this turbulence node and create a duplicate so selected control D to create a duplicate and name it not numbers but circles animation and now we just like this over here and link that to our circles particle system and now we will change the axis type from Y to X and then our spheres will move along the x axis and you see that we created a really complex motion here with only two notes and within a few seconds okay now our basic grid system is finished and I want to make this a little bit more interesting by applying a few color maps and we can apply color maps by using an effect called fields you can find the field effect here this symbol here gives three circles so let's click it and apply a new field effect first of all I want to apply a field effect to all my moving particles so I will simply link this up with my circle animation right here and with my numbers animation right here so this will affect everything that is linked here all these particles now with the field now I will rename this and color 0 1 because this will be in or let's say color maps your lines may be a bit more information because this will be a color map and to use the field as a color map I can change the field type from sphere to map so let's select Maps here on bottom and you see that nothing is happening right now but if I come down here now and then I have to change my map to color from graph to color and now I want to apply one of the presets so let's select the preset here and for this I choose this preset you see we can scroll down here there are many really cool presets included let's choose color preset number 16 I have to move this a bit and apply it and now I want to change the effect so it should not affect the opacity it should affect the color of our particles and now you see that it already effects the color of our particles but I do not want it to be projected on the x-axis actually I want it to be projected on the y-axis so I will choose this from apply to Y and we'll choose also project - why and this should work and you see that it does what I want to do now is going to modify displeasing a bit because I do not want these dark particles in here so I will just grab this and drag it out and now I will just even out the distance between these four colors you see what I've got now in the bottom or on the bottom here my particles are white and then they are yellow like this Turkish color and then they are red and this is exactly what I want and you see that this adds a lot to the look of our grid system okay so now it's time to add our earth to add the earth we will use a preset Stardust comes with a lot of presets to enter the presets you just open up this first tab here the starters tab and then click on browse preset and one of these icons and here I want to open up the heart folder and you see that we have really really cool presets here that you can use as starting points for your projects and in my case I want to use this earth here so let's add this to our scene you could choose to replace but don't do that because then it will replace everything that we created so far so just choose to add this element to our scene and then Stardust will add this earth globe here and you will see that inside our node tree we have a new node tree editor so I will just replace this a little bit better and you can also take a look at these structures how these are built so this can be also a very good resource for learning Stardust and what I want to do now is I want to change just a little bit so that it blends in a little bit better in our setup here so the first step with our earth is to change the color so that it blends in a little bit better into our scene and to do that I want to add a new field node if we take a look here we have once these not already applied and if we select this and then come to my effect controls panel and deactivated you see what it is and it is actually also a map and it is a map that is featuring the information of the image that got applied to our scene if I move up here you see that we have a PNG here and this is actually the that is controlling the birth of our particles but what I want to add now is another field that will control the coloring of our particles so let's select our three nodes here drag them down a little bit and then we'll just disconnect them for now that clicking on the connection here and now I want to add a new field node put it in here maybe I should rename this also to know what this is so this is the particle map and the next field node will be the color map I could also add earth here that we know we're working on the earth color map so let's link these up again that our chain is closed again and with our earth color node selected I'll just change the field type here to map then I will use color I will affect or affect the color and I will choose preset and I will use the same preset that I used for our grid so this is preset number which number is it 14 and applied and now I could choose which axis I want to project this to so maybe we use the C axis for now let's take a look how this looks like and I think this looks pretty good so let's choose this one and I also think that my earth is a little bit too big and you see that we have these two transform nodes here and what they are doing is they're actually rotating our globe so if I create a quick ramp reasonable set this to half now because it renders faster let's create a quick round preview see that the earth is building up and it is rotating slightly which is pretty cool and it can also use these transform nodes to change the sides so let's just select the last transfer mode here let's take a look what this does actually doesn't do too much it just changes the rotation a bit I think and I could now scale it down by simply adding values 75 here 75 years and 75 on C and now my should be a little bit smaller which it is okay I've changed this back to full resolution because it looks better okay so now we have our earth now we have our emitter and everything is ready what I have to add now is this nice spherical field in our grid here so to do that we add a new field effect and we want to add this field effect right here on bottom of my setup let's move over here to navigate in your node tree you can use this little rectangle here just click and drag and make sure that you connect all these elements to this field node so let's select this one here and connect these let's select this one here and connect these you see now through these connections all of them are connected together so this field will really have an influence now to all of our emitters particles and everything that we applied and I want to call this spherical field so this will be our theoretical spherical field effect let's come in here and you see that the field type is already set to sphere and if we take a look here you see what already something is happening so there is already a small sphere pushing our grid outwards and I want to increase the size here a bit so let's go to the field properties and let's see how much we have to put in here I think 500 will do 500 500 and 500 pretty good and actually this looks really nice so for now let's make this a little bit smaller and let's take a look what we have got here we could add now a bit of camera animation to make this a little bit more interesting so let's move to our camera let's close up our star dust layer so let's search a nice camera angle therefore I go to my rotation properties on my chem control null and let's see what we can do here maybe something like that it's a bit of an angle here because also apply a bit of an angle on the X here to make it a bit more interesting not too much but a little bit like so it looks pretty good so I have values of 5 and - let's say 35 right here now it could zoom in or move in with my camera a bit so let's see what can do it here like so looks pretty good and we could of course now also add a bit of depth of field so let's press a a here to reveal the camera properties let's turn on the depth of field setting and now we can see that already Stardust is already reacting I'm going to make sure that my focus distance is set right so I want to set the focus distance right here to the edge of my sphere or my earth here so let's bring the focus distance in a bit like so okay maybe increase their perch a little bit to make this a little bit more intense so let's see what this looks like I don't think this looks pretty good what I do not like is that my grid is really very very visible so I do not want it to be that visible what I can do here is I can come to my Stardust setup and select my corners and maybe reduce the opacity here a bit let's see I think this looks a little bit better so set this to 60% okay so I really really like this really looks nice so there's one more thing that disturbs me and I think that this sphere of the circle particles are actually they are a little bit too big and there are too many of them so what I can do here is I select my circles nodes and then come to my effect controls panel and first of all I will change the size to three that they are a little bit smaller and now I can change the birth chance here you see I have a birth the birth chance here of 100 if I set this to 50 then we immediately reduce the amount of circles and this is cool thing this is looking way better because it's not so crowded then I think this really really looks nice now we will create a very quick build of animation for our setup and this is really easy as well so first of all I want to animate in our corners if we select our corners node and then we come to animation properties or animate properties it's called easy we have these graphs here and I can change these graphs and control the animation of the replicate so if I set this year to 0 and this is always over the whole lifespan so you see that now they would animate on over a time of 20 seconds because we put in 20 seconds for the lifespan of our particles here we do not want this of course because this is taking way too long so we do not want these to build up through 20 seconds for a whole animation we do want them to build up quite quick so let's select our corners replica and instead of using this linear setup here I can use a preset as well so let's click on preset and you see we have a wide range of really cool preset and let's choose the fade in baby a here this one and let's apply it and this will have the effect that our grid let's create a quick run preview again with half resolution that our grid will animate on in the beginning and not sure here probably within the first few seconds I think that it is right I think that the speed of the build up is quite nice so let's leave it on the default it could of course come in here and change this a bit you know make it bit slower to build up or even make it a bit faster like so I think this is OK and now I have a nice build of animation for my grid I also want to add a bit of animation for all the particles that are flowing around here in the air so to do that I have to add another effector and actually I want to use another field so let's take our spherical fields here move it down a bit and let's add in a new field effect or field note and let's put this in we could put it in before the color map you can also put it in afterwards doesn't really matter so let's just clean or clear disconnection and reconnect these again here so I just put it behind or beneath my color map but before my spherical field here and I can call this field here clear left and I can actually if you are familiar with cinema 4d you have mograph and mograph has these effectors that you can use to manipulate let the clones and it's very very similar that the field effect is very similar to this you can use this actually as an effector like in Maghreb so let's change the field type to box and now I can choose what I want to affect so here there are the effect properties that I can choose and I do not want to change the position so I will set this to zero I want to affect the size and actually I want to be everything inside these box inside this box field to be zero size to be not visible so I set this size here to zero then let's open up the field properties I do not want this field to be feathered at least not for now so let's change this for to a value of zero and now let's increase the size of our field and you will see the more I increase the size here the more particles will disappear so let's increase the size you to something like not sure 2004 now then in Y we may need 1000 and in C we need actually we could yeah let's let's type in 2000 as well let's see whether this clears all the particles yes it does so not all our particles are within our box and that's why they are not visible because they have a size of 0 now but what I can do now is I can animate the position of my box to create a build up effect so let's do that let's choose our frame number 0 let's create a position keyframe for our origin here and let's move forward maybe for three seconds let's say that the build up should last about three seconds and now we just move our effector here on the x-axis so let's see how far we have to move it until our particles start to appear and you see now they are already appearing so I have to move it quite far let's move around until all of them are revealed even if it's further so maybe I think 4000 should do so we can type in here 4000 let's take a look by pressing you to reveal all the keyframes let's just make these quick ege keyframes here actually I think I made a mistake here I have to put in 4000 here and not 400 so let's again put the cursor here let's enter 4000 this time and now we can take a look at this build up so I will just and create a quick run preview so what I don't like about this now is it starts very late and then it builds up too fast so let's come into our build up and let's change the federal year so I want to apply a bit of a feathering here so let's put in 50 here maybe because then it will be a bit smoother so let's take a look and it still starts very very late so I will change the size of our box here a bit maybe this is a little bit too big so let's set it to 1500 let's see what this does and let's set this to 1500 as well maybe even reduce this further 1200 okay so you see now something's happening in the beginning nothing is visible and then slowly starts to build up right straight from the beginning this is exactly what I want so I think this is way better and then it probably also can change the position here a bit - maybe something like let's see maybe something like 3000 get everything is visible or even 2,000 is enough let's see no that's not enough 2500 yeah I think that this is okay and now I just made this a little bit more smooth so it starts from the beginning and we'll build up smoother throughout our animation so let's take a quick Ram preview and you see now the build up is working quite well so it's very smooth everything is coming together quite nicely so to make it even more interesting you could now of course choose a new camera angle you know maybe something like this to improve the look of this scene let me change back to full resolution quickly we could add a little bit of glow for example so let's do that quickly I will add an adjustment layer and on the adjustment layer let's call it glow I will add a glow effect and with this Chloe effect in the standard settings it really doesn't look good so I would recommend to increase the glow radius to something about 3 200 so that it is really really big glow and maybe decrease the intensity to 0.3 depending on how intense it should be or 0.5 I think this looks better and now you see if I deactivate this definitely adds to the look of our scene you could of course also add a background so let's do that add a new solid call it V G and then drag it on top or the bottom should say of my composition add for color gradient to this with 4 colors so the first one will be maybe bluish tint here okay second one black third one black and this one bluish tent - now let's make this bit darker so this one as well change this a bit to something like so maybe and then in the end we could apply a new adjustment layer and just bring it on top and add a new color correction and there is a really cool thing that it's called luma tree color which is quite new in After Effects and I really like it you can do really great cool things with this and then you can choose a creative look set up and let's choose maybe which one was it which I used here I think it was FL clean Fuji C so if I apply this you see immediately we get a different look but I think it looks really cool and then we can of course change the curves maybe to brighten this update and we could also increase the saturation by just pulling this out of it like so looks quite nice and in this case and maybe would change the background bit because it doesn't look that good actually let's change this back to glue looks a little bit better blend them bit more maybe make this one maybe a bit darker so okay and the things look not too bad okay let's take a look at the result of our tutorial I think that is really cool it looks nice and a very complex setup and we actually only used one layer of particles so you see how powerful Stardust really is so let me invite you to visit my website which is www.hyken.com that you can find all my After Effects templates you can find a lot of useful stuff like tutorials I also have a few free templates so check out my website thank you very much for watching and I really hope to see you soon good bye you [Music] you

Channel: graphicINmotion

Views: 271,531

Keywords: after effects, template, motion design, motion graphics, graphicinmotion, animation, project file, free after effects project, free after effects template, after effects tutorial, stardust tutorial, stardust, tutorial, particles, hud, particle grid, corners, stardust presets, color map, partcile texture, particle globe, particle earth, earth, globe, stardust plugin

Id: -Mr1eqZpzJA

Length: 39min 59sec (2399 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2017