Stardust Digital City Loop - After Effcts Tutorial

[Music] hello and welcome everybody this is Roland Hartman from gravity motion comm and it is tutorial time again in this tutorial I will show you how to create a really cool digital city and I will also show you how you can create a seamless looping animation flying through this city so let's jump right into After Effects and let's get started if you do not have to start as plugging already I would recommend that you jump over to the superluminal dot TV website and get it there you can also download a free trial version in after-effects first of all let's create a new composition and in my case I will just use this HDTV 1080p reset and I will make sure that I make it 125 frames long and I will call it the little city and now let's create a new layer by pressing ctrl Y and let's name this Stardust and I will apply the Stardust effect to this layer and now we have some particles here okay great so the next step is to create a layout for our city and to do that I will create a new composition and I will make this 2000 times 2000 pixels and I will just call this my city layout and inside this new composition let's create a new layer make sure that it's comm size and I can also call this city layout and on this layer actually I want to change the color here to something like that okay and I also want to make sure that my grid is turned on show grid and snap to grid if you create looks different than mine then this has to do with preferences right here is right here you can set up you create you can set up colors and you can also set up the size of your grid now I will use discrete to create kind of a map of my city and therefore I will use masks because later on in our digital city composition we will use these masks to emit particles using Stardust and we will use these masks to create our buildings actually so first of all what I want to do is I want to specify my Road in the middle and to do that I just select this layer and I select a rectangle mask tool and then let me take a look what we can do here so make sure that you leave enough room for your road so that it is big enough let's say maybe like this here this could work okay let's make sure that this is in the middle which is not so I will quickly change this like so and I will just make sure that inside this area I will not build any buildings so the next step is to create simple buildings and I can do it like that first of all create just a simple rectangle like so okay I've got my first building here so let's create another one right beside it okay now let's come in here let's make some small buildings right here might be something like that and maybe another one right here and now I will choose my pen tool and I will create a more interesting building shape and a little bit of a bigger building so let's say maybe right here let's create something like this and always make sure that these edges are really linear edges so to change that you can hold down alt and click on the edge and then we drag it on the point in our grid and you see what I do here so this is a simple outline of my building and this is how you can fill up or how you can create the map of your building I would recommend that you do not create too many buildings and do not make it too dense because then it gets a little bit crazy with this digital setup so I will continue creating the layout for my city and I will be back when it's finished ok so now my city layout is finished and you see what I did I just created a few different shapes and and just create it yes something like a map so we are more or less looking at our city from the top and now I want to group these masks into three different kind of buildings I want to create skyscrapers or really tall buildings then some kind of middle buildings and smaller buildings and to do that we need to group these masks on separate layers so that we can use these layers later on as emitter layers and Stardust so let's do that first of all I want to create and specify my skyscrapers and ever I just select the masks that I wanted to be skyscrapers and I want this one to be a really big one really big building so this is mask number 13 here then I want this one to be a skyscraper and let's say I want this one to be a skyscraper so let's take these three on this side and right over here I will take let's say this one here this one and this one so these will be my six buildings that will be really tall and now you see have all these masks selected right here now I can colorize them and choose one color so that I know these are my skyscrapers and actually I also can bring them just on top here or let's say just beneath my road mask and so I know okay these are my skyscrapers and now I will just copy them to a new layer so just create a new layer and call these sky scrapers and now we will just copy these masks over here control-c control-v okay perfect and I can turn this off for now okay now let's take the next set of masks so the next one will be my middle buildings and I will choose this mask here and hold down shift and choose this mask this mask and let's say this one and this one okay so let's take a look we've got one two three four five that's good colorize them green and now copy these over create a new layer call it meet buildings and paste the masks in here okay perfect and now I will just select the other masks and these will be my small buildings you can always come in here later and change the layout of your city but it's good to spend a little bit of time in the beginning so let's copy these masks or let's colorize them first of all another color and now copy them create a new layer and these are my small buildings and I paste them in here okay so now I've got all my buildings set up and that's really good let me quickly just group these as well are they already grouped okay so I have one mask that I didn't specify or four copies and I will just add this to the small buildings so let's just make this green and just copy it over to my small buildings layer number 20 to copy it over right here okay perfect now I will just grab all these layers and copy them over into my digital city composition and I will track them beneath my Stardust layer and now let's make sure that this is in the right position and therefore I just have to put in on 60 times 540 now they're exactly in the middle of our comp and now let's make all of these 3d and rotate them by minus 90 degrees on the x-axis okay perfect now we can build our first set of buildings and therefore let me change this quickly to a custom field and I can see what I'm doing and you see here I have my City layout already and now I want to start to build my skyscraper so let's choose the Stardust layer and with this emitter that's already there I can now change the type the emitter type from point to text or mask and now I can specify a mask and now I can specify a layer right here in the layer properties and therefore I will take my skyscrapers and then I can specify some pop properties and you see what we've got now now particles are emitting from this path but they are from the mask I should say but they are now traveling around and I do not want this so let's set the speed here to zero and let's also set the size of the emitter to one and let's take a look what it does now now it's emitting inside my mask and this is because we have text masks amid type settle volume and if we want it to be a weighted edge so let's choose add weight it and now you see what we have got here and one more important thing I do not want them to emit all the time I only want them to emit one so let's just changed emitting type it once and let's make sure that our particles are alive through the whole animations let's set this to 5 seconds and now you see we've got our particles here and with my path subdivide I can now change the density of these particles so if you come in here a little bit closer let's set this to 15 for now I will make the particles way smaller so let's take a look here particle properties and maybe make these for for now looks quite good probably I can set this down to 10 okay so for now this looks good me now it's time to give our buildings some height and therefore we will just use a replica node so let's add a replica node and let's link it with our particles and inside this replica node will now apply some offset on the y-axis so let's set this to 24 now and let's start replicating and you see that I chose the wrong direction so let's just change the offset to minus 20 and now you see we get some buildings going here and because these are skyscrapers well make them rather large here so maybe as a good starting point let's go with 30 to 35 here it looks quite good and we could also make these a little bit more interesting by adding a bit of random offsets here and you can go to the replica node right on the bottom there is this option to random properties first of all you can change for example the particle scale this randomize is the particle scale a little bit and this looks quite good because then it looks a little bit more interesting you could do the same with the opacity and you can of course also do the same with the replicate chance you see you could also use this to create some nice build-up animations or whatever but actually I do not want the replicate chance to be random I just want this to be zero but I will add a little bit of randomness in the particle scale and and opacity ok this looks quite good now let's add some color to these particles and to colorize them I will use a field node so let's add a field node and let's link this to our replica now we choose this field node and we change it from field type to maps because I want this to be a color map now we will use type color and we will change the size to a size X Y and set because then I can specify the size and now let's project this on the y axis and let's make sure that the effects of course set to color and now we see that it's already having an effect on our buildings but it's not set up right here so let me apply this to the few properties and now we can make this a little bit bigger and you see if I make it bigger than more of the the gray values come in here and at the bottom but I also can shift it in position and if I shift it up here now you see that my gradient is mapping fully over all my over my buildings from bottom to top now and now we can specify some colors so let's change this for to something like maybe interesting colors we start off with or actually this is the top of my building so cool I will make this a little bit darker okay and now let's take this color over but make it brighter on the bottom like so and I think this looks quite good for now okay so my first set of buildings looks quite nice another thing you can do is you can of course use custom particles let me show you this quickly let's create a new composition make sure that this composition is only 100 by 100 pixels big and this are my particles and I just need to frame two actually because I will just create two different particles so I create a new layer and this will be make it calms eyes and this will be fully white okay so let's change the opacity here to 25% and now let's create some digits here therefore I take my text tool and I put in one make sure that this is aligned in the middle here and make sure that this is only one frame long so let's make it smaller or shorter actually I think there's something wrong with the duration of my composition yet it's only one frame long but I wanted it to be two frames long okay now this works now I will just make sure that my white solid is covering the whole composition and that this wall is only one frame long now duplicate this and shift it over and now change this one here to a zero and this will be just a binary code particle and if you watched maybe my my digital intro tutorial also start as tutorial then you are already familiar how to build these custom particles so let's go back to my digital city composition and let's bring in our particles comp drag it on bottom here make it invisible and within my Stardust layer and within my particle node here I can now change this from circle to a texture now let's specify the texture right here and I can choose my particles and now we'll use not current time but random still frame and now you see they're quite small so I have to add a little bit of size here maybe double the size to 8 and even 10 maybe like so and what I can do now is I can go to my replica field and there is this option to offset the texture right now I said to none but if I set it to random then you will see that this randomizes the texture over my replicates that makes sense in this case if you are using this kind of a digital of binary code particles but you see that we lost the colors now and this is because of the setting of the texture and there is this texture color use and if this is set to default it will just use the colors that are specified in your texture so here it's white and and gray or transparent but if you change this from particles here I'm from default to alpha then you see immediately that our field node again takes over the control and color rises our particles okay so this is it with our first building so you see how this works it's not that complicated to create really nice buildings but you also can do one more hand choose to emitter and there is this optioned path properties to speed a long path so that the particles move along apart and if we set this to maybe not a too high value but maybe 10 and now we take a look here and create a click run you will see what these does and you see now the particles are rotating and you can do this with one set of your buildings and this can have quite a nice effect so maybe let's let's rotate our particles in our skyscrapers for now okay and to create another set of buildings it's pretty simple what we can do now is just duplicate this tree here so just select all of these nodes here press ctrl + D and create a duplicate and now you only have to go to the emitter to the new one to emitter number two and just change the layer here and let's say we continue with our MIT buildings here and you see immediately now we create another set of buildings now if we go to my replica node and just change the size here so make this smaller maybe like 20 and maybe also change the offset a bit so that they look a little bit different so minus 15 and yeah like so that looks quite good now they're a little bit denser than the others now we can go into the particles and change these so let's say we do not want to have textures here maybe we want to have rectangles and can move in here now and change this size a bit so maybe I want this to be smaller on the X or maybe let's make it like 6 and 12 it could look quite good and you see now we created another set of particles I can now come in here into my field and create new colors so let's open up the maps here and let's open up the color / length and let's create a new color maybe something like that something like that and we can change the field bit because of course this is now a little bit smaller so let's set this to 250 and bring it down a bit or actually I have to bring it up the value up like so and you see this looks quite good and of course now these are also rotating actual don't want this so I will go to my second emitter here and I can set the path properties here speed a long path to zero again okay so now I created another set of building so let's create one more and we'll just move over here a bit so let's select the last three node here control D and now change the layer and emitter number three to my small buildings let's move on to my replica node let's make these small 10-15 maybe change these to minus 18 just to get a bit of variation okay looks quite good and of course now let's change the particles and in this case maybe we just want to leave circles take a quick look here doesn't look too bad I think they are a little bit too big so let's set them to four and we can also just change the weight or the subdivide of the path here now I meter settings so let's just increase this or actually yeah include or actually decrease these so that's that we get a little bit of a denser then the particles here is maybe two six looks quite good okay and now let's go to our field and let's change the colors here maybe to something like blue and now make sure that our field is in the right position so let's take a look here and I think that this looks quite good okay so now you see I created a nice city layout and if I change my view now to active camera you see what we've got here and now it's time to create a camera actually so let's go to our lair and let's create a new camera and I want this to be quite a wide-angle camera we can use this 15 millimetres for now let's take a look what this does and now let's create another null object that will just be my cam control so create a new null object make it 3d and Link the camera to it I can call this cam control and I always like to colorize these in the same way so that I know these block belong together and now I can change the position here of my null so maybe just move it up a little bit not too much I want this to travel along my road here and now I can choose my camera and rotate this on the x-axis maybe minus 10 it was the wrong direction so 10 plus 10 like so that doesn't look too bad and what we can do now is we can make my my guide layers here invisible so select all these layers the city layers of the masks here and just make them invisible now you see we already have a nice city set up so the next step is to really fill out our screen so if I go back to my custom view you see we only have one block here but we can of course not duplicate this and create a really nice City area here and to do that we will again use a replica node so let's add a replica node here and let's put it right down here and let's link all my trees here my building trees to my replica node and now I created a replicate of all my buildings and now I can shift this so let's come in here let's make sure that we choose to create two replicates because I want to create two actually and let's offset on the z axis and we will offset it for two thousands and if you see what this is doing now I'm shifting these and because I know that my city layout is exactly my first block here's exactly two thousand times two thousand pixels wide I can now just put in here two thousand and now I know that this will repeat in the same distance yeah on the set axis and this is exactly what I need to create this nice looping animation that I will create now in the next step but we can make this even more interesting now with our replicate we can now add clone and ever we use a clone let me put this right here and create a clone of this whole thing here so of this replica and now let's add a transform node to shift this so let's link the transform node to our clone come in here and now with our transform node I can change the position on X and now I can change this to plus one thousand two thousand sorry and you see what this does this now shifts this whole street here by my my first read with the buildings over and to get in even a bit more variation what I can do now is I can't just change the scale on the set for example instead of 100 to -100 and you see now it will just turn it around so if we get a bit more variation here in our city setup and to add even more variation here I can change the scale on Y to maybe something like sixty and you see now the buildings are just a little bit smaller and yeah business can help to sell this effect and another option is that it doesn't get too crazy we can decrease the particle path city maybe also something like 16 okay now let's duplicate this here so the clone and the transform but make sure to just turn it off before you do it because otherwise when the duplicate is now it's not not linked to anything it would duplicate or create a clone of everything and this can sometimes depending on your system can lead to a crash so make sure turnoff the clone and then duplicate it and now let's link it again and now we can activate it again so activate the two clones here and let's go to the transform here and just change instead of 2000 we will now set this to - mm that's it and now we have another set of our buildings right here and I can maybe change this here even further and to create more variation and set this to 50 okay perfect now let's change back to our active camera and you see what we've got here now we already have a really nice buildings or a really nice city setup I forgot one essential thing I actually I don't know why but I always forget this the particles have this transfer mode and of course we want to set it to something more interesting we're creating a digital city so let's set it to add or to screen this is really up to you and you see immediately that we get a way nicer look here so let's make this change here okay this looks pretty good now it's time to create our animation and I want to have a looping animation so how can we do this first of all let's go to our camera I think that their rotation doesn't work like this I want to rotate it bit more maybe 15 degrees I think this looks a little bit better and now you see if I move to frame number 0 in my animation everything disappears and this is because a Stardust requires one frame to create all these these to create all these particles so just move in one frame and then by pressing V on your keyboard set the end point of our work area just this frame here now let's create a keyframe on the position of the camera actually what we can do is we can separate these dimensions here because I do not need X&Y I just want to animate my set position so let's just create a keyframe right here with a value of minus one minus eight hundred and let's move our camera forward for 2,000 pixels so let's set this to plus thousand two thousand and this is one thousand two hundred and you see what this did so if I go back now to my frame here by pressing J on my keyboard you see that actually we have exactly the same image here the only thing that changes is the background right here so if I go forward you see the position of the camera inside the city is the same only the background changed so if I play this now it will not loop of course because we have this jump view but I can compensate this by changing the visibility of my particles and therefore I can go to Stardust and I can go to my render settings and inside the render settings we have this option of the clipping and now I just have to change the maximum distance and the maximum fade so what I will do here is now I will change quickly back to my custom view and it will zoom out a bit here to explain this bit better and actually we have a small problem here because my clones are not in the right position just realize that so why is that let me take a look this must be a problem of the transform so if I shift this back yeah I think this is it so let's shift this back - 4000 let me see yeah that's it okay so we just have to change the transform here on the set position to minus 4000 and then we have exactly what I want okay like so so if we take a look here what my camera camera does this is the small yellow box here it's moving through my city and I was just changing the clipping settings here so now I have to change the clipping of these the star dust particles I'm moving forward for to tau right from this point to this point right around here so we can take a look here my camera take a look at the box is moving from here to here and I want to make sure that in the beginning I do not see this last part here of the city so I can just limit the visibility of the particles to a range of two blocks and our block is two thousand times two thousand so we can just change this to four thousand let's take a look here I will put in here four thousand and now I will put in here mm not everything is gone because my camera here in the custom view is is too far away but if I go to my active camera you will see that my city appears again and if I did not calculate wrong then it should work now to create a nice looping animation so I will just create a quick run preview to check whether this worked and I will lower the resolution here a bit so that it calculates a bit faster so let's take a look well it works so the RAM preview is finished and let's take a look where that really loops nicely and you see it does the only thing that jumps are the moving particles on my building so if you do not want to have any jumps in here then you should make sure that the rotation of these particles lasts exactly as long as your camera move or you can of course also just turn off the rotation of the particles around the masks to create a really seamless loop I just have to shift this last keyframe for one frame and now I have my perfect seamless loop so okay this is how you can loop very complex setups by using a travelling camera and by creating clones on your camera or traveling axis now let's make this even a bit more interesting so first of all we can add a bit more digital stuff here and again if you watched my tutorial about the digital globe this earth-like thing with this nice digital grid then you are familiar with the techniques that I use here so I will make this rather quick now and I will just add a little bit more interesting stuff to this city and to do that we will again just go to our Stardust layer and we will add another and meter here so let's create a new emitter and let's create a new set of particles actually what we can do here is we can duplicate this set of particles because I wanted to use the same particles here so I just duplicate the particles from a first building and linked them to my new emitter now with this emitter I will set my type to create I want to create a grid here again I will set the speed to zero and now let's make sure that the size of the grid here it's a bit bigger so I want it on X to be 1000 on Y to be 1000 and unset to be 1000 okay and you see what we have got here now let's move to the beginning of our animation now you see my create here actually I can move it up a bit so that I'm traveling through this grid nicely take a look like so that looks quite good and I think I've too many particles here so I do not want so many so maybe let's set this to 5 times 5 times 5 or maybe yeah I think this is OK and now let's add a replica here and this time we will use the replica in a different way this time I just want to create some nice grid here and there I can use the corner effect corners effect and I really love this so this is probably my favorite effect in Stardust so let's increase the replicas here to something like 10 for now and let's increase the offset to something like tens well let's see what this does and this already creates a small small small grid so I definitely have to increase this year so let's see 40 replicates and maybe set two-twenty gets more interesting okay now let's make sure that I change but I think it's still a little bit too much too dense so I will go into my emitter settings and reduce the number of particles here so let's say 4 on the X 4 on the Y and 4 and sad and this looks a little bit better so now let's make sure that this looks a little bit more interesting and I will go to my particles and they're too big here so I will reduce the size and now I can go to my replica and add a little bit of randomness again so let's make the density maybe a bit higher 200 like so this looks quite cool now let's go to our random properties first of all make sure that we offset the texture randomly that's important and now let's make sure to add a bit of random particle scale maybe 40 let's take a look here increase this to 60 even and also the particle opacity to 40 it more interesting now I can go back to my particles because now they're a little bit small so get back bit of size here like so and now let's apply some color here and I can do this simply by applying a random color from a gradient so let's go to my particles here and now let's choose the color creed and and now I will just feature a few colors that I've got in my scene already so I will take this purple color here then I will add another color on a rule feature this green here and I also got some Blues in here so let's feature this as well if I can get it it's back here okay and let's make this a little bit brighter okay and now you see I've got already a quite nice looking great and if I link my grid now to my replica you will see what happens now it's replicated and now it feels the all-city okay so this is more or less how I created the city how I created the grid to make it really look awesome you can add some clothes and one more thing that I want to show you if you remember the example that I showed you that was some kind of a reflection going on and I want to show you how to create this reflection quickly so let's just choose my Stardust layer and let's create a duplicate by pressing ctrl + D and now the lower one here I will just rename to Stardust and shadow and now let's select this layer and make sure that my tree here is Stardust shadow okay this is good now we can just delete our grid that I just created because I do not need this and I also want to delete my clones because like because I also do not need the clones I only want my shadows to be visible right here so right in the main main street we can say and to create a shadow now I only have to add a transform node and link it to my replica and now I will just change the scale on Y from 100 to -100 and you will see what's happening now and now I just duplicated more or less or I just mirrored the whole thing on the y axis and now with this layer here so let's collapse this start a shadow layer I can first of all change the opacity to something low like 40 and now you see we have again or we have already a very nice and clean looking reflection and now of course you can add some blur so maybe just the directional verb or whatever you want a directional blur to the shadow and let's take a look maybe set this to 5 and then you see we have a really nice-looking and very complex looking city with a very nice reflection ok so as a last step in this tutorial I will add a new adjustment layer I haven't just add a little bit of glow to this because lo is always cool working with particles and which with digital particles so let's add a glow to the adjustment layer and this doesn't look good as it is so let's increase the radius here to something like maybe 150 and you could also put in two or three instances of glow you can change the glow operation mode maybe to screen then it's not that harsh and you can play around here create your own looks make sure that you have maybe set this to 16 or 32 bits when working with clothes then you get better results and we can also change the threshold maybe to something like 45 that also the dark things you glow now it's a little bit hard maybe -7 let me see you can create a nice glowy look or your particles and now let's create a final Ram preview of our animation here and while creating this Ram preview I just realized that I forgot one important thing so let me quickly tell you this and the star dust layer are in our city layer the grid that I create that you have to set the emitter to once it was set to default and if it's set to default and it will emit particles throughout the whole animation which of course we will destroy our looping ability of this setup so make sure that just in the grid emitter right here you set emitting two ones and then it will loop and now I can render the RAM preview to show you the result okay so the RAM preview is finished and you see that the looping works great and it only lasts a few minutes to render so Stardust is really awesome when it comes to this very heavy and very complex particle setups so this is it with this tutorial I hope that you liked it I hope that you learned something now it's up to you to create awesome digital cities if you have any questions then please feel free to post them in the comments if you want to watch more awesome tutorials I would recommend that you check out my website which is www.hyken.com there you can find some really nice After Effects templates and you can of course find all my After Effects tutorials we have a bunch of Stardust tutorials right here but of course also added tutorials and there is also an After Effects basic course free After Effects basic course for all beginners out there so thank you very much for watching and I really hope to see you soon good bye [Music]

Channel: graphicINmotion

Views: 107,940

Keywords: after effects, template, motion design, motion graphics, videohive, graphicinmotion, animation, after effects project, after effects template, project file, free after effects project, free after effects template, stardust, tutorial, training, digital city, particle city, buildings, skyscrapers, binary code, stardust custom particles, texture, custom particle, superluminal, skyline, digital, code, 3d city, 3d, city, seamless loop, loop, looping

Id: DHOSRcQU9zc

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Mon May 28 2018