Text to Sand Transition - After Effects Tutorial (No Plugins)

hi this is Noah with creationist XCOM and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make this and after-effects so a dust reveal or a text to sand transition or whatever you want to call it and we won't need any plugins for this we can do it with the cc particle systems to effect and with a bit of tweaking you can get a variety of looks you can do sparks or fairy dust and you can make it so that the text disintegrates and blows away or you can make it so that the dust actually reveals the text and this is just one of 200 text effects that I made for products called creation title effects which is a very useful tool for any After Effects user because it's full of all these different styles to text and the style to cover every theme so you'll always have really nice-looking text for all of your projects and the 200 text effects are each on their own text layer so you can just click on it to edit the text and you can easily change the font and you can customize all of the effects with slider controls on each layer so it'll be a big time-saver for you if you ever use text and after effects and you can check it out that creation effects calm and it's called creation title sex and there's a link in the description so onto the tutorial I'm going to be putting in a lot of settings and a few expressions and I recommend you just copy as I do use the same settings and then when you're all done you can go back and tweak the settings to get whatever look that you're after first thing I want to do is add some text so I'll use my text tool I'm going to type in creation effects and I'm going to duplicate this layer and the top one will be just the particles and the bottom one will be the plain text so I'll select the top one and I'll add my particle effect I'm going to use CC particle systems too and you can see we've got a problem with the particles getting cut off at the edge of the layer and there's an effect I can fix that it's called CC composite and want to put that before the particle effect and you can see that expanded the Alpha Channel and now we can see the particles I'm going to open up some of these sections here so we can see all of the properties and the first thing we want to do here is check the source alpha inheritance and that'll make it so that the particles are only emitted from the letters and you can see if I move the producer around it fades and then gets bright as we go over the letters and we can actually tighten that up a little bit by decreasing the radius X to 1 the radius is how wide our particle emitter is so we can be very narrow width wise and then height wise we want it to be at least as high as these letters so for the radius Y I'm going to put in 13 depending on the height of your letters it might be different from that and then we want to animate the producer to go from one side to the to the other side so I'll just put it over here at the edge of the frame I'll type in 0 and make sure it's in the middle of our layer vertically and go to the first frame and add my keyframe at the position property here and then go forward about a second and a half or however long you want your transition to last and I'll type in 1920 which is the width of my comp I'll hit the U key and you can see the two keyframes that created and if you scrub through you can see the particles exploding off of the letters we're going to need more particles in that so I'm going to change the birth rate to 50 and the longevity which is how long those particles will live before they fade away we'll set that to 4 seconds and I'll change the animation preset to Direction normalized the velocity is how fast these particles will explode off of those letters and this is a very sensitive control so we can use a small number I'm going to put in 0.3 and Herot velocity will make the particles move with the particle producer so they inherit the momentum of that producer as it moves across we can set that to 40% gravity you can see that the particles are falling down that's because gravity is set to a positive number but if we make it negative 0.3 the particles will flow upward resistance that's how much the particles will slow down after that initial burst off of the letters and we can set that to about 20 direction we can leave alone extra that makes the particles spread out a little bit and add some randomness I'll set that to 2 particle type we can keep that at line but you can experiment with different ones if you want maximum opacity is set to 75% which is too bright for me so I'm going to put this at like 22% and for the color I'm just going to sample the color of the text for both the birth color and the death color and I'll make the death color a little darker okay let's have a look and see what we got okay you can see some awesomeness starting to manifest here it's a little too orderly for me I want to add some some more randomness to it and we can do that with a simple expression on each of these properties and it's the wiggle expression if you don't know about the wiggle expression it's I'd say it's the king of all expressions and if you only learn one expression it should be the legal expression it's really simple I'll start by adding it to the radius X just alt or option click this stopwatch icon and it opens up an expression box here I'll type in wiggle in parentheses I'll do ten comma one so what this does it makes this value fluctuate ten times a second it will fluctuate randomly by an amount of one and that'll make it much more random and organic and just more realistic and we can actually just copy this expression and use it on all these other properties just copy and paste the only thing that will change is the second value you can experiment with different amounts but I think about 3/4 of whatever this value is set to you can use for your second value in the expression so the radius Y is set to 13 so I'll change the fluctuation amount to about 10 and then you can just go down and do that for all these properties and you can even add a wiggle expression to the color properties here but when you use a numeric value on this property it's going to be very sensitive and you can see we've got kind of this party going on with our particles using all these different colors and that's because we have it set to one so we want to use a very small number like 0.1 I'm colorblind and I can't really see much difference there but I'm just going to assume it's that it's there which is the story of my life you colorblind people understand I'll do the same thing for the death color and okay let's play it back okay you can see we've got some clumps of particles here which I don't really like that's the velocity property and if we go back to velocity we should be able to just lower this fluctuation amount let's try 0.2 you can see that spread them out a little bit I think that's better so you can see we've got some particles floating at different speeds going different directions so that's a little better it's still not quite enough randomness for me I like to add one more effect it's my favorite effect it's called turbulent displace and let me change the evolution you can see what it does so you can see it's warping it and what it's going to look like is that all these particles will be twirling and swirling and darling and Gerling and flowing in the wind so we just need to make some changes to these settings first size we can leave it 100 amount we'll make that 35 complexity can be 1.5 and the evolution we want that to just keep changing continuously you could use keyframes I'll just add an expression time times 120 so every second it'll add 120 to the value and what we can also do is move the turbulence so that it moves upward with the particles so the evolution will keep changing but the turbulence that distortion mesh will be moving upward with the particles as they float up and that's the offset turbulence property here and we can make that move up with the particles with an expression first I want to see how fast these particles are moving so at I look we can just estimate that it takes about two seconds for these particles to move to the top of the screen so I'll add an expression value minus opening bracket 0 comma time times 300 and close the bracket and that's kind of just like our other expression sorry typo so it's like that this expression it just makes one value this Y value will continuously increase which will move the turbulence upward in this direction and one of the things we want to add to this turbulent displace it is a very simple expression on the random seed random seed just randomizes the distortion with each new value that you put in here I'm just going to set this to index and index is this the layer number so now as we duplicate this layer and I'll tell you why we'll do that in a second the warp will produce random results on each layer let me duplicate it three times so now with each layer we've got different warp results and different wiggle results because the wiggle expression is going to yield different results on each of these values with each new layer so what that does is it adds multiple layers of particles and they'll each be going different directions and it's just going to add depth and realism to it and also make it a little brighter so we can see the particles better so let's have a look at what we got so that's looking pretty good we're almost done here we still have to animate the text to reveal itself with the particles so you can see these top layers are just the particles and the bottom layer when isolated is just the text so we can reveal the text with a linear wipe effect and set the feather to about 50 and then all we have to do is animate the transition completion and I'm going to reveal the key frames from one of these top layers and we can use these as a guide so I'll go to that first keyframe and add a transition completion keyframe at 0 and then go forward and then go forward to that second keyframe we made and add a new keyframe here at 100% and if we go through it looks like there's a little bit of a gap between particles and the text becoming visible so I'm just going to grab these and slide them over one frame and wrong direction sorry I had a 50-50 shot okay so that looks a little better because you don't want the letters to disappear too soon one more thing I would do is add a sand texture to the particles especially areas like this that are just a solid color they could benefit from a sand texture so you could use a photo if you want I'm just I'll just make one really quick I'll add a new solid layer call it's and texturing and I'll add a fractal noise or a turbulent noise effect and I'll lower the scale all the way to one and increase the contrast a bit that should work in order for this to work we have to pre compose this layer so with layer selected I'll go to layer pre compose and move all attributes into the new composition and we'll close that pre comp that opened up so now it's it's in here it's in its own pre comp and we actually don't need to see it so you can just turn it off and now we can add a texturized effect to these particle layers and we want to set the texture layer to the sand texture that we just made and you can see now it added a little sand texture whoops I've got to texturize effects here and I'll believe one we'll just copy that and put it on these other layers as well maybe I'm back in my sand texture comp I'll change the evolution so that it changes we'll make it so that it changes randomly on every frame with an expression random and in parentheses a thousand so now it's like noise and I almost forgot you might want to experiment with different blending modes I'll change this top layer to screen or maybe add I think that'll look better lower the opacity of that a little bit so there you have it see we don't need no stinking plugins and you can go back and change those settings if you want and experiment with the wiggle expressions or maybe with different particle types and see what you can make and one other thing I should mention is that you don't have to use text for this any layer with an alpha channel will work so you can use an image if you want to create maybe some really nice text in Photoshop or again the creation title effects template is perfect for that because it's got all of those different styles for your text and they're already made and you can customize them so you can you can go look at the demo video for that if that creation effects calm and there's a lot of other good stuff there too there are custom 3d books there's VHS effects old film effects glitch effects ink bleeds Aurora's growing flourishes and lots of different art effects so you can convert your video to animated artwork in just about any medium you can think of [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Creation Effects

Views: 681,330

Keywords: after effects, text, sand, dust, reveal, transition, disintigrate, explode, revealing, blowing away, wind, blow away, particles, no plugins, without plugins, how to, turning, turn text to sand, turn text to dust, sparks, blows away, storm, tutorial, particle, wind-blown, effect, disperse, how to make, how to create, dissolve, dust to text, sand to text, float, sand reveal, dust reveal, particle reveal

Id: rcLD9W6dIzQ

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2017