Trapcode Form 3 Training | 01: Intro to the Designer

[Music] well folks my name is Chad Perkins on behalf of red giant welcome to this first tutorial in this free training series on using trapcode form form is a widely used and powerful particle system but the O form is such a unique animal and completely different from any other particle system and most other particle systems particles are born they have a lifespan and at the end of that lifespan they die out but the particles in form just exist they never die and so the features that form has like you know controlling form with freckle displacement or with audio or whatever it creates such original inspiring results it would be difficult or impossible to create with another tool now I realize that might sound as intimidating as it sounds exciting but forth isn't difficult at all to learn or even master as we'll see as we go throughout this series and there's also a way to just jump in without really knowing anything about form so that's we're gonna be covering here in this first tutorial now let's start with a brand new After Effects project nothing else going on here I'm just going to click and create a new composition we'll make it 1280 by 720 and 24 frames per second duration doesn't matter I'll say 10 seconds that's fine now go ahead and click OK and you can't just apply for them to nothing you have to apply it to something so let's go ahead and create a solid I'm just gonna right click in the timeline panel choose new solid doesn't matter what color it is I just want to make sure its comp size and click OK and now I'm gonna go to effect and then I would go to RG trapcode but I'm actually currently using beta software so I'm gonna go to RG trapcode beta I'm gonna choose form to apply form now your default settings should look something like this an unimpressive kind of grid of white dots depending on the resolution your composition this might look smaller or bigger but something roughly like this is the default settings for form I realize not super impressive in the next tutorial we're gonna look at how to create impressive stuff from scratch but there are a bunch of presets included with form to help you get started right away and they're found here in the designer so I'm just gonna click this large inviting designer button to open up the designer I'm gonna go ahead and pause this to make editing easier but you'll notice that now in form we can play our timelines and have the animations show up here and we'll come back to this momentarily I'm just gonna pause this for right now now we're going to be digging into all of this throughout this tutorial but essentially just as an overview of this designer interface we have presets on the Left we have the main components of form along the bottom and then these are called blocks by the way and then if we select one of these blocks let's say opacity then we get the controls for that block on the right hand side there's also the blocks area if we put our cursor all the way over to the right here then we get the blocks which are essentially presets for these various blocks so if we want to apply a color I can click the color block and get the controls for that color or I can go to the blocks and get presets for those colors and change those things there as desired so that's the overview of the designer let's talk about these presets now you'll notice that when I put my mouse over we saw some cool presets here but then as I put my cursor back away that drawer and if you want to think of it that way closes back up again and that's out of convenience for you and that does actually feel pretty sexy because you can put your mouse over and like I want this now and now I don't want it now I want this now I don't want it and so the interface responds to you very dynamically which is kind of fun but if you ever did want to keep something open like presets then you can come over here to this arrow and click it and once it faces the opposite way then it means it's going to stay open and same thing with the blocks area as well now there are two categories here multiple form presets and single form presets we'll talk a little bit more about what those are a little bit later on in this movie I'm just gonna go ahead and close this up though I'm going to start on single form presets these are a little bit more simple than the multiple form presets now I'm gonna open up basics right here at the top we have a bunch of really awesome presets in each one of these categories let's say for example this plasma thing one this beautiful form shape and again I could go ahead and I'm going to click this little to go back to the beginning of my timeline I'll hit the play icon and now we actually see that animate which is really cool I'm going to go ahead and pause that now in form we also have GPU acceleration I click this little sprocket icon to get the settings for form and now we have our preferences here so I was using CPU acceleration but now I could also use GPU acceleration and there's two options here the nuts and bolts of it is that direct goes a little bit slower but a little bit more accurately and streaming goes faster but isn't always as accurate so I prefer to use streaming when I'm using GPU acceleration because I find that the ways that it's not accurate don't really bother me usually so I like to use streaming for GPU particle running click ok and now when we play this back it plays back a little bit faster now I've noticed some glitches in my screen recording software when I have multiple things using the GPU so I'm gonna go ahead and just turn this off back to CPU for right now but I would recommend leaving this set to GPU I find that it does speed things up a little bit now let's go back to some of these presets this is a great way to get acquainted with form and what form does these are a really beautiful preset they're just plasma thing 5 again we'll hit the play icon so we can see that previewing here it's just so beautiful and let's go down to fractals there's one called data flow and as we'll see throughout the series that form is just really great for creating kind of like fantasy user interface elements like this very interesting stuff I'm gonna go down to shape grids here and there's this one called Chevron cascade that I'm a big fan of and you can see here that we're not using just plain old particles we're using this custom particle that's a chevron we'll talk about how to do that in a later tutorial as well I'm just gonna pause this for now now I'm gonna close up my presets area and let's talk about these blocks so these now every time I click a preset my blocks are taken over with the settings needed to make this preset and because of the modularity of these of the designer interface we can select one of these components and change just that component which is really cool so I could click on the size rotation block for example and the size right now is set to 49 but I could just click and scrub to the left and take down the size if I want two of these Chevron's or take up the size whatever I want to do here I have total control these are also rotated 180 degrees so I can click on this and take this to zero and take it to zero and they will flip up now they're pointing upwards now presets are one of the best things about the designer but it's important to be aware of just how many presets there are so there are presets for the entire thing for all of form there are also presets for each block so I'll click on block and I have these different types of presets but there's also presets that go beyond that so right now I'm using a custom particle type and I can also click on this choose sprite button to choose a different custom sprite so I could scroll down and look at all these amazing options so if I wanted to use arrows here I could just click on basic arrow click OK and now my Chevron's are replaced with these basic arrows so presets presets everywhere it's pretty awesome now let's say I really liked this this change I like these tinier arrow is pointing upwards more than the Chevron's I don't but let's just pretend I did I could come down here to this button right here which is save single form and I could save this as a preset if I want to from then on at the bottom of my area here and close these up so we can see this correctly but at the bottom in the custom section that's where my custom presets would show up oh and you know you could also save your own custom block presets if you wanted to just go over here into the controls area by the block section and just click this little save preset icon and then your preset will show up in the blocks area as well now all of this is being created with a single form form is basically a container of particles maybe a grid or a sphere or even a 3d object as we'll look at and that's kind of like the structure or the base form of the particles often just called the phone and in times past we were only able to have one form at a time or one base form but now you could actually have multiple forms at once and so I'm gonna go into my presets area and click on the multiple form presets all of these just contain all the single form presets just containing one form one base form structure multiple form presets use multiple forms and tend to be a bit more complex there are some great ones in here I'm gonna open up organic Cygnus JM is really interesting I'm gonna hit play here and actually I'm gonna keep this open um click this little arrow so this stays open these don't render as quickly because again there are multiple forms happening at once so there's all just a lot of textures here it looks like some stars and there's like these kind of strings and glows just a lot of really rich stuff going on I'm gonna close up organic I'm gonna open up backgrounds this is probably my favorite of all of the presets I don't know why I just love this it's just so 80s and awesome and this is just multiple forms at once creating these shapes and the squares and the rainbow stuff I don't I just I'm in love with that one it's so cool I'm gonna close up backgrounds I'm gonna open up space I love this neutrino one I love space things this feels like something straight out of 2001 I just I think it's beautiful when I close up space I'm gonna go to geometry I love this magic Taurus and let's take this apart I'm just gonna double-click this to apply it and I'm actually gonna go ahead and pause the action you see we have a bunch of particles moving around here and let's go ahead and dissect these multiple forms you can see now that we have we have almost like what looks like a lair section here we have the master form the base of everything and then we have additional forms as well and you see that we almost like kind of have like a stack here where we just had one little block before we now have the block plus a couple other ones and waiting so for the active form we're seeing the blocks and for the other ones we're seeing kind of like a condensed version of them so I could take off the visibility of let's say form 3 and form 2 and now I'm just seeing that master form form one I still have form three selected but I'm looking at master form so I can click on master form to see all of the parameters here for the master form if I want to have special access to different aspects of the form I can click this little flyout menu and from here we can duplicate the form we can solo it and see just that we can unhide all forms we could reset this form we could reset the whole project we could also save this form preset if we want to let's say add another blank form we could go up to the forms area here and click this blue plus icon to add a new blank form and we're now seeing this familiar pattern here that we saw that with the default form settings earlier to get rid of that I could simply select it and hit the trashcan icon and it goes away now I'm going to hold the option key and click this eye icon which turns everything back on likewise if I turn off layer while holding alt or option it solos a layer so let's take this apart so we have the first form is kind of like these cloudy type colors the second form is like these kind of same colors but particles and then the third form is like this oops that third form is kind of like this 3d torus shape and when I say 3d I actually mean 3d I can click this camera icon and we get this camera preview and now we have camera tools and I can click around this and we could see this is an actual three-dimensional torus of particles it's pretty cool and I could also hit the C key on the keyboard to cycle through the camera tools so if you're not aware of this keyboard shortcut you're kind of stuck because it's just one single camera icon so I hit the C and then now I could move this up and down I could track left and right up and down and if I hit C again I get a zoom icon so I could zoom in or zoom out so I'm gonna hit C again get back the orbit tool move this around to the side and again we'll have a dedicated movie to 3d forms later in the series now if I wanted to I could reset all the camera moves by clicking this little reset icon that's not to be confused with this icon which will actually resets the whole project this one just resets the camera angle by the way these other settings are also important you could turn on and off motion blur depth of field and you could also turn this off this is the full render icon I usually leave this turned on but if you want to see just the particles in there most simple form you can turn this off which gets rid of a lot of effects and makes things render more quickly but it just kind of gives you one single flat pixel I'm gonna again turn this on I'll go ahead and turn off the camera settings now you might have noticed that there's kind of like this weird gap here with the plus sign well what happens is when you have a master form and then add extra forms the forms by default inherit properties from the master so you just see a vacant blank space here it means that this form form - in this case is getting this property color in this case from the master form so the master form has this blue orange light blue gradient and because form to and form 3 have nothing there we know that these colors or these forms are getting its color from the original master form but we can change that let me go ahead and turn back on all these other forms I have form 3 selected that's the torus and I'm going to go ahead and click the plus icon to add a new color to just form 3 that's the torus the 3d shape I'm gonna go ahead and in the block section I'm going to click on Peachtree and now you can see that we have a more warm tone torus and yet the master form color is still intact and also form to the extra particles it's still using the N or inheriting we could say the color from the master form but form 3 is allowed to be its own creature and have its own color swatch now again we could also change this if we want to we can temporarily turn this off so see what it looks like with inherited color turn that back on again and I could also delete this to get back to the original color as well so again total flexibility and you don't have to be a master of form to get in here and really do some amazing creative stuff and at this point all you have to do is click this apply button at the bottom right corner of the designer and your design is sent to the main workspace in after-effects and from here you can continue to edit your design using set alarm parameters such as size for instance and if you open up the show forms area you can access settings for multiple forms from right here in the effect controls panel now you'll notice that form 3 is highlighted here and the parameters down below here have formed 3 or simply f3 in parentheses that tells us that we're only working on formed 3 that's the big 3d tourist if I click master form in the show forms area here then my parameters change to reflect that I'm now adjusting the master form so now when I change the size I'm changing the size of the master form now I personally prefer working in the designer but we don't have to go back to the designer for every little change next to each form is a drop-down menu that you can use to do things like solo a forum or reset it or delete it you also go all Three Stooges and poke this thing in the eye to hide or unhide forms you can click add a form to launch the designer and create a new form and you can also click the all forms button to display the controls for all the forms at once if you want to the moral of the story here folks is that you can work with one form or many forms you could work with presets or adjust things manually or a combination of both and you can work in the effect controls panel or in the designer or both now we're just getting warmed up in this training series on this incredible tool over the next few tutorials were going to be digging in and learning how to make things from scratch we'll also learn about the power of curves formally called quick maps and we'll also learn about how to use OBJ's to make the fundamental structure of form a 3d object we'll look at using the powerful auto animating fractal field to displace the form particles we'll get using your own custom particles like those Chevron's we saw earlier we'll look at lighting form creating self shadowing and reflections we'll also take an in-depth look at using audio to control form particles you see this we're gonna build this from scratch and control all of this movement with only audio no keyframes finally we'll finish up with some recipe type projects to help tie it together all that we've learned it's going to be an amazing series about an inspiring tool and we're glad you're here on behalf of red giant I am Chad Perkins thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one shout out to pond5 for all the super dope music i used in this tutorial [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 92,230

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, gaming, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, how to, diy, maker, iron man, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, vlogger, vlogging

Id: YEmDyCjSf_w

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018