Trapcode Form 3 Training | 02: Base Form and Particles

[Music] hey folks chad perkins for red giant this is the second tutorial in this training series on trapcode form in this tutorial we're going to just start from scratch and learn the very basics of form including what we call the base form we'll also look at adjusting its dimensions shape and resolution we'll also take a look at the particles themselves we'll then wrap up with a little project for we'll use form to add stars to this 3d galaxy sync now I have here just a plain old basic composition my settings here in case you're curious 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames per second nothing special I'm gonna right click in the timeline panel create a new solid make it the comp size click OK and now we can apply form to it now I prefer to go to effects and presets and do a search for form and apply it this way but a lot of people like to go to the effect menu and make sure that the layer is selected and the timeline panel is highlighted now we go to the effect menu go to RG trapcode and choose form now a lot of new users are intimidated by this when they first see this it doesn't look super magical it's not very impressive and it's kind of confusing it doesn't make sense really what's going on so let me break this down for you and actually to do that I'm gonna create a new comp camera I'm just gonna go to my timeline panel right click new camera and use the default settings click OK and now I'm going to use the unified camera tool and click and drag around because this is actually in 3d and this is now much easier to understand what's going on you see form has two components two main components the base form and the particles so if i zoom in here we'll see that there's actually a bunch of little dots here a bunch of little spheres and these are the particles and they're arranged in a grid a 3d grid the shape of the grid is referred to as the base form I like to think of this kind of like building a house like the particles are bricks and you can arrange bricks in any shape you want so the particles are like bricks and the shape of the house or the shape of the building is like the base form now when I go back to form here I'm going to open up base form so we could adjust its properties and I'm gonna go ahead and leave my camera angle all screwy like that cuz it's easier to see what's going on so we have a bunch of fish different shapes for base form by default it's set to grid as we can see here we also have a few other options such as strings where instead of using particles per se it uses actually a solid string which is interesting there's also a sphere so now our our particles are layered in a sphere and not in a grid and finally we have obj model which allows you to use a 3d object for your form now this is kind of a special thing so we'll talk about this a couple tutorials down the road but we are going to definitely talk about it because it's an extremely cool feature of form now just for the sake of this tutorial I'm gonna go back to box grid and we can see our grid here and let's talk about some of these attributes we can change the size of the base form now by default this is linked so X Y Z is all one parameter so just scales up uniformly but I find it's very often helpful to change this from XYZ linked to XYZ individual so you have access to the size X independently of the size Y and the size Z now again I realize it still isn't much to look at just yet but just hang in here like it's it's one of these things that really pays off you invest a little bit it's like Bitcoin five years ago you know put in a little bit and you're gonna get a lot just hang in there now I'm gonna take this back to XYZ link just so it's a little bit easier to see what's going on and here this up particles in XY and Z this is really where we control kind of like the resolution of the base form so as I take particles and X down you see we have less particles and X and so we can get just kind of these interesting like columns of dots and it's adjusting these properties that makes form so useful for creating heads-up display elements which we'll look at a later movie in this training series we could also increase or decrease the particles and why and I'm gonna bring this back up again a little bit like I don't like we had it originally if I change this to one you can see we not only have one particle in Z so we have one sheet of particles like just one flat grid or we can increase this to something very dense until we have almost like a 3d cube just for now I'm going to take the particles in Z down to one just so it's really clear and obvious what we're looking at here and I'll zoom in a little bit as well and we have some standard parameters you know we have the position of the form we also have rotation of the whole form now we're not going to talk about obj settings in this tutorials we talked about we're not going to talk too much about stringing settings as well but be aware that these properties will be completely grayed out unless you choose strings or obj settings as your base form so as I choose box strings then we get the properties for the strings I'm just gonna close that up take this back to box grid now let's talk about the particles themselves when i zoom in here again so we could see a little bit more closely open up I'm actually gonna close part of base form open up particle it's I find that it's very helpful to do that it's good housekeeping because there's so many parameters and a lot of these trap code plugins that if you just leave everything open it just starts to look like my bedroom in high school just take just a complete mess so I gotta tell you things up a little bit now we can change the particle type by default it's set to sphere we could set this to glow sphere we could set this to star and there's other things like cloudlet and some really interesting shapes that we can get by changing this particle two different things we'll talk in a later tutorial about how you can use one of these sprite options or text for polygon options to use your own custom image as a particle which is very powerful as you can imagine now when I go back to star here you'll notice that glow sphere and star both say no DOF that means no depth of field that means if you were to use them in a 3d scene and you were to use depth of field from your comp camera these options would not have depth of field it would still be a glow sphere and still be a star but these other options would have depth of field applied so just be aware of that how much you star for right now and we can't really see it looks like a grid almost and so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go back to my base form and take down the particles in X&Y so we have a little bit more space between these particles and see what's going on a little bit more there you go close up base form I find that when I'm working with a form and particularly back and forth between the shape of the object that's emitting the particles or in this case the base form and the particles themselves now another thing we're gonna say for a later tutorial in this series is open these are opacity over color over the capacity curve there's these kind of quick maps that are built in to form that kind of deserve their own tutorial so we'll talk about those later but those are extremely powerful this white is getting irritating so I'm gonna change my color when I click this color swatch and I'll change this to something like maybe a pale orange for some of these particle types like star we can add a glow here it's going to built-in so you increase the size of the glow or the opacity of the glow and that adds some interesting effects as well and we have some basic parameters but that are just really good to be aware of for example we have the size of the each particle and one of the most important properties you'll see throughout form is just randomness so as I increase size random you see what happens here we have some of these disappear and all of a sudden this looks a lot more organic we could also do the same thing with opacity random and increase the randomness the opacity and have some of these disappear some of these be faded and the last thing I want to talk about in this section before we get to our little project is rotation so a lot of these properties like size size random opacity they're very obvious their value is right here but size or rotation excuse me as a category in and of itself that contains multiple properties so it's worth opening that up and seeing all that you have here you can actually increase the rotation speed Z and as I preview this you can see that we kind of get some randomness and the rotation of our stars and maybe I'll take that down a little bit let's say take that down to two and maybe increase a little bit rotate maybe increase the randomness of the speed rotate and then now as I play this back we have just kind of these stars rotating in random ways I want to zoom in really quick so you can see that a little bit easier there's that so this one's just going crazy this one's just kind of like a little clock they're really interesting now let's actually build something I'm gonna go over here to this galaxy scene here this is some beautiful art that I'm actually using in the training series as well some of those graphics you might have seen and this is some amazing art from my buddy Johanna smart who's an amazing designer and painter and illustrator now I'm gonna go ahead and create another solid for the form layer and by the way this galaxy scene it's a 3d scene these layers are in 3d and there also is a 3d camera flying through the scene and so if I scrub this over a minute you can see that the camera is pushing in you could kind of see that I'm gonna zoom out a little bit and you can see the layer boundaries here as I scrub in time the camera is actually pushing in that will come into play later so save that away in your memory banks okay so now I'm going to go to layer new solid and I'm going to call this layer form make sure it's comp size and click OK and now I'm going to again go to effect and I'll just apply formats the last effect I apply it so I'll go ahead and click form to apply that here and we want to do is make a 3d star field with this now I'm going to zoom a little bit closer so you can see what's going on a little bit better and the base form is where we want to start usually and I do want to grid this is great but I want this to be spread out I want these particles really to go deep far back on the z-axis so changing x y&z together is not going to work so I'm going to change this from the size from X Y Z linked to X Y Z individual and then I'll make the size X really wide this size Y enough to cover the screen and then some and then I also want to take up size Z a lot like in the thousands maybe 4000 now this kind of grid look is not going to work for Ana starfield I mean this is too geometric and it doesn't look like anything like stars so we're going to use another attribute of form called dispersed so if you come down to disperse and twist open up the source and twist there's a dispersed value so I'm going to increase the dispersed value which will create some random dispersion in these particles and I could crank that up quite a bit here and then when I let go you see we actually have a lot of great randomness this kind of looks a lot like a star field so these particles are a little bit too close and so we can fiddle with that in a couple of ways if they're actually too close to the camera we can go to the position value in base form and push them back and that's actually what I'm going to do here but I could also I mean I think they're probably a good amount of distance back here but there's still a little bit too big so what I could do is get some help from the particle area so when I close up this person twist I'm gonna close up base form open particle and let's change size random increase that quite a bit that makes a big difference and maybe we take down the size of the particles maybe we take down the size of the stars to one well now that looks maybe a little bit too small so we can actually type in a fractional value here like 1.5 and that's a good mix in between there and I might still back this up maybe a little bit back a little bit further but what's really cool is that there weren't really any depth cues in this scene before everything that's kind of on the same plane even though it's layered 3d stuff everything kind of needed to be pretty close to each other so we don't have anything like really close to the camera and so not only does this trapcode form stuff really add a lot to our scene and make it look more believable but it also adds a lot of depth to make our scene more engaging and I know there's just a simple example we're just getting started in this series but you can really see the benefits of trapcode form here because most other particle systems they're going to generate particles that are going to die out but form particles just live they continue to exist and that allows us for stuff like this for stars that wouldn't die out in the course of 30 seconds or a minute or whatever the exile allows us to use this great tool for this purpose which is really cool so now if I back this up you can see now like we're moving into space and that is just awesome as I scrub this now pretty little quality here because we got a lot of 3d layers going on but we get a lot of dimension out of these stars and you know maybe that's moving too fast maybe we want to push that back a little bit maybe we want to take the stars down a little bit more maybe we want to increase the size z to spread those out so we can fiddle with this to taste but essentially that's our star field and again because these particles are in 3d all you have to do is put a camera in your scene and once you move the camera these particles these foreign particles will move in 3d space it's pretty phenomenal also be sure to not take the layer and put that into 3d it just works at 3d as is now another thing that you could do here is go into form your effect controls panel I'm going to click away to deselect it and then click it again to select it I could press the keyboard shortcut command D on the Mac or ctrl D on the PC to duplicate this effect so now I actually have two versions of form and what actually happens initially is that this top duplicate completely replaces the old duplicate so there's the the first form isn't being seen we could take off the visibility and we don't really see a change so what we need to do is come down here at the bottom this duplicate form - and I'm going to go down to rendering at the very bottom and change the blend mode from none to normal and now we'll have both copies and what could you do with that well what I can do is let's say we take down the particles and X down to like 20 and maybe particles and Y down to 20 so we have much fewer particles here well then I could change the particle type to star so we just kind of have a few of these kind of shining stars with the spike so maybe that's too much maybe we 10 by 10 so we just have a few of them and maybe we make them a little bit bigger maybe we actually make them too maybe we bring them a little bit close sir so we have a few of these little spikes here for variation now we could do a quick render and there's our scene now in the next tutorial in this series we're gonna take form a lot farther we're going to talk about using fractal fields to distort our form particles thanks for watching and we'll see you there shout out to pond5 for all the super dope music I used in this tutorial [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 31,057

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: J6DCLJvUGUc

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018