Trapcode Form 3 Training | 03: Curves

[Music] hey folks Jeff Perkins for red giant here for part three of our series on using cap code form in this lesson will cover drawing curves formally known as quick maps curves allow us to map properties like opacity for example over the forum in different ways and they make almost everything you do with forums look better now for me honestly they were kind of tough to understand in person maybe that's your situation as well but now they're my favorite part of forum so by the end of this tutorial you're gonna be using curves like a champ now we're gonna start just by grasping the basic concept of mapping by looking at color over and then we'll talk a bit more about the actual drawing of curves we'll also look at some additional tools and features in the curves areas we'll look at animating curves and we'll wrap up by using curves to create enhance this vintage movie logo now I'm gonna start here at After Effects I've already created a comp it's nineteen twenty by ten eighty made a solid applied form to it I'll just click the reset buttons you can tell this is just default settings of form now what I want to do first is open up the base form and I want to get this in a way that we're kind of set up for this tutorial so we're not gonna make anything pretty just yet we're just going to figure out how these map things work so I'm going to increase size X Y Z quite a bit here I'll take particles and Z down to one so we basically don't have any 3d depth to our particles we have just one 2d sheet X&Y of these particles and that's it I'm gonna make that a little bit bigger just so we can see what's going on done with base 4 I'm gonna close that up open up particle and let's make the particle size 3 so we can just kind of see a little bit more clear maybe even more than that maybe 5 yep perfect okay now let's talk about this mapping situation we're gonna start by looking at color over now most of the time in form whatever you see the term over like opacity over and size over and you have this axis drop down here that's an indication of one of the curves so I could open up size curve for example and draw the curves will look at that later and color overs a little bit different in that there isn't this curve but it still is a good way to start understanding the idea of mapping so let's start with color over and I'm gonna change color over to X meaning the x-axis which is where this color will be mapped now see that activated the color ramp and I just take an axis but basically what we need to do is choose an axis first X Y Z or radial and this determines how this gradient will be placed across the form so for example we have color over set to X so it's gonna take this gradient from red to blue and map it across the x-axis from red to blue now we could change the color over to Y in which case this would map the rainbow gradient from top to bottom over the y axis now you can also do this over Z but we don't have any layers in Z because of this tutorial we just have a 2d layer so it wouldn't do anything in this case we could also choose radial here which is really cool so now we go red to blue from the inside to the outside now hopefully that seems simple enough it will get much more complex and harder to wrap your brain around as we go so I know that I'm starting very slowly here it's only so that you can really cement these concepts in your head before we really get to some more mind-bending stuff so I'm going to actually change this color over to off so it's not confusing and I'm gonna change the regular color to like a mint green color just so we have something kind of pleasant to look at let's go actually and actually look at one of these properties or mapping over and by the way you'll see these curves throughout form so you see size like size has a curve and that the tell-tale signs there is a size over property there's a curve property and there's a curve offset property as well so we see that with size we say it with opacity you'll find it in audio react you'll find it in dispersant twists you'll find it in fractal field you have a lot of options for controlling how to map these different properties across form which as you'll see is extremely powerful so I'm going to change the opacity over drop down to the x-axis now we see no change because as we open up curve we see the solid blue chunk and the blue indicates the maximum value so basically this controls just like with color how we map the opacity across the form from left to right because we're choosing the x-axis and by having all blue it means that it's just full opacity but if I were to for example take a dip in the center here and just draw in like a dip in the center then we could see that it creates a dip and the opacity at the center of our form now I kind of did a little janky job here and left this big spike right here and so that's what we see right here we see this little spike of green from my sloppy Genki curve drawing right here but that's okay cuz I can click this little smooth button and every time I click the the smooth button this gets smoother and smoother and kind of smoothes it out which is really nice now another thing that I can do if I want to put back something kind of janky they are kind of alias when you draw in here so don't you know shame yourself like I did no curve shame yourself for making it not completely smooth what I can do here is if I kind of want this u-shape but it's not ideal I could then go over to the pen side and what it will do is we'll convert this jakey drawing into kind of like Bezier curves they're not quite Bezier curves but they're the same type of thing where we have these points that are smooth and now it's much easier to kind of like fine-tune so typically what I'll do is I'll start with the pencil sketch something out really quick then go over to the pen side and fine-tune it there I mean I was just fiddling right then while I was talking to you but I mean look at this with a steep dropoff here and look at this with a steep dropoff here we have a smoother drop off over here on the right side and you see that smooth gradient so even in the same form we can have steep drop-offs in opacity and smooth gradations in opacity that's incredible now I'm gonna go ahead and reset this form to get it back to the way it was by clicking this reset button here by the way if you ever want to undo the last action this is your little your helper here so I can click undo and I could redo that undo redo I'll just leave it set there we also have some presets to use so if you want to just go back to the beginning you don't have to reset it you could choose that preset right here that makes it full-size you could also choose to do this this linear drop-off and this is actually probably the the preset that I use the most most the time I just want kind of like a smooth fade out here so as we have a the full graph on the Left we have full opacity on the left of our form and as that gradually fades out to nothing on the right hand side again because it's mapped to X we fade out to nothing on the right hand side of the x-axis if we change the axis from X to Y just like we saw out the color mapping we're now going from opaque at the top to transparent at the bottom and later lessons will use radial a lot I find this is very helpful because we could make the center of the form opaque and then kind of fade out the edges which is a really cool effect now in this case these dots right on the edge are still a little bit too opaque for me so again I could go back to the curve here and maybe boost the center a little bit and then I could bring in this point to have a more steep dropoff to transparency which is something I find myself doing quite a bit with form so now we have this which is actually pretty awesome we have total control over how we want to map this form and where we want things to be opaque now if at some point you want to let's say you want to flip this so you want the center to be transparent and the outside to be opaque you can click this button right here which flips the graph which is really handy now you might be wondering why when I flipped it why the center is still transparent well sometimes what happens is you get kind of like a the equivalent of like a stray pixel you get like a little piece that is you can't really see but it's it's spiking somewhere and that's what causes that so you just kind of click in just like I did and force it to be down at the bottom there and there you have it now I'm going to flip it back now another thing you could do is actually I'll go to the pencil side for this but I can click the randomize button and when you randomize just gives you a bunch of random values so from left to right actually no we're still in the radial axis so from Radio from the center to the outside we're now just getting just random opacity values all over the place if we change this from radial to X we'd have something that's maybe a little bit more useful maybe something we use like something techy maybe we did this in the y-axis almost looks like an old 1980s computer terminal now another thing we could do is we could actually transfer grass from one to another now this dis randomize this is really really really random and it would be next to impossible if not completely impossible to recreate this on your own but if I did want to transfer this graph I could just click the copy button so I'm gonna go ahead and copy this graph then I'm going to turn off this graph by going to opacity over and turning that off and then I'm gonna go to size over and let's map this to X or I guess that was why we were using so let's do Y open up size curve and now I could paste that and now we have the same thing but with size and if I turn up size a little bit more you can see what's going on so we start you know we big where there's spikes and then it goes to smaller points so this isn't quite opacity this is size but it's it's quite interesting and you know again it completely changes the power that you have over these foreign particles this is what makes form so magical because these particles just exist and they're there we can control things like mapping that you wouldn't have access to in a regular standard particle with the millers with particles that like die because they wouldn't exist like this it's just the magic of form yeah I want to talk about this right here that the size curve offset value so what this is is almost like the the base threshold of the form and as we increase this it's almost like we're raising up the entire graph so in this case we're going to make everything bigger if we took this below a hundred it's like lowering the base line of the graph or like shrinking the graph down and it makes everything smaller so if you want to universally lower the graph or raise it or lower it sighs curved offset is the way to do that by the way notice that there are stop watches next to the curved offset values yeah and also next to the curves curves are fully animatable so if I go out to like a second for example click the stopwatch for size curve go back to the first frame and maybe reset this so it's nothing well then over time we can see this pattern start to emerge because it interpolates between the full graph and the one that's just random so imagine the power fading in fading out of randomness all that stuff animated over time in form okay let's look at a project here I'm gonna go to my project where I have another just plain old default application of form nothing done to it I'm just gonna click reset just to prove that have no tricks up my sleeve and I'm gonna go to base form I'm gonna change size from XYZ linked to XYZ individual so we have control over the individual properties of the dimensions of the form and basically want these particles just to be full-frame except that I want to expect a 2/3 9 aspect ratio so I'm going to change X to 1901 let's say 2000 just to be safe that make sure it clears the sides of the the document here and I want this to be in size y 800 again I want that aspect ratio of a Hollywood movie I would take particles in Z down to 1 and so now we have these cool particles here now I want to adjust the number of particles because I want these stripes I want it there to be striped so normally what you might want to do is change particles and X to a really high value until you can't see the dots anymore and that takes a lot of trial and error and it's kind of frustrating and then if you change the form anyway you can see the dots what I want to do is just change the base form from grid to strings which just draws a line on the x-axis and so don't have to worry about that love it now I'm also going to take strings in Y maybe down a little bit so we could see a little more clearly take that down to 50 this is looking pretty awesome feeling 80s guys open up particle I'm gonna change the color from white to like a super pure 80s red and I might take this from sphere to glow sphere because that makes those strings more rad I think I think the 80s would be proud I'm gonna take size 2 3 now let's talk about curves making this awesome with curves what I want is I want the to adjust the size of these strings so that they are big or at least normal size on the left and then they dip to be very tiny in the center and then thick again on the right hand side so almost like a u-shape I want to be big small big so I'm gonna go to size over the x-axis cuz I'm want to adjust it from left to right and I'm gonna open up the size curve and I'm gonna go big small big and because I draw like an amazing champion I'm going to smooth this a few times and then I'm going to go over to the pen side where I have more control here and I could fiddle with this as thrilling as it is to watch a tutorial where somebody is fine-tuning something and polishing it I'm going to spare you that but basically this is what I want we have big strings here they get smaller in the center and then they get big again and that looks pretty cool now what I want to do is I want to start okay at the top and then fade out at the bottom so I'm gonna go over to opacity so we go the opacity curve pasady over Y and I'm gonna go to the opacity curve and let's just choose the preset right here this linear drop off and so now we have completely opaque at the top fades at the bottom but I don't really want a linear ramp for this I kind of want it to be a little bit different because I don't want to start fading out immediately and then fade out gradually I want to be opaque completely in the center and at the top and then just kind of like right at the bottom I want to fade out so again go to my old buddy the pen and then we can kind of shrink this so we can bring up the opacity on this side pass it on this side then we just kind of have this steep dropoff and opacity at the now I turn on my text layer that I have previously made for the cyborg inator and now that I see that I see that I'm off a little bit with my size like there's a little bit too much space here and maybe not enough space here so we can go back and fine-tune this as needed may bring this in a little bit maybe push this back a little bit and then could fiddle with it until it's something that I like and that's good enough for now I think now in the last tutorial we looked at the dispersed value which basically kind of lets the particles kind of stray from the grid a little bit which is a very very handy property to use and I want to use it in a different way and I want to use this curve here for this I'm gonna increase the dispersion and you see as we increase dispersed they kind of go all over the place but I only want the particles to disperse where the text is right here like they're almost like a horizontal stripe of dispersed particles so I actually wanted to Spurs this and why because I want them to be normal from top to bottom and then to be dispersed right here and then go back to being normal so I might change the dispersed strength to over why open up the despread spur strength curve and what I want to do is start with nothing I want to flatten this out so we don't have any dispersed so I'm just gonna kind of paint this here like Bob Ross it's just kind of painting with dispersion that's good it's really great it's really great okay so now I wanna kind of spike in the center here and you can see that as I'm drawing this it's creating these dispersed particles in the center maybe I don't want them that much there we go so wherever this spike is that's where these particles are going to be dispersed and that looks really cool add a little polish with the VHS adjustment and bring back in the aspect ratio crop and we've got something really special guys I encourage you to play with these curves and incorporate them into what you do it gives you so much power and control and flexibility when you're creating your form 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

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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: SJ6X_dzAPoo

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018