Trapcode Form 3 Training | 06: Layer Maps

[Music] hey folks Chad Perkins for red-giant and this is Toria we're going to look at something called layer maps which is probably the most powerful and yet underused feature in trapcode form we'll start by explaining layer maps and what they are then we'll look at some basics of just how to get started with layer maps and then I'm going to show you a series of examples just kind of some breakdown of different things that you can do with layer maps just to open your mind to the possibilities now layer maps are found in the form interface here in this layer maps section layer maps allow you to use other layers to control the color alpha displacement size fractal strength dispersion and rotation of the form particles now let's look at this example here I have this little pre comp with these little dripping little vector shapes here kind of pretty just a five second long composition but there's a lot of gradients here a lot of details and a lot of cool stuff going on so what I can do over here is I can go to my form here on a different layer and I'm gonna go to layer Maps open up color and alpha and I'm gonna choose the layer I'm going to choose HD dripping rainbow things is the name of my pre comp here and now in latest the latest versions of After Effects we can choose to use the source or let's say we've applied fractal noise to another layer in times past we would have to pre compose that layer to kind of bake in the fractal noise or whatever effect you're using and you don't need to do that anymore you could just choose effects and masks from this drop-down it'll use all of that content you'll see the fractal noise or whatever effect you've applied now we don't have any effects on this pre comp so I'm just going to go ahead and click outside of this to accept it and then we want to adjust the functionality for right now I'm okay with RGB to RGB and nothing's working yet because you need to map this over certain property so I need to map this over X Y before we do that I'm gonna just my base form a little bit I'm gonna go to X Y Z individual and I'm going to smash together in Z a little bit more so there's just not that much space between them and I'm also going to increase the size X&Y there's a little bit more probably add some more density to the particles add more resolution here in just a second but for now I'm gonna close up base form and come to color and alpha now I haven't adjusted the color at all but it doesn't matter because if I had my particle color let's say I'm gonna do something I'll just make it red for right now whatever I change it to in the layer maps I'm gonna use another four layer for color and alpha it's gonna completely replace that red with the colors from the other layer so now I'm gonna change color in alpha I have this layer loaded up the HD dripping rainbow things and I map this over X Y which will enable it and now the red is gone and now I see these little drips and again I'm going to go back to base form increase the resolution by increasing the particles in X the particles and Y and we get more detail here we could see those gradients from all those particles and I'll take down size Z maybe something like 30 so to smash that together and now if I preview this back we get those same rainbow drips from that pre-comp but now our form is doing that so it really opens up a lot of possibilities of what we can do with trapcode form now if I were to click this little transparency grid icon we'd see a bunch of black dots as well now this is black on black so we're not really seeing that but what I want to do here is change RGB to RGB to RGB a to RGB a so that way we can actually use the Alpha Channel that's in the pre comp and get rid of those black dots those black particles and just have this as transparency I mean this is a really beautiful effect the animation carries over and so now that pre comp layer is driving both the color and the animation of our form particles now something to keep in mind and something we're going to see throughout this tutorial is that we can still use all of the awesome features of trapcode form with this stuff with layer maps so I can go to disperse and twist and I could I only closed this up so it could see everything here I go to this person twist and I can twist these particles if I want to create some interesting results that way I can disperse these particles if I want to so I have just like I have a flood of rainbow that's really interesting disease pockets of color that kind of overlap I could also undo that and add some fractal field I could displace these if I want to so you can see that we have a lot of diversity and a lot of options when we're using layer maps let me show you another example here I went in and I animated this a little bit with some text same exact thing with the same pre-comp that we were just looking at the same dripping rainbow stuff they're just animated in different way and what I did with the form here as I applied polar coordinates to it and wrapped those drips around so now they're kind of dripping outwards instead of Dripping from top to bottom and then I added an adjustment layer with the transform effect and then animated the scale of it so it all scales up and kind of drips and I also changed the fractal displacement settings so that's kind of more of a big wave rather than like a little tiny wave and so we just kind of have this like cool undulating thing that just kind of pops out I love that love the way that looks and to me what's really fun about this is this this doesn't look like trapcode form this is really unconventional stuff and a lot of times when you use form in very conventional ways where you're just using fractal displacement or whatever it's kind of it has a tenancy to maybe feel old a little bit because we've seen that before and different things you kind of have to get creative with it and this is one way you can really get creative and use form for some beautiful effects because the layer maps now let's look at another example here I have a fence layer just a fence but as you can see here there's some transparency so I can go to form and I want to go to particle I'm just going to maybe make this kind of like a fiery fiery orange type color and I've already kind of adjusted the base form a little bit I might go back and maybe make this a little bit wider or maybe go to the XYZ individual do the same thing where we're kind of doing maybe like 1920 by 1080 and then I want to take this down to like and add some more particles here and x and y just we have kind of like a dense grid here and then I could go to just close all this stuff up here I go to layer Maps color and alpha and now what I could do is I could choose the fence from the layer drop-down and then what I could do and I mapped this over x and y but I actually want to not use the the color information so I don't want to use RGB to RGB I actually just want the Alpha Channel of the fence so then I could just use a 2 a alpha 2 alpha the Alpha of one layer to the alpha of this layer and now I have this cool three dimensional fence so I could turn the layer or the camera on that I've already created and I could rotate around this and now we have like this fence made it out of form particles now you can tell I'll go ahead and turn on the transparency grid you can see what's going on here this is just a almost like a three-dimensional fence three-dimensional holographic fence on transparency and again we could go back to form and again we can you know I don't know twist it or whatever we want to do to it go to the fractal field and displace it and so we have all this flexibility and it's almost like we have kind of like a three-dimensional holographic fence because of this alpha Channel and because foreign particles exist in 3d space now one of my favorite things to do with this is to use effects use some of the great built-in effects that come with After Effects to create some really interesting results with layer maps and form so for example I have this thing I'm just gonna turn this visibility off I use CC mr. mercury which is you know not the most popular of effects it just makes goo like 2d goo with some bevel and emboss on it and so I just did this I just shot a bunch of goo upwards with CC mr. mercury but the cool thing with that is that particles are born and they die and with form we can't really do that we can't have particles born and die and so by using a particle system like particular ideally in this case I just used just a junky old CC mr. mercury and we could hook that up to trapcode form and create some really beautiful effects like these swirlies by using the strings and so the particles come on and they're born and they die which we usually can't get with form any other way other than by animating opacity or something like that which just doesn't feel too organic or too real and this way they grow organically and they disappear organically and it's really beautiful because it's using CC mr. mercury as a color and alpha map now here's another example I'm gonna take the visibility off of this form swirlies layer and put on the form smoke layer and this is using the same exact CC mr. mercury except that I changed the particle settings on this one to use the cloudlet increase the feather increase the size decrease the opacity a lot just 9 not opacity value of 9 and now we have this kind of very smoky type thing which looks a lot more like something you would see with particular and not with form now of course you probably would want to do something like this with particular because it is born and it dies just like particular does and so that's more suited to the job but if you're playing around with form and you need it to do this if you need it to be smoky and to appear and disappear or morph into something that appears and disappears you do have that flexibility with form because of layer maps there's another example I have this other layer here which I use the shadow effect and I animated shatter and the shutter point here let me just close this up and I'll open up shatter and I increase the repetitions so the little chunks are a little bit smaller and I animated the position of force 1 I also took down their radius quite a bit so I made kind of like a Zorro animation creates this Z and then when I turn on my foreign particles you can see that it kind of erodes the form and it makes it feel like this form is almost like cloth that's being cut up with scissors or something we have like little shards that fall apart and really what's happening all that's happening is that I'm using that shatter layer as the color and alpha for the layer map of the form I love the way those tears in the the shatter the way that breaks up it appears to make the form look like cloth it looks like we are tearing fabric here now another thing we could do with this is change the base form so here I have this map of the world and I tinted it with the tint effect and then I used it as the color map the layer maps area color and alpha use this for the RGB and I change the base form to a sphere and I only use one sphere layer if you use multiple spheres layers you get that kind of like well not 26th at minus 2/3 here then we have multiple concentric spheres and I don't want that just one but then I have this kind of cool globe rotating around it feels like again like a hologram made out of foreign particles and again we still have access to all of the foreign features I could make the size random I could make the opacity random I could add some fractal displacement disperse all that type of stuff right here with my globe now I'm gonna close this up a little bit I'm gonna go down to my layer Maps after closing up all this stuff up layer maps and I could use this map for color and alpha but I can also use this map the earth map here or any other layer for any one of these properties so if I wanted to have a map of the size of the particles I could also use the earth map and use that as a map for the size so then the water disappears and the continents and there's some gradients in the continent so this is probably not the best map to use for this but you can still see there's just kind of like the difference in the size of particles here which is interesting if you want to flip that there's a handy invert map section not know about you but I always get my whites and my blacks confused when I'm using things as maps and so I'm always so grateful to software developers to put an invert map button for me there but I could flip this now and now we see the water and there's some more there's tinier particles where these continents are and size is actually really good around for color and alpha because you can't have a separate color and alpha map color and alpha are just kind of one thing so you can kind of cheat it a little bit by using size because you can use size as your alpha because it kind of makes the particles so small they disappear and then use a different color map for that way so now we haven't talked about displacement fractal strength dispersed and rotate rotate we're not going to look at in this tutorial we're gonna save that too when we talk about custom particles in the next movie in this series but I do want to talk about displacement fractal strength and disperse and I want to talk about using them all at once so I'm gonna look at another example here so this camp I have this flower from Illustrator and I have the transparency on here and able at the bottom of the comp panel there and you can see that there is this alpha as part of the illustrator flower now I also have a gradient just a simple it's actually just a shape layer there's a simple black to white gradient notice the kind of like harder edge here and we're gonna use these in just a second now I've created form and a camera and added some basic fractal displacement fiddled with the base form setting just stuff that we've already covered in this training series a billion times and as I play this here we just have just real simple animation nothing special at all but we're gonna really customize this by going into our layer maps and again combining these into some interesting things so I could go into color and alpha and I actually want to use the color of the form as is I don't want to change the color so I can use the AI flower illustrator layer and I'm going to map the functionality of the alpha to alpha just about the Alpha of the star and I need to map this over XY so now we're use the transparency we're using the transparency of the star which is kind of cool and if we a little bit more resolution a little bit fractals with a little bit less factor this place but we'd be able to see that star shape a little bit more clearly but you could already kind of tell that it's using the Alpha from the star now I'm gonna close up a color and alpha and get into something that's very interesting and that is displacement now in regular form here we have fractal filled displacement and spherical filled displacement but those are based on a fractal and a sphere respectively you can't just displace however you want to displace something but this displacement is unique to layer maps we can actually displace this in a really unique way so I actually can change the map over to X Y and this is how I want to do this but I'm just can temporarily release set it up this way I'm gonna say the displacement is the flower and then we have this flower displacement we can increase the strength and what this does is that this maps the RGB to X Y Z so this displaces things in all directions and that's actually not what I want here so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change X Y RGB to X Y Z to individual X Y Z because most of time when I'm displacing something I actually just want to displace it in the z-axis so I mean that might change for you but for me right now I want to use just the z-axis I want to displace this and have this coming out at me and actually so we could see this little bit more clearly I'm going to temporarily take down displacement to zero just so we can see this there we go so we can now see with the displace value of zero nothing's happening but with as we adjust this displace value we can see that the white and the illustrator file is actually causing these pixels to move forward well depending on how we adjust this value and so we could really get access to our shape and displace certain pixels in certain areas by using a map like this and again just so you can see the difference more clear will take us back to RGB 2 X Y Z and will displace this if I use the the flower here well this place this in all dimensions and that's really not what I want here so again I'm gonna do individual X Y Z and turn off X displacement I'm just gonna use Z displacement and just a little bit in the negative direction for that so we have this cool displacement to our flower and maybe that's a little much I may take that down just a little bit but you get the idea okay so I'm gonna close up displacement so now we're using a layer map for the Alpha Channel we're using a layer map for displacement and now we could actually use a layer map for while anything if we want actually but I'm actually gonna use a layer map for dispersion I just want the kind of edges to be dispersed here so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change the layer to the gradient and I'm gonna map this over x and y now dispersed is actually kind of interesting because if you just set a map to disperse the particles nothing will happen if you if you don't have any dispersed about you so I need to come down here to dispersant twist bump up the dispersed value and now we're seeing these particles be dispersed because of our gradient map now if we were to go back to our shape layer and let's say open I'm a type you you to get access to the things that we've changed including the gradient I can edit the gradient and if I were to move these color stops around change how they gradually go from one point to another or make a more abrupt change then we start to see that reflected in the map right here which is you know really cool I'm gonna go ahead and get that to a happy place and go ahead and click OK let me go back to my forum settings now I want to bring back that fractal displacements I'm gonna open up fractal field take our displace value to about 150 I think that's where we were and this doesn't work I just kind of want displacement to be at the ends I could use a gradient for that I could use a layer map to customize where I want that but I could also use the curves in addition to what I have going on here with the layer maps so I'm going to make sure the fractal strength is set to radio because I want this to be again out from the center and I don't want there to be any fractal displacement in the center I'm so I'm gonna mow the lawn right here and then bring this up I want and I'll smooth out a few times and maybe you actually bring that back in a little bit a little bit on the edges maybe even a little bit more on the edges and now I could smooth that out and so we have dispersion at the ends of our flower and we also have a little bit of fractal field displacement at the ends of our flower we have displacement in the center so you can use layer maps for multiple properties you can use curves for those properties in addition to layer maps and really the point here is to get the most out of form by using layer maps so I really challenge you to experiment and explore the possibilities here thanks so much for watching and we'll see you 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: 31,553

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: 7OWVKb649Ao

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018