Trapcode Form 3 Training | 10: Audio Reactors

[Music] hey folks Chad Perkins for red giant and in this tutorial we're going to explore the massive collection of tools in form for using audio files to control form particles these features blow my mind so hopefully you share some my enthusiasm for this stuff after we're done here now we're gonna start with just the very basic so we understand what's going on we'll talk about controlling properties with audio to even certain frequencies of that audio will also look at using our old buddy curves to control which particles are affected by audio now we're also going to be making some beautiful art combining form of music just creates a really rich and engaging experience now this tutorial is a bit advanced in places so if you're confused you might want to go back and watch some of the earlier tutorials in this series alright we've got a lot to cover so graphics fade out and let's jump into After Effects now I have here a very simple scene I'm just going to start with form with this default settings I'm going to give you some parameters to just kind of input here I'm going to go to base form I change this to XYZ individual change the X Y Z to 750 in the X and 400 and the Y I don't need to worry about Z and take particles X - 7 and particles Y - 5 and particles Z - 1 again we just got some real basic simple grid particles set up here I'm gonna close up base form open up particle I'm gonna take down feather to 0 I'm gonna take up size to 40 and last things let's go ahead and change the color I'm gonna click on the color swatch here and if you care or that's interesting to you I'm just going to use - 90 90 and 90 now you saw a start from scratch we just have a real simple grid of foreign particles we can see what's going on here and I'm gonna press the period key on the numeric keypad just to preview our audio ok so again nothing happening to our particles and we have a little simple dinky beat in the background here so I'm going to open up the audio react section where it says where we're gonna be spending most of our time in this tutorial now what I'm gonna do is in the audio layer dropped I'm gonna choose the audio file I'm going to use it's this AI F file now that so it doesn't do anything yet this is just telling form which audio file we're going to be using notice that we have five reactors here so we could have form react in five different ways to the same audio layer we're going to start out a little bit simple in this example but in a later example in this tutorial we're gonna be using all five of those things at once now I'm gonna open up reactor 1 and I first want to say ok I'm going to map this audio to a certain property so I'm gonna map to and from this drop down you can see that we have all kinds of properties to map this - I'm gonna map this to particle size now you saw me set this up there was no animation I didn't do anything to it all I did so far was connect the audio mapping to this audio file and watch this animation as we play back I mean so much life to this animation and really all we did was just connect it to this audio track that's all we did now you notice that when that bass drum hit we got a real big explosion here these particles got really really really big because they're set to use the of a very low frequency or kind of where the bass drum hangs out so if I wanted to I could turn down the strength and that would make it so that when the bass drum hits they don't get as big I could also take this way up so they get way way bigger so you really have a lot of flexibility with what you want to do and you control that with the strength value let's preview that just one more time with this lowered strength value so just a little bit more subtle now I hit the HOME key go back to my first frame and I want to talk to you about this delay value this was initially a little bit confusing for me when I was learning this section and I think for me a better way to think of the word delay is not delay but maybe stagger because right now what happens is when the audio beat hits all of the particles respond and they get resized but what if we want instead of all of them being resized at once if they're to be kind of like a wave of size that moves through them to the beat and that's what delay is for so the default delay Direction is X left to right but without a delay maxvalue when it's set to zero nothing happens so in order for the delay Direction to show up from left to right at all we have to adjust delay max to a non-zero number so all say let's take this to delay max to 1 and now when the beat hits it's not going to all hit at the same time it's going to move from left to right let's check it out so the delay Max value determines the the time in seconds that it takes for the animation to traverse all of your form particles now instead of left to right I'm going to change this to outwards so that this animation happens from the center outwards it's kind of a beautiful animation and can you imagine animating this by hand now one of the things I've always looked for an opportunity to do and it's just never happened for me but I always want to use these features for some kind of like promo or motion graphics thing where I'm not even using the same audio I just used the audio to control the scale of the circles or the foreign particles or whatever is going on and I just haven't had an opportunity to do that but it's just so handy even if you're not using the same music to just use some other music just to control the animation now as I scrub this animation from the beginning we're getting a little bit of ripples initially as those high hats and the snare are going and I really want this to be controlled by the bass drum so what I can do is I can adjust some of these other values let's say the threshold so I'm basically as I increase this then the other values have to be loud enough in order to trigger the the particles moving so if I raise that high enough then as I scrub here in the beginning when there's high hats and snares they don't make the cut because they're not loud enough at this frequency range to do that and so now we just have the outward motion from the center now let's keep this party going and add another audio reactor so now we have basically our bass drum frequencies this is about a hundred Hertz again that's very low bass and so we're having a much stronger response to our bass drum that we are to the high hats and snares that are going on in the beginning so I'm going to close up audio actor1 open audio reactor two and I'm going to take this to a very high frequency value like seven thousand so this responds to the high hats instead and both of these reactors will be allowed to exist simultaneously so reactor one still gonna make this ripple out from the center and we're also going to add another thing for the hi-hat so I'm gonna map this one to dispersed and kind like we saw with layer maps before you need to actually go in and add some dispersion so I'm gonna open up a dispersant twist take disperse to about a hundred I'll close that up and now when these high hats are triggered the particles will disperse a little bit so now we have both animations happening at once let's preview that see what looks like that's kind of fun I love those particles just gonna dance around those dispersing little circles got some swag now I could go in here and what I would probably do if I was playing with this as I might go up and I might take the strength to like 350 which makes them disperse a lot more which accentuates that movement even more which is kind of cool but the point is is that we've created two audio reactions from the same single track we have emanating out from the center particles when the bass drum hits and then we have particles that disperse and when that when the high hats hit and both of these are happening simultaneously on the same particles now let's take this to a whole nother level we're gonna go and we're gonna dig pretty deep into this and we're gonna be making this example here and this is actually I think a really good form example not just a good audio example but a good form example as well this is a pretty complex interesting pattern to me I just really love this example it's just render this and see what looks like [Music] ah I love that it's elegant and it's rich there's so much detail and life to this but you know there's not a single keyframe all of the movement here is driven by the audio and well a little by the fractal fields in form as well but not a single keyframe for all this movement now you might have noticed that it started with this bass note these bass notes that go and they have a certain animation there's kind of like these ribbons that happen when the bass notes hit and then there's these little like high-pitched planks that come in and like blink blink blink and then they create a different animation they create these kind of like ripples with dispersement and so this is two totally different animations when there are bass notes like this and these high-pitched blinks so the first two reactors in the section the first two reactors are going to respond to those high-pitched little plank Adeeb links and the last three reactors three four and five are going to be controlled by the low bass notes we're gonna use all five audio reactors in this example there's a lot to do here and we're gonna start from total scratch so I'm gonna go pretty quickly if you need to pause and rewind go ahead and do that I'm going to make sure I'm at the first frame I'm going to open up the base form I'm going to change the size to XYZ individual I'm gonna give this three hundred in the size X seven hundred in the size why I don't worry about size E because I'm gonna take particles in Z down to one I'm gonna take particles in X to 340 particles and Y to 300 that's all I need for the base form section right now I'm going to open up particle I'm going to take size to 1.3 I realize that's wacky but just go with me here I take opacity down to 50% I'm going to change the opacity over value to over X because I want there to be fading in from the left and fading out to the right so I'm going to change the opacity over value to X open up the opacity curve from the presets I'm going to choose this kind of like bell curve and then I'm gonna go into the pen side I'm gonna model by this a little bit so it's just these edges are kind of faded out even more and you might kinda have to have to fiddle with that a little bit to make sure the edges are smooth on both sides but that's looking good enough for me for right now so I'm going to close that up I'm going to change the color here to kind of like a reddish orange I'm going to give you the values here for RGB 255 60 in the green Channel and 6 in the blue Channel it's a little vibrant but it's gonna end up working out pretty well for so I'm going to close up the particle section probably I want to shift this whole thing over so I'm gonna go to world transform and on the X offset I'm going to type in negative 130 and close that up again so so far nothing too complex right we just have a sheet of orange spheres moved over a little bit and it's a pretty dense grid here and this is gonna make things render pretty slowly and for my examples that I show you I'm gonna edit out the rendering stuff goes a little bit slowly but if your computer chugs a little bit that's totally fine and normal now open up the audio react section and from the audio layer drop-down just gonna go ahead and choose this little file of me thinking around the piano and now we have our audio layer set so let's go into reactor 1 here and I'm going to map this to fractal so that our form particles here can be controlled by the audio to trigger fractal displacement now even though we've set this up if I scrub my timeline here we won't notice any differences because if we haven't set up any fractal displacement so I have to go down to fractal field and filled with those settings to see any changes I'm going to take this place to 90 and I'm gonna give a little bit of flow in the X just too so it just feels a little bit from left to right I'm gonna take Y to negative 2 so it flows a little bit from bottom to top and I'm gonna take down flow evolution down really low let's say to 1 so that it just evolves very slowly I'm also gonna take F scale down to 6 and complexity down to 2 so it's more of a big smooth change rather than a tiny turbulent displacement all over the form now our fractal field settings are set there so we can close that back up again go back to reactor 1 and again we're going to be using these first two reactors control the high-pitched Pleakley plinks so I want to change the frequency value to about 1700 that's about where those frequencies live I'm also going to change the width to five so it's a little bit more narrow and the threshold to ten now if I scrub this we might notice a little bit there we go a little bit of a change so we have a little bit of fractal displacement when those little plink a deep links happen but we want to delay this to go from bottom to top we want to send a little ripple up from the bottom at the top so we want to change the delay direction from yr to Y bottom to top and then we want to change the delay max we see a change there to 1 and now as we scrub in time instead of affecting everything at once we have a ripple that goes from bottom to top we see this starting to come together here now let's enhance this change by adding some dispersed particles as well and a close up reactor 1 open up reactor 2 I'm going to map this to dispersed and just like with fractal field we don't have any dispersion setup so we're not saying any difference so I need to go down to this person twist I'll take this up to 200 and now we have a lot of dispersed particles but again we only want this to be in these ribbons and we kind of want it to be in the same ribbons as the displace in so we're going to use similar settings here so I'm going to take the frequency also to 1700 take the width to 5 the threshold to 10 the delay direction from Y or to Y bottom to top with the delay max of 1 and so now we're seeing this kind of ripple together here actually it might be better if we change those settings a little bit it's looking a little crazy so I'm going to go over and change the width value to 25 and the threshold will take down to 7 and we'll also take down the strength because this is just way too much dispersion so I'll take that down to just 10 so we just have a little dispersion and that's looking much better so it goes right along with our fractal displacement and that's looking pretty good it's actually preview that and see what we have so far [Music] no that's very nice I like that it's elegant is beautiful it seems to fit with the music really well and these dispersed particles with the form that fractal displays me at the same time how gorgeous is that ah Foreman's just anyways so what I'm seeing here that I like is that the these palinka tea planks are really driving this animation nothing is happening in the beginning we have some subtle fractal displacement very very subtle when those bass notes are going but really those pelea deep links are very controlling this very in a very detailed way one of the things I do want to change here is I want these animations to happen a little earlier and we can control the timing of the animation by adjusting this time offset value if where you want this to be controlled by audio but maybe happen a little bit sooner or later we can change the time off-site all this happen a little bit sooner so I'm going to change both the time F's offset values for both of these reactors to negative 0.1 that makes it happen a little sooner and because they're animating from bottom to top that essentially effectively makes this raise up a little bit along the y-axis which is what I'm looking for now when a close-up reactor 1 and to open up reactor 3 I want this to react to sphere 1 size now this might be confusing a little bit because you know were you actually using spheres as particles here but sphere one size is actually referring to this spherical field so the size of this sphere one displacement which is really cool so again we have to set that up just we can see what we're doing I'm going to turn on visualize field so we can see the spherical displacement here and I'm going to change the strength here to 37 I would change the radius to 500 to make this really big so let's move this over a little bit I am going to change this to 245 zero along the Y and negative 170 along the z2 kind of back that up a little bit alright I like that so I'm gonna turn off visualize field get that out of the way close-up sphere one go back to reactor three I kind of like the frequency where it is because again these last three reactors are gonna control be controlled by our base notes so I'm just gonna bump up the frequency a little bit to 180 I'm gonna change width to ten and strength to ten and I'm gonna change the delay direction to Y top to bottom I think it's one of the things that makes this elegant this example so elegant is that there are forces acting on this from all over the place things going from top to bottom from bottom to top than left to right right to left and I think that's one of the things that it has really working for it so I'm gonna have this Y size go from top to bottom I'm gonna take the delay max to 1 so that shows up and we'll also take the time offset here to negative 0.1 as we did with the other reactors now you might be saying well hey there's barely any change to the the size here we had a lot of displacement before and now we're not seeing that much well remember that this is being triggered by those base notes so as we're seeing these little hype lickety plank we're not having too much strength from the base notes but if we run this to the beginning here we definitely see some of that influence here let's go ahead and preview it and see what we have [Music] so we're seeing when these bass notes hit that we have these little this little soft ripple coming from the top to the bottom just like we said top to bottom and you can see that it kind of ends here because this is part of the spherical displacement you see the sphere so down here is not really being affected so let's make another Atwater reactor to affect the bottom right side of these foreign particles I'm gonna close up reactor three open up reactor four I want to map this to sphere to size so instead of another spherical field come down here to steer to turn on visualize field and we're going to turn the strength 244 again we can see that happening already here I'm going to change the position to 735 400 negative 190 and I'm gonna take the radius up to 400 and maybe we can take up the feather value a bit more I want to get to 60 I'll turn off visualize field and I'll close up sphere - I'm gonna come back over here to here to size and change some of these settings take frequency up to 180 again so it's controlled by those base notes with 210 strength 210 and I'm going to change the delay direction from Y bottom to top with a delay max of one second as well so our first spherical displacement if you remember is going from the top down the second sphere on the bottom right is going from bottom to top so we have a bunch of really interesting textures over our particles that are creating all the ripples from the overlap these various displacements the ripples from sphere to move upwards the ripples from sphere one move downwards and you can see how as we kind of scrub this slowly here it's pretty elegant so let's do another preview [Music] so again we had these really nice cross ripples no describe that we have ripples coming from both directions and it feels again very complex and elegant very organic now one of things that might help so if we go back to our base form I might want to move this back along the z-axis a little bit so that it hits those two spherical distortions a little bit more as I move this back in z space because we had those you know those spherical fields back a little bit they start being kind of bent by them a little bit more and that distortion creates those beautiful ripples because again a little default blend mode of these particles is set to add so the more they overlap the more they kind of create these bright highlights and now we could see those ribbons a little bit more now let's preview that and see the difference nice we're getting there we're really getting there so one more thing we got to do we got to add reactor five and I'm going to map this to displace X also going to take the frequency here to a 180 as we've had before and also going to take the width to 10 and the oops and the strength to 10 and I'm going to leave this delay Direction set left to right and I'm gonna have the delay max set to 1 so this is going to be another ripple from left to right so we have this fear this distorting this kind of from left to right but the size kind of ripples from the top down and then to add to that we're going to have this displacement going from left to right you see this kind of ribbons starting a little bit if I back this up a little bit more you can kind of see these kind of like ribbons of displacement there's vertical red ribbons of displacement moving from left to right there we go and then we also have this for your size on the spherical field on the right rippling from the bottom to the top so now we're pretty much done here I just want to turn on this purple solid layer that I have this is all it is is just literally a purplish bluish solid that I use a mask on with a high feather value to make this just kind of chunk of blueish whatever the layer is set to the add blend mode and when these colors are added together cuz he's really interesting ribbons of orange and purple and pink and all these gorgeous colors so let's hit the HOME key and preview our final result you [Music] [Music] love it I think one of the things that I love most about this is that the intensity of velocity that the audio hits controls how much the form particles are triggered by the audio reaction so if yr when I hit these like piano notes really gently they cause more gentle reactions and when I hit them more intensely they cause bigger reactions and because form is reacting so sensitively to those volume changes it makes this feel very organic now let's look at one more example here this is really fun essentially what we're seeing here we're gonna be looking at is by using curves to control which areas of the form particles are affected by the audio reactors let's see what this looks like so the snare drum is affecting the particles are the right side of our particles the bass drum is affecting the left several particles and what they are doing is completely different they're doing two different things to two different sides of our foreign particles so let's talk about how to do that I'm going to go ahead and turn off my example my pre-rendered example and we have these foreign particles on white so for right now I'm just gonna go ahead and unsure my layers and turn off this solid in the background so we can see what's going on we'll turn that back on momentarily I changed the base form two strings and make sure that size is set to XYZ individual I'm gonna set the X to a thousand and I'm going to set the Y to 200 we'd have to worry about particles in X because these are strings so I take strings and Y down to 13 now take strings in Z down till one so I just kind of want like almost like an exaggerated music clef here then I'm open up the string settings and I might change the density to 35 I'll close up bass form open up particle and I'm gonna change the size to 6 actually I think I want these particles to go out increase the size X a little bit back in the base form area I want them to go off-screen just a tad and it looks pretty good it actually looks kind of cool in some ways but I need to color this because it's gonna drive me crazy so I'm gonna change color over to X so I'm gonna color this from left to right that looks okay but I'm gonna open up color ramp and I'm going to click randomize and maybe I'll randomize a few times cuz of these pretty cool color palettes a lot randomized does I'm gonna go ahead and take off blue from this side and green from this side so we kind of have this kind of look here so blue pink green and one more thing I'm actually gonna take the blend mode from add to lighten kind of tone down this brighten just a brightness just a little bit and I'll go ahead and close up the particle section for some reason all my menus are open this is crazy I'm gonna close them all up and we'll go back and we'll start in fraud EO react close up all these unnecessary things and I changed audio layer to my audio layer my aai F file that retro drum loop thing and my first reactor I'm gonna map to fractal so again we got to go get some fractal distortion and I go down to fractal field I'm gonna take displace up to 170 F scale down here up to 15 and complexity to 2 now on a close-up fractal field go back up to reactor 1 and so we have this these strings that are reacting with the music all at once looks pretty cool on its own but I think we can take this to some cooler places now our first two reactors are going to deal with the high hats and the snare on the right-hand side of the form the third reactor is going to be for the bass drum on the left hand side of the form so just be aware of that I'm gonna take the frequency here to 300 where again the snare and the high hats exist I'm gonna take width two will be a lot more narrow to a point five and I'm going to take threshold to 45 and strength down all the way to 50 so we have just a little bit of changes here when the high hats and the snare hit and by taking down the width and bumping up the threshold it's really targeting just the snare in the high hats now just so we know what's going on let's preview what we have so far so we have a little bit of movement when that bass drum hits a little bit and it's it's a forgivable set in this case because we also have the hi-hat going on at the same time that might be what our frequency is reacting to but we have a really big reaction when that snare drum hits now in addition to making things go all screwy because of the fractal displacement we're gonna add a reactor to set to disperse to make the particles dispersed as well and again if we're gonna set this to disperse we actually have to have some dispersion so we go to disperse and twist and let's take disperse to a value of 100 close up this person twist go back to reactor 2 again I'm going to take the value to 300 again D with 2.5 threshold to 45 and strength down to 15 just as we had before so now when the particles hit they not only have fractal displacement but they also disperse a little bit as well now really what we want to talk about here is mapping the audio reaction to one part of our form so I'm going to close up reactor to open up reactor 1 and change this strength over value and we want it to be just on this left side or on the right side excuse me so imma change the strength over to X because I want the strength to be mapped over the x-axis and I'm gonna open up the strength curve and I don't want there to be any stuff on the left hand side any adjustment from this audio reactor I don't want there to be any of it on the left-hand side and then I want there to be some on the right-hand side so I'm gonna smooth this and go to the pen side of this curve so I can make this all nice and smooth there and there we have it and so now our dispersion and our fractal displacement only happened on the right side of our particles now I want this to be we made this for reactor 1 I want this to also be the case for reactor 2 so I'm going to copy this this curve and I'm going to close reactor 1 open up reactor to change strength over to Exxon reactor to go to the strength curve and just click the paste button to paste that in as well so now we have this awesome adjustment that's only happening on the right side of our particles total control now last thing we got to do in this tutorial I'm going to close up reactor to open up reactor 3 I'm gonna map this to displace Z this is a cool one folks you can displace these particles on the z axis and this won't be that cool until we actually fiddle with this a little bit but stink stay with me here I'm gonna change the frequency to 70 so we target that bass drum a little bit more accurately take the width down to 3 again increasing the targeting of that bass drum and we're gonna take threshold all the way up to 100 and I'm gonna take strength down to 55 so only when that bass drum hits we really want to isolate that bass drum now right now if we just scrub this we're seeing all the particles being affected at once the whole thing is displacing along the z-axis but we only want the left side so again I'm gonna do strength over X and I'm going to open up the strength curve and I'm gonna do some little crafty here I'm gonna paste this but this is actually the same curve that we use for this stuff on this side so I'm going to click this little flip button so that it's on there the left side that's where the bass drum stuff is and then there's no adjustment out to the displacement displaces a value none of that's on the right hand side so as I scrub it now we're just seeing the left hand side move a little bit now that's a little bit wonky all the this side is moving at once might go into the curve here let me smooth that out just a little bit and bring a little bit more of that over but here's a great last final step guys what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the delay direction and add some delay so instead of just moving all of these strings at once I'm gonna have a delay of 2 seconds and so now as these particles move so it's almost like the bass drum kind of like ripples through because they're reacting to the sound waves we could really see that turn on this purple orange solid and we have here a really cool example let's go ahead and preview back and see we have so there you have it pretty amazing stuff folks I hope you caught the vision of how amazing this stuff really is that's so powerful there are great tools even if you're not using audio in your your graphics with the form you can still use audio to drive your animations to create really complex animation and there's so many controls they really thought of everything so again thanks so much for watching catch the vision play with this audio stuff 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: 57,705

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: k2qXiDHPFew

Length: 34min 23sec (2063 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018

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