Trapcode Form 4: New Features Tutorial

[Music] hi Brian beam for red giant here to talk about some of the new features in trapcode form part of trap code sweet release 15 so the big new thing in trapcode form is fluid dynamics where particles behave as if they're suspended in fluid with fluid physics you can create really beautiful organic animations in a way that you've really never been able to before and after effects and probably the coolest thing is that fluid systems can interact with each other let's dive into the designer and take a look so remember whenever we're setting up something in trapcode form we can use all of the normal twirl downs and after effects to be able to adjust the form settings but we've got this great designer to be able to kind of better visualize what's going on with our form setups one quick change to the designer in trapcode 15 is this blue progress bar so if we make a change let's go into our fractal field and just displace an X and if we hit play you'll see that as it goes through the animation it's just going to show us where in time we are and it's just a great way to be able to kind of visualize time so let's set our displacement back to zero and we'll check out the new fluids so there is a new block inside of the designer called fluids and if we click that and enable fluid motion and go back and hit play instantly we see our form particle grid flowing upwards and breaking apart but let's make it a little cooler so if we go into our type and we're gonna go and switch to an obj model and if we go and choose obj there's still this really great collection of models that come with trapcode form as a way to get started and we're gonna go grab the buckyball just because it's fun too and immediately we've got a more interesting animation going on so the fluid physics are really helped out by having something that has XY & z space so if we go and change this to faces and bring our particle density down a little bit maybe 20 and then let's go into color we're gonna select the color block and go into presets and let's check this neon noir and now let's go back and play and see what happens now we have our colorful Bucky ball floating upwards so by default the fluid force is set to buoyancy and swirl only let's take a look at how to adjust these settings and what's going on so the first thing we're going to look at is this UI that's included as part of the designer so this box is representing the area where the force is being applied so if we move this around you can see that the force is being applied inside of that cube we can also use the camera to be able to pan around so if we click the camera and then click C to bring up the rotation you can see that we can move that camera around where the field is and see how it's affecting the field so let's reset our position we can also scale down the region scale and effects a smaller area or we can scale it up and make it effect an even bigger area so why are the particles moving up the particles are moving up because they have buoyancy you know the particles are suspended in a liquid and so if they are lighter than the liquid and they have a higher buoyancy rating they're going to want to move up that much more quickly you can think of it like bubbles in a can of soda you know the bubbles are rising to the top so if we bring this buoyancy up from five to say 40 and click play you're gonna see those bubbles rise a lot faster and if we bring the buoyancy down and set it to a negative value and you'll also notice that as we adjust these settings the higher the value the wider the arrow and the arrow is also indicating which direction the particles are going to fall so if we have a positive number we can see that the particles are rising up and this is a particularly strong value so that arrow is really fat but if we bring it down again now when we hit play we should see those particles drop and I like to think about those like coins dropping coins into a big bucket of water if we set the buoyancy to zero the particles aren't going to do much of anything they're still suspended in the fluid but they're the same weight as the fluid and so they're really not moving around a whole lot but if we do have zero and we want them to move around we could start to introduce some swirl and swirl is kind of like turbulence in the liquid so you could almost think about it like putting a stir stick into the bucket and turning it and as you turn it it's creating kind of distortion and noise inside of the fluid higher-value is going to create a stronger response and a smaller value is going to be much more subtle we've also got this swirl scale and if we scale up the swirl it's gonna get much more complicated and it's gonna run more slowly but it's gonna have much more detail so the in swirl scale the higher the number that you have the more detailed the look and the lower number you have the bigger and broader the distortion is we can also separate our swirl values so if we click on random swirl and go to X Y Z individual now you can see that it's only applying on the X so if we turn that down to zero and have it only apply on the Y that's going to change that effect or we get out of it on the Z and the y so let's maybe crank the scale up to make it more detailed and you can also adjust the animation by plugging in another random seed so if you want to kind of change things up say you've got multiple copies of the same system and you want the animation to be different all you need to do is plug in a different random seed it's also a great way to kind of art direct an animation where you like the general look of something but it's not quite right and you can just play with these random seed numbers and so you have something that you're really happy with so let's take a look at another example of using swirl and only one dimension I've got a base form here I'm going to bring that down to one and then we're going to adjust this up to a thousand and then we will go down to particles in X&Y and set that to 150 and let's go give it a color we'll go into the color presets and select orange to blue and then I'm going to map it over Y and now let's go back to our fluids and will enable fluid motion we're going to turn our buoyancy to zero and then we're gonna go to random swirl here and go to XYZ individual and now if we crank this up and the random swirl Z and hit play you'll see that we're only affecting it in one dimension you could maybe use this to simulate paint in a pan or maybe something that you're looking at through microscope there's lots of possibilities another thing to note about fluids is that as we make adjustments it's going to recache our simulation and that's going to be highlighted by this light grey bar racing across the screen so as you make your scene khmorr complex that line is going to take longer to generate so if we switch this up to 500 and 500 you'll see that it slows down our simulation but most of the time when you're experimenting you're barely going to notice the gray bar racing across the screen at all so next let's take a look at apply force and force lifetime and what apply force does is we have two options we have continuously and at start so if we select at start that's going to create kind of a blast of force right at the beginning and then no more additional forces after that so if we take a look at this you can see at the beginning it's initiating the random swirl that we created but it's not adding anything extra after that it's basically just saying this is what's happening whereas if we take apply force and we switch it to continuously and we bring force lifetime down to something really small like 1 or 2 then every couple of seconds in this case it's going to reintroduce another dose of those fluid forces and so over time you'll see that this gets to be much more turbulent than it would otherwise so if we bring that down to one every one second it's going to introduce more forces let's switch that back to at start so you can see the difference again so you can see that the same random swirl value creates a much different effect because it's only being applied once versus being applied continuously we'll pull that up side-by-side so that you can see them next to each other so there you can see a much clearer distinction as to what's going on so there are three other fluid force settings that we need to take a look at and the next one is called vortex ring and pay attention to the grayed out areas underneath random seed as soon as we make vortex ring active it's going to turn those on so in vortex ring particles are moved through a ring full of vortex forces you can sort of picture it like a whirlpool and if we go down to vortex tilt and rotate we can reorient that to be able to kind of see that it's a disk and the UI changes from the box to the disk with these arrows that are indicating the direction that the vortex is spinning in so if we go ahead and hit play we will take a look at what that looks like you can see that it is taking the particles and they have a buoyancy that makes them want to rise and this force that's spinning around the tube is creating this motion that is causing the particles to kind of curl up under each other as they're pushed up so a vortex strength is going to be just how fast those forces are spinning and you'll see the arrows get wider or narrower based on how strong the effect is and negative values are going to cause the particles to go downwards so if we bring back our camera again you can see them spinning down so vortex tilt and vortex rotate allow you to control the orientation of the animation so if you want that force to be pointed in a different way you can do that we can also move where the vortex is happening this be a great thing that you could animate outside of the designer and we'll take a look at that in a few minutes we can also adjust the core size so as that gets bigger it's gonna be a smaller ring that's causing the forces but a bigger hole to push those particles through and as it's smaller those rings are going to be much bigger so as it gets bigger you can see that there's much less room for these particles to go through and they're mostly just going up because there's no room so if we go back and make that size bigger you'll see that the whole can again push particles through let's take a look and visualize relative density so there's two settings in here there's opacity and brightness and off let's switch that to opacity so visualized relative density controls how the particles are visualized in relation to the combined density of the particles and the fluid forces surrounding them so that's kind of complicated but let's break that down so if we have a lot of particles and there are a lot of forces going on so there are a lot of forces in and around this vortex and so any where that there are a lot of forces and interaction going on opacity is going to make those areas more opaque and in the areas where there's less going on those particles are going to get more transparent so if we go back to type and let's just change the particle density up so you can better visualize so in these areas where there is less fluid motion happening and the particles are a little more spread out you're going to see those areas get more transparent and in these areas these are going to be like a hundred percent opacity because there's a lot of stuff going on in there we've also got brightness and I end up using brightness a lot because I really like how it sort of works like a transfer mode like a door screen or hard light but it doesn't get rid of the darker bits and so it sort of works like both a transfer mode and an ambient occlusion and so now anywhere where there's a lot of forces and a lot of particles it's going to get brighter and in areas where there are not a lot of forces and not a lot of particles that area is going to get darker so if we change our preset over to something like fire and let's map that over Y and let's increase our particle density some more and if we play that back you can see that we're getting some bright hotspots and we're getting some darkness where the forces are less and it's a really cool effect let's go ahead and zoom our camera out and play that back so you can see it and that's looking pretty cool so next we're gonna take a look at the vortex tube so the vortex tube has all of the same settings that the vortex ring has but instead of acting like a whirlpool that's sucking stuff up or pushing things down the tube ends up being much more cyclonic and it's like a tornado and that it's spinning these particles around and around and around if we tilt this so that we can get a look at the tube a bit better and let's go back to our camera and zoom out so now we've zoomed out you can see that the UI changes from our ring where the forces are going around clockwise and counterclockwise to some discs that are representing that this is a tube so this is the outer edge of the tube and this is the inner edge of the tube so you can think about this inner circle is sort of the eye of the hurricane so if we scale vortex core size up you're gonna see that the area where the forces are being applied is a much thinner section of the outer ring of the tube and if we shrink down the eye you'll see that more the particles are being affected inside of the volume we have the same strength settings where as we turn up the amount you're gonna see those arrows get bigger and bigger and bigger and if we go to negative values you're gonna see the arrows turn around and the particles will start to go the other way so if we go to force region scale and turn that down so let's go down to maybe 30% you can see that it is affecting the particles in a very different way like the size of our cyclone is smaller and it's still affecting these particles out here but on a much smaller scale because it's really the residual forces of the particles in here that are being affected and those forces are sort of rippling out so if you throw a rock into a pond the ripples are gonna grow and dissipate and get softer as they spread out and these fluids are very gently affecting the outer reaches of this system so one of the cool things about all these settings is their keyframe bubble outside of the designer so if we were to take the relative position and move it right you can see that we the position of the forces so fluid dynamics have individual settings and that's what we've been playing with but they also have global settings which control all the fluids you can think about it like a set of controls that control the nature of the tank of the liquid fYI if you're working with more than one fluid system the global controls will only be found in the master system so the first setting that we're going to look at is fluid time factor so right now it's set to 1 and that means that we're basically playing back in real time if we go to 0.5 you'll see that we've scaled down temporarily in time the fluid settings so that they're running at half speed basically it allows you to speed up or slow down the animation of all the fluid interactions and this is keyframe rule in After Effects so over time you create a matrix effect or you could go crazy and have it speed up so in fluid time factor you basically have control of time at space next we have viscosity and viscosity is basically the thickness of the fluid so if we turn that up it's going to be going through much thicker fluid like a syrup or molasses and if we scale it down there's going to be very little resistance at all and finally simulation fidelity so simulation fidelity is going to be how precise the simulation is so if we go to 1 it's going to be a very rough sim but it's going to run very fast and if we crank that up all the way to 10 it's gonna have to think a lot longer but there's going to be much more detailed to the simulation so so far we've been looking at single systems but the real power of all of this fluid stuff is when you use multiple systems together so let's go to our master form and let's duplicate it to create a second one and let's go in and we're gonna change our color to teal and then let's go in and move that down so let's take our relative position and move it towards the bottom of the screen and now in our fluids we're gonna go from negative 10 sinking to positive 10 rising and when we hit play you're going to see them smash into each other that's pretty cool every time I watch one of these for the first time I get kind of excited and there's a little geeky part of me that does a little dance so another thing to keep in mind is that making systems invisible doesn't make them inactive if you switch the eyeball off we're still seeing the visible system interacting with the invisible system this could be super useful on a VFX shot where you want to make it look like your fluid particles are interacting with a surface so you can also mix forces so if we go to fluid force and set it to vortex ring and maybe scale that up a little bit and now when we hit play you're gonna see it interact in a different way one thing to keep in mind if you want to see the UI for the forces you need to make sure that you're clicked on the fluid block if you're in the base form or any of the other blocks that aren't fluid it's gonna go away now we have one more fluid force to take a look at and that's none so let's go to our second form again and we're go to fluids and we're gonna select none and let's move that up a little bit and basically what none is going to do is those particles are just going to kind of be there not gonna be doing a whole lot and they're gonna be waiting for whatever else is happening inside of the fluid to happen so let's take a look so they're basically reactionary they're waiting for the orange particles to arrive and they're going hey what am I supposed to do so let's go back to our After Effects composition and look at some of the settings there so now we're back in After Effects and all of the settings that we were just looking at in the designer are still available here so if we go to our effects control panel and we twirl down show forms you're going to see that we have the two forms that we set up and they are in master and form so if we click form two we can scroll down and all of our fluids are here so we can see that it's set to none you can see the grayed out settings because it's set to none and in our master form this is where global fluid controls are so if we wanted to create our bullet time thing we could move forward and set a keyframe and come forward again and let's set that to 0.125 hit you to bring the keyframes up let's set another keyframe at 0.125 and then a few frames later let's put it back to 1 and when we play it back you can see we've got our slow-motion effect so here's one other setup that I did that has a whole bunch of fluid systems that are all interacting with each other and obj that I modeled in cinema 4d and exported and I've got a system keyframe that is moving right to left I've got one that's going left to right and then I've got another two that are in the back and shooting forward let's go take a quick look in the designer so if we unsolo and remember they continue to affect even if they're not visible there's four different setups that are all heading for this text and the text is set to none and as soon as they hit you'll see the animation that we created before we wrap up let's take a look at some of the new presets that are included with this release of form okay we're back in the designer so if we go into the upper left where our presets are we've got both single form presets and multiple form presets and if we go to fluid we can see that there are several single options and if we click over to multiple we see that we have several options in here as well and all of these are customizable and you can tweak them to your heart's content we've also got fluid blocks to help you get started with setting up your own systems so both form and particularly inform our particles are constant and they're always there in their inside of the fluid in particular it's more like a hose that's been jammed into the liquid and it's shooting particles out into the fluid they're both equally powerful but they do different things and so depending on what effect you're trying to create you might want to use one versus the other [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: rTb2ZUxx2Gs

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018