TRAPCODE | What's New in Trapcode Particular 6

[Music] hi everyone harry frank from macson here and in this tutorial i'd like to walk you through what's new in particular from trapcode suite 17. i'm going to put track code particular on a solid here in adobe after effects and i'll mostly be working in the trap code designer but i'll bounce back and forth a little bit between the designer window and the effect controls here in after effects but for now let me click on the designer button and launch the designer window for years trapcode particular has been a very traditional particle generator plug-in for adobe after effects and by a traditional particle generator i mean that particles are born they have a life span and do something during their lifespan and then they have an end of life there's a different trap code plug-in called trap code form and trap code form operates under a different set of rules particles have no life span they have an infinite life span so rather than focusing on what particles do during their lifetime the focus of trap code form is more about how we affect the group of particles as a whole and up until now trapcode form and track code particular have been very different plugins with different uses but in this version of particular we're actually going to bring many of those features from trapcode form right into trapcode particular and this opens up a huge number of possibilities now we can see this functionality by going to our emitter behavior and we'll see that we've got a couple more options down here for a dynamic form and a classic form now before i get too far i want to go to my emitter type and change this from a point i want an area for my particles so i'll set this to a sphere and i'll bring up the emitter size just a bit so right now i am continuously emitting particles inside a spherical area if i go to the emitter behavior i'm going to set this to a dynamic form and just for now think of these as the same thing we'll talk about the differences in just a little bit so i'll set this to a dynamic form and what that means is that particles no longer have a life span they sit there forever i can define the number of particles overall not the particles per second and i can also define how they are distributed so rather than being randomly generated in this spherical area i can say that they are generated on a grid and i can define the number of particles in x y and in the case of a sphere how many spherical layers there are or in the case of something like a box how many particles in z we have so let's talk a little bit about that difference between dynamic and classic form a dynamic form is going to be for use with simulations such as flocking or fluid motion that would also include things like air turbulence now so what is classic form well you might infer that classic form does not work with simulations and you would be correct and the reason it doesn't is that traditionally the trapcode form plug-in had the ability to change the number of particles over time so you could either animate the particles in x y or the sphere layers or you could load something like an obj sequence that would also change its geometry from frame to frame it is impossible to run a simulation when your particles are changing from frame to frame you need a consistent number of particles to run a simulation so in the case of using dynamic form you're going to find that this works well with all of the different simulations you would use a classic form in the case where you want to change the number of particles x y or z over time by animating them with keyframes or in the case of obj sequences where your geometry might change from frame to frame it's pretty easy to figure out when you go to use the function and the function simply isn't there so in the case of classic form you'll find that the simulations are grayed out and we'll show some examples of why you would want to mix things like form and particular so i'm going to go to my sphere layer here and i'll just make sort of a ring of particles let's say we want 16 particles and i'll set the rest to one and one i'll bring up the overall size make this a little easier to see and in the particle settings here i'll turn the feather down and in the color map let's make this something more interesting like this technicolor preset so i've got a set of particles that have no lifespan they're just going to sit there forever but i can affect them with things like simulation so i'm going to apply a fluid motion simulation and right now these are using a buoyancy and swirl so the buoyancy will tend to push them up a little bit over time but i'm going to switch this to a vortex tube i like to think of this as sort of the washing machine setting so these things will just kind of go into a vortex spin and i'll add a little bit of random swirl here to kind of break up their path just make it a little bit more interesting so these are form particles and what i'm going to do is add another system that is a more traditional continuously emitting particle system and i'll set this to emit from the parent system from that primary system so it's going to emit particles that have a life span from particles that do not have a life span i'll set the color from parent to 100 i'll set the velocity to 0 because i'm really just going to make sort of a particle trail behind these let's go to the size and i'll turn down the size over life just to kind of give it a little bit more of a trail kind of feel i'll make this trail a little bit bigger now even though i've got a fluid motion simulation running on this primary system that does not limit me to what i can do on this secondary system so i can go in here and do something like enable flocking for this secondary system and instead of having them attract and separate using sort of a swarming behavior i'll simply turn on target attractions so that these will all be drawn toward the center so i'll set the target attraction to maybe 20 or so so now as these spin around these will actually start to get drawn towards the center i could duplicate this system and give the duplicate some velocity and turn off all of the simulations for that but i could add an environment block and have the this other system be affected by air turbulence i think it would be more interesting if i set this system to use a screen blend mode and maybe a smaller particle size but let's turn up this error turbulence because i think that'll make it look a bit more interesting probably will want some more particles over time too so let's set this to quite a bit like 500 or so now i'd like to reset this and show a really cool example of what we can do with some of the new stuff that has been added to flocking so i'm going to set this primary system to be a grid so rather than a point emitting particles i'll set this to a box that is a dynamic form i'll set this to x y z individual so i can make this a bit more of a rectangular shape oops i'm going to reset my camera here and i want these on a grid i want only one set of particles in z and i'll turn up the particles in x and y until this starts to feel like a decent grid i'll stretch this out just a little bit okay and then i'm going to add one more system so i'll click the plus button and this system is going to explode so this will emit on one frame and i'm going to change the color of this just to a red set of particles and i'll turn up the particle size so that you can see them so if i hit play we'll see a burst of particles in the center and i'll move these over to the left side now we've had flocking in particular since the last version but we've added some features that really take this to the next level now i'm going to take this grid and enable flocking and this will immediately start to collapse upon itself because flocking has particles attract to each other and sort of swarm around their center point i'm actually going to set these all to zero and i will set these particles to be prey particles so prey particles get attacked and chased by predator particles i'm also going to set the evade to zero so they're not going to do anything they're just going to sit there and be prey particles now for the red particles i will also enable flocking and i'll set these to be predator particles so they will essentially try to attack the prey particles but they're not going to do anything because the prey particles aren't running away they aren't um evading or anything like that now just to show that what what that would look like if i set this evade to something that's not zero as there is proximity the white particles would run away but i'm not going to have them evade i'm going to use a different feature in here which is predator prey interaction so back here on my predator layer i can say when that predator encounters a prey particle and that is dependent on the size of the particle so when a predator particle touches a prey particle what's going to happen and right now it's not doing anything but i could say when a predator particle comes in contact with prey particle it will kill the prey particle so these will continue to eat through the prey particles until they run out and once there's none then they kind of go about their business another option i have is to convert the prey particles to predator particles now you have to be careful here because this can end up with a lot of particles especially in a grid situation like this so i don't think we actually need this i don't think we need to have it convert i'm simply going to leave this on the kill prey setting what use can we make of this i mean what usefulness does predator prey simulation have in the world of motion graphics or possibly visual effects well we have to think of this as just the language that we use to create these behaviors and if we think creatively there's some really interesting stuff that we can do i'm going to go back to this grid instead of having a grid let's say we were using some text now i'm not in the after effects application right now so it's just going to use some placeholder text here which is just fine so it's rendering text on edges as well as the faces i'm going to bring these down just a little bit let's say i make these about a 75 density so we have these burst of particles and they start attacking the prey particles and it's going to take a little while for them to get through them so we're probably going to want to make these a bit more aggressive so i'm going to turn up the pursue to about 35 and also at the very beginning looks like we're losing a few that kind of go off in this direction they didn't get invited to the party or whatever and that's because predator particles have a field of view if they cannot see the prey particles and they're facing the wrong way they're they're oriented out this way they won't attack so if i turn up the field of view so it has a full 360 view they will catch up except for this one little slow poke here let me turn up the range of view and maybe turn up pursue just a little bit more let this particle catch up i'm going to add a little bit of randomness too so i'll add a environment black here so i'm going to alt click here or you can option click in the mac os and click on the plus and that will add a blank block here and i'm going to go to air turbulence and just kind of add a little bit of random motion to this as they sweep across the front here this is clever and all but it doesn't really look very interesting so let's kind of bump the aesthetic here let's go in and change the overall color map in fact i'm going to change this from a sphere to a glow sphere i like the look of glow spheres when we do this and i'm also going to make a particle trail behind this predator system looks like i still have my glow blend set to normal let's set that to screen and let's create a trail behind these predator particles so i'm going to hit plus i'm going to turn down the particles per second and set this to emit from parent system and then this is going to emit from system two and i want to turn the velocity to zero and i also want it to take on the color from parent so i'll turn that up to 100 now i need to make sure to turn up my particles per second a little bit and turn this up until we get a fairly nice and smooth trail behind my particles i'll use a scale or sizeoverlife to kind of scale these down i'll set these also to use a screen blend mode these have a lifespan of three seconds i think that's a little bit big i'll set this to two and i'm also going to add another environment block and add a little bit of turbulence to this uh this trails system just to add a little bit of variation on their motion all right so now with a little bit of color a little bit of variation nice little trail behind them this is really starting to take shape and i think this is an amazing use of predator prey interaction and how we can use this in motion graphics now i'm also for staying organized and right now as i've got three systems and i'm probably going to add a fourth system it's good to stay organized and one of the new features we've got in particular is the ability to rename and color code systems so for this primary system i could rename this the text let's just call it text this system two i'll call this the predator and system three i'll call this the trail now you might be saying well this is cool and all and this is great for making a text transition where the text disappears but what if i want to make the text appear and rather than erode away there's actually something really cool that we can do so i'm going to add one more system and again you might notice notice that i have a tendency to set the particles per second to zero and really as we change settings and we have a hundred particles per second um some of the settings that i'm going to be changing can result in a huge number of particles per second uh temporarily as i make changes so i've started to just kind of get in the habit of of setting this to zero before i make other changes so what i'm going to do here let's just explain in theory what i'm going to do right now we're having these particles swoop across the face here and we're basically kind of setting off a chain reaction where we're killing the particles and as the particles go away the predator particles move on to the next set of of prey particles creating this sort of chain reaction across the front well what if we could emit a particle or we could sort of spawn a particle every time one of these text layer particles disappears rather than having them disappear i can have them actually appear and spawn so that is exactly what i'm going to do so in my emitter type i will say emit from the parent system and i want to make sure to emit from the primary and again at this point if i had 100 particles per second emitting from this pretty dense grid we'd have to sit here for a few seconds waiting for everything to catch up so setting everything to zero is quite useful so i want to emit from the parent from that primary system and i want to emit at the parent end of life basically emit at the parent death but we thought that saying emit apparent death sounded too morbid so when we kill off a prey particle we will spawn another particle in this second in this system four so now all i need to do is set the particles per second and really all i need is one particle i want to spawn one particle every time one of the other particles dies i also want to make sure to set the velocities to zero so that they don't go flying off into into the distance so now i'm actually seeing one system reveal and one go away over if i were to change this uh color of system four we'll see it sort of slowly change the color from one system to the other which is actually kind of an interesting effect but i want it to reveal so i'll go to my text layer and i could simply turn it off if i wanted that's one way but i tend to avoid doing that because first of all that doesn't get stored with the preset another reason is if you are soloing layers and then unsoloing when you unsolo them it resets everything back to a visible state and that doesn't really help so my suggestion is to go to the opacity and simply set that layer to zero if you don't want it to appear i'm also going to get rid of that weird purple i'll set this back to white and if i hit rewind and play we'll see that we are now doing a really cool automatic text transition now you'll notice that the particles are starting to disappear i just need to bump up the lifespan if you're wondering why i can't just make that a form layer so that they are infinite well the problem is that i need to have them appear so any sort of birth event for a particle means that it's not a form layer it has to be a particle that has a finite life span because it has a birth event so they need to be born at some point which introduces time and life span so it has to be a continuously emitting system so we will omit one particle for every time the primary system has a prey particle killed now i think this is just kind of mind-blowingly cool there's one more feature i'd like to show you in flocking called teams and this allows you to define groups of predator and prey particles to work together rather than attack each other so let me go to my presets and load the cleverly named rokhamsakum boxes and this preset is really to show this feature specifically the teams feature so so let me summarize what's going on here i've got a red box and the red box is emitting particles so i'll turn these two layers on so i have a form box and it is and it is emitting particles the box is set to be a prey particle and it's emitting particles that are predators that will attack we also have a blue box let me solo that the blue box right here this blue box is also prey that means this box will get attacked by predators and it's emitting particles that are predators now you'll see that i've got teams here so if i go back to my red group let's unsolo everything my red particles are part of team a so if i select this system you'll see team a and this is also team a so predator and prey groups that are part of the same team will not attack each other and that's very important because let me show you what happens if i don't set this so i'll go to my team here and set this to none what happens is that the predator particles immediately attack the source from where they came and this isn't what i want i want to ignore these and attack the other group so teams is exactly how i define this so if i set this predator and prey group to be on the same team they will not attack each other same goes for this blue group here you'll notice that this is on team b and team b for the predators so that way predator b will attack prey a and predator a will attack prey b and if i hit play they will annihilate each other to the point where they all are gone so that is teams in the flocking simulation now if you've used particular in the past here we might be noticing one more block that wasn't here before which is collider space now collider space existed in trap code form but it did not exist in trapcode particular so let me show you what this does i'll go to my presets and load a background so i'll go into my backgrounds and let's choose this one called aqua rays collider space will mirror our particles in the axis that we select so if i click on mirror in x we'll have the particles mirroring along that axis and it's important to remember that this isn't any sort of image effect it's actually truly mirroring the particles in space and as you can see with just a couple clicks this takes a preset into a totally different direction so let's reset and just talk a bit about how collated space would work when you are using particular so let's say i have some simple particles here and i'm going to add a simulation with flocking and instead of having them attract or use any predator prey behavior i'm going to use the target attraction feature which i think is a pretty underused feature or at least kind of a hidden gem because it does allow attraction to a 3d point with my particles so as i drag my emitter around the particles will tend to be attracted to this point as long as they are within the range of view so if i take it outside of that range of view then they won't be attracted next i'll make a trail and i'm going to do this a quicker way which is to go into my basics section and alt or option click on the mac and this aux system new preset and what that does is load essentially all the stuff that i usually do when i make an aux system so it makes it a child emitter it takes the velocity sets it to zero it sets the color to inherit from the parent and sets the particle size to a little bit lower so let me go in and add some more interesting color here and in fact i'm going to bring down the particles per second in the main system here but i'm going to make these just a little bit bigger so i think that these will be just a touch easier for you to see okay so talking about collider space i can go in here on this on this topmost system and click on mirror in x and as i draw these we'll see that we've got this really interesting symmetry going on now i'm going to reset and go back to after effects and show some features in the effect control windows you might be noticing a theme with this release of particular that we are migrating many features from other products and very much amplifying how particular works i'd like to talk about another one of these features that is borrowed a bit from 3d stroke now on another layer here i'm going to draw a mask and in particular i'll go to the emitter settings and change the emitter type to use a text and mask now in the text to mask section i'll define the layer to be used as that mask layer before i go any further i want to change this from faces to edges i've drawn a spline an open spline not closed so there aren't any faces so i need to make sure to set this to edges and right now it's just emitting particles off of this spline i'll go to the emitter behavior and change this to use a dynamic form so now these particles are just stuck to the spline i can go to the distribution options and click on grid and now this is very much starting to behave like trap code 3d stroke but because of some of the features that we already have here this actually adds a lot of features that i've wanted to see in 3d stroke for quite some time which is custom particles so let me go to the particle section here and we'll change the particle type to a sprite and in the choose sprite options here i'll choose something with some direction here like the 8-bit arrow as i turn up the size we can see that we are now using a custom sprite in there so we've got custom sprites along this spline and in fact i can go into the particle rotation section under particle rotation and have it orient along the spline now keep in mind direction is always very relative when you're talking about the direction along a spline so the up vector of my sprite or my particle might need to be adjusted and that's what i need to do here is adjust the rotation in z and set that to 90 degrees so now i can use splines i can put custom particles along them and i can even add custom color mapping so in my sprite controls here i'll make sure to turn up the color fill option so this will fill the particles with whatever color i define and in the color i'll set this to go over x and we'll see it using the default color map there but i can use whatever color map that i want so i think that's a really really cool thing and speaking of assets and integration another thing that has been there for quite some time is the ability to use 3d models as emitters in addition to using splines like that i set this to a 3d model and i click on choose model in the past we've had a fairly limited number of objs but we're starting to open up the library to include items that we've taken from the cinema4d library i'm still using that custom particle here so let me set that to the sphere and i'll turn down that particle size so i'd expect to see that assets library growing significantly over time being that trap code particular is now a part of the maxon family so that is a quick overview of trapcode particular from trapcodesuite17 my name is harry frank for maxon thank you so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

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Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, maxon, maxon one

Id: 0MAfXAmrRXc

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021