Turn Footage into 3D Particles with Trapcode Form - After Effects Tutorial

hello and welcome everybody this is Roland Hartman from graphic in motion comm and this tutorial time again in this tutorial I want to show you a way how to create a really nice digital look for your footage for your photos or your videos using the trapcode form plugin i recently released a new After Effects template which used this technique and I got a few requests where I can make a tutorial on how to do it so let's take a quick look at this template preview you see that it is kind of this digital technical looking stuff going on with these colorful particles and actually the color of the particles is of course controlled by the footage data pudding and in this tutorial I want to focus on the trapcode form part of this slideshow so you see the particles coming together forming our footage and then there of course also distorting here on the side and creating this really digitally look and this is what we are going to do in this tutorial I will also show you how to do these transitions I will not show you each single step how to create the slideshow because that would be a little bit too much for a tutorial but I want to point out if you like this slideshow then you can of course also purchase it through my video hive profile let me show you this quickly you see that on video hive you can purchase the digital cooperate slideshow if you do so you would help me a lot and support me because then I have a better living and I do not have to do so many freelance jobs I would have more time to create tutorials and stuff for you guys on my youtube channel I also would be very thankful and happy if you take a look and visit my website which is www.hyken.com freebies and of course all my tutorial you can of course also following along on YouTube on Facebook on behind Twitter or whatever is your favorite social network so we'll be really glad if you take a look at my website and browse through my templates maybe you'll find something useful for your projects and now let's get started in After Effects I will quickly delete my video preview here because I don't need this anymore so to follow along this tutorial you need the trapcode form plugin if you do not have trapcode form you can find a link to the trial version download in the video description then you can follow along the tutorial but be aware that the trial version of trapcode form will render with the watermark okay so you see that I have already imported a JPEG here which I will use for dates tutorial and now I want to create a new composition and this composition will be HDTV 1080p 25 frames per second the duration should be up around 20 seconds long and I can name this my main composition and now I need another composition and this will be my footage bond composition same size and same duration and now I need one more composition and this will be my footage mask composition footage mask composition we can also call it footage 0-1 mask composition so that we know this will be the mask that we set up for our footage 1 ok so far so good now first of all let's enter our footage 1 and inside this footage 1 composition I will drag my photo and then I have to scale it down because it is a little bit big so approximately like so it's fine for now and now I want to go to my footage 1 mask composition and I will drag my footage 1 composition into this footage mask composition very good and now I go to my in composition and drag my footage world mass composition into my main composition okay so let's create a new solid by pressing ctrl + y on your keyboard and it will call this solid trap code for make sure it's the same size as the composition and now I will search for my form effect here and drag it on my trapcode form layer so you see now we have this really small we're here with a few particles visible and now I have to change this base setup therefore we go into the effect controls panel and open up the base form under the base form I will leave the standard setting at box grid but I want to change the size now so first of all I want to change the size on the x-axis from 200 to 1920 and I want to change that why sighs to 1080 because it is exactly the same size as our composition the SI sides we can set one because I do not want many particles in C space and so I can also change the particles and C to 1 and now it can change the amount of particles on the x-axis let's set it to about 260 for now and maybe also increase this debate to 120 on the y-axis I can change this later on now let's move on to the particle setup and first of all I do not want these fears to be feathered so I set the feather value that sphere pheew to 0 and I want to increase the size to something like 2 or even 3 let's see yeah looks not too bad let's set it to 4 even because then we can see a little bit better what's going on now what I want to do I want to tell trapcode form that it shall take over the color from our footage 1 mask layer so I go to this layer maps tab here and open this up and in the layer maps tab we find this color and alpha so open this one up and choose for the layer the footage one mosque and you see nothing is happening and this is because we didn't tell it where to map it so you have to tell trapcode form where to map the information that it gets out of this layer in our case I want to map the RGB and the Alpha Channel so I change from RGB to RGB a and I want this to map over the x and y coordinates and now you see what we have got we have a strange-looking version of our footage if I turn off my footage mask layer now I make it invisible simply then you see we have this cool digital particles representation of our footage made by trap called former okay so far so good the next step that I wanted to create is I want to create this offset in C space therefore first of all I have to create a new layer map so let's go into our project window here and let's create a duplicate of our footage one mask composition and I want to call this footage one displace lens map actually I should have called the first composition not mask but color map because this is a little bit a little bit confusing so let's call it color map then we know what we are doing first is the color map and this is our displacement map so let's enter our displacement map and let's put a ten defect on our footage so I searched for my tint effect in my effect and presets panel here and apply to our footage what I want to do now is I want to make this a little dull so I want to get I want to reduce the contrast the white should not be fully white and the black should not be fully black because otherwise the displacement would be simply too strong I will show you this and then it will make more sense so let's go to the main composition again and let's drag our displacement layer on the bottom of our composition and make it invisible on our trapcode form layer we can now go to our displacement you see we have a few options here first of all we can use a layer for X Y and set if I do this and select the displacement map you see nothing is happening so why is that again we have no map over okay I will simply choose x and y and now you see something is happening and it is displacing and yeah but it doesn't look really good and why is that so first of all I want to create a camera so layer and new camera that we can see what we are doing I want to make a 24 millimetres a little bit of a wide-angle one-load camera and press ok now let me create another layer and this will be a null object and I will turn this null object 3d and parent my camera to this null object because then I can simply control the rotation of my camera and you see what trapcode form is doing right now it is displacing the footage but it's not the cool displacement so it's not looking good and it's it's yeah shifting the particles in all directions and I do not want this so let's go back to our trapcode form layer and let's change the settings for our displacement map first of all what I want to do is I want to map these two individual X Y and set axes and I do not want any displacement on the x-axis I only want the displacement on the z-axis so let's choose the layer the displacement map layer for the z-axis and now if you increase the strength you see what is happening so let's increase it to a negative value because then the displacement is going in the right direction so let's say around minus 200 and now let's rotate the y-axis of our null a bit object again and see what's happening and you see that we get this nice 3d displacement of our particles which is kind of a 3d representation of our 4 which is pretty cool but we can make this even a little bit better so first of all I'll go back to our footage displacement map and what I want to do here is I want to make this effect a little bit more subtle so what I want to do is I want to reduce the contrast of our picture I do not want the white values to be fully white and I do not want the black well-used to be fully black because the displacement map works the following everything that is black will not be moved at all and everything that is white will be moved to furthest so if we take a look at our main composition you see that the white parts here are moving very far and the black parts are not moving at all so they are staying at the zero or at the center of our composition and to make this a little bit more subtle I will go into my displacement map and I will change the map black to kind of dark gray here like so and I want to change the right to another gray like so so if I go to my main comp now you see that the displacement is a little bit more salt so I have a bit more control if I now change this value to a higher value then I can still create a really dramatic displacement but you see that I have way more of control here how far this is displacing so let's stay for now - 250 and let's move back to our displacement map and make it a bit more subtle what I want to do now is I want to add a little bit of a blur to our footage so I go to my effect and presets panel and type in fast blur and drag it on my footage layer and let's set this to a value or five maybe even ten I don't know let's see so with a value of ten let's go back to our main composition and let's take a look and now you see the displacement gets smoothed out so if I go back to displacement layer but I will lock the composition here so you can see what is happening and I go here to my fast blur and turn it off you see immediately that the displacement gets kind of fuzzy or grainy and if I add the fast blur you see that it gets smooth out and this is exactly what I want I want to have a smooth and nice displacement and the higher you push this fast blur let's say a really high number like 50 then you get a really soft and solid displacement which is also quite a cool effect I think but not really what I want in this case so let's go back to our main composition and let's unlock this composition for now and play around with the values here so if I increase this now you see what this does this is really very very soft looks kind of cool actually but not what I am looking for so I want it to be a little bit more a little bit rougher so let's go back to the displacement map and set this back to ten fast blur now let's go back to our main composition and this is more the look that I'm searching yeah okay now let's add another layer another map and this time I wants the map to control the size of my particles so I will simply duplicate my displacement map composition and we'll call it size map now let's drag in the size map into our main composition and let's turn it off on the trapcode form layer in our layer maps tabs we can find this tab here that's called size now let's select our footage size map here and you see nothing's happening because we have not determined which axis it should map so I want to choose the X and the y axis and IOC suddenly my particles disappear so just go back to the particle settings and increase the size let's see what we can do here and you see okay now if I turn the size up then the white particles come back or the lighter particles come back but my but my dark particles are still so small that and nearly cannot see them and I do not want this so let's say I want to turn this back to an amount of six and now I go into my size map for just double-clicking and I want to play around here so we still have this tint on it and if I narrow down the contrast even more then I then I can reduce the effect of my size maybe even bit more so let's make the black value even brighter like so and let's make the white value a bit darker until we nearly have only a little bit of contrast going on in our picture and let's reduce the fast blur in this case to five and now let's go back to our main comment let's take a look what's happening and you see now the effect is a little bit more subtle we still have the difference in size but it's not as harsh as it was before so let's say I will increase the size to about eight for now just that we can see better what we are doing okay so far so good I think that it looks pretty cool now it's time to create the distortion of the particles along the border of our footage therefore I simply duplicate my footage color map composition by selecting it and pressing ctrl + D now we'll rename this composition and we'll call it the footage 1 mask now let's enter this composition and in this composition I want to create a new layer by pressing ctrl + y and let's make sure that this layer is 100% white because this layer will be used as a track mat so we can call this mask now what I want to do is I want to make this invisible for a moment but make sure that it is still selected and now I select my pen tool and move out a bit and I draw a very rough and quick mask around our business target man-god here you don't have to be precise at all just draw a simple mask and close the mask now if I turn on the mask layer you see we have a very rough white mask here now what we have to do we have to change the footage down here to a guide layer because then the other compositions and especially track code form will not look at the end on this layer it will only take over the values from our mask layer now let's go into our mask settings and change the mask feather to around 228 and maybe bring the expansion bit in here so don't know 40 50 pixels we have to take a look how this works I will make my footage layer here invisible just to see what I'm doing and you see I have this a smooth mask here now okay so let's go back to our selection tool and let's go back to our main composition so the first thing that I want to do is I want to take my footage mask composition and drag it on bottom of my composition of my main composition and make it invisible now I want to go into the trapcode form now I select my trip code form now let's go to the trapcode form layer and let's take a look at the layer maps and now we need the fractal strength so under the fractal strength we choose our masks I could also name this fractal map now but I won't do this for now because we will need this for another reason and I want to map this over x and y and you see nothing is happening and this is because I didn't set up any fractal field now so let's move down a bit here and let's open up the fractal fields tab here and inside this vector field we can now increase the displaced volume so now you see that our footage gets to store it and this is not what we want we want the outer parts to be distorted not the inner parts so normally we could go in here into the fractal strength map and click on invert it and you see now nothing gets distorted and this is because we forgot something or I forgot something in my footage mask composition so let's go back to the footage mask composition and let's create a new layer and a new solid and make sure that this one is 100% black and simply drag it below our masks layer now let's go back into our main composition and now you see immediately that something is happening now the distortion is working but now for my tastes of way too much is distorted so let's go back and set this mask up a little bit better so we have to go to the mask layer press mm and let's reduce the mask fader maybe to about 150 and let's reduce the mask expansion to about minus 50 now let's go back to our main composition to take a look and now you see only really the outer regions of our footage get distorted and this is exactly what I want now let's deal with the distortion so let's go down here to our fractal field I actually do not want them to be displaced in all directions because this is yeah it's a cool effect but in my case I simply want to achieve another effect so let's go to the rotate tool and let's take a look what this looks like you see it's cool but it's not exactly what I'm looking for so let's go back to our trapcode form layer and let's change this in my fractal field settings I will turn the displacement back down to zero and I want to change the displacement mode from xyc linked to XYZ individual and now I can control the displacement of my particles individually so I want them to displace quite a bit on the X because this creates this cool digital look and I also want them to displace on the CX is quite a bit like so and later on I will animate these values over time but for now we simply create this bit of distortion and also want this fractal field to affect that size of my particles so let's make this to a value of about 5 or 10 only that the particles get a little bit bigger now what I can do is I can change the fractal noise and if I if you take a look the noise is moving and it's moving quite a bit and this will not look good only if you are after such a look but I'm not so I will take the flow evolution down to really slow value of a small value like five let's see what this does now I think this is this is okay and I also want to change the scale of the noise a bit so let's play around here a little bit maybe to something like not too much like ten could also turn down the complexity a bit you know you can play around here and create your own look you can change the minimum and the maximum here I'll leave it like it is and I think complexity of two and so think I have to increase the scale a bit to about I don't know let's see maybe something like 15 scale 15 complexity two or three not sure three maybe see I'm just experimenting here so you see I have no values in mind for now and if I now change X displacement reduce the Z displacement a bit I think that this looks pretty cool yeah I'm satisfied with this look okay so you see we have a slight motion going on here it's not too hard I think and we have this really cool displacement of our broader particles if you want to change the amount of visible distorted particles you can go into our color map and drag in our mask layer so let's take the footage one mask and drag it on top of our footage one composition now let's press f4 to change the track matte settings and set this to luma matte now you see that we are masking out particles here and if I go back to the main composition you see that now the distorting particles are weighed less so they are not not so many are visible and now I can control the amount of visible distorting particles through my mask settings so if I go into my mask composition the footage one mask and if I change the feathering here for example if I reduce it now to about 50 for example and go back to my main composition then you see that we nearly have no particles or no distorting particles on the side here and if I go here and increase this to about 250 and go back to my main content you see we have a lot more distortion going on so in my case I will go back set this to 150 was quite a good value and leave it like that now we can improve the look of this a little bit so let's go back to our trapcode form layer and just for now let's set our displacement strength to zero so that we have our flat more or less flat footage here because now I want to improve the look a little bit to improve the look you can first of all take a levels effect so let's go to our effect presets window and let's choose a levels effect and with the levels effect selected I now can change the wide input here so I want to change the white input it you see if I drag this little arrow here to the left then my colors get a little bit brighter and sometimes this can help if you use trapcode form to create footage or - if particles take over colors or footage then it can get a little bit dull and if you use the levels effect you can get this a little bit brighter or change the look a little bit so not too much only a little like so looks good and I could also change the black input but I think that's not necessary I think it looks pretty cool and now let's add a little bit of glow here so let's search for our glow effect and I want to use the standard glow the stylized glow and this is way too heavy so I will increase the threshold that only really the brightest parts of my footage here are glowing so a really high you of about 50 or 95 should be fine and now I want to change the look of my particles even a bit more so what I do not like here is I think that my size map is too dull so let's go back to my size map and let's increase the contrast here a little bit by making the black a little bit darker and the map white to value a little bit brighter let's take a look and yeah I think that this is better now I go to my trapcode form settings and close my Clos and my levels and open up the forum settings and I want to reduce the particle size down to 6 again so that they are not so big and now let's go let's close this up quickly let's go to the glow effect and reduce the close size here to about 6 or 7 I think this looks quite good ok so now I'm really satisfied with the look of my particles here and of my footage now we can create the animation part so first of all I want to create an animation for my displacement so let's move our time marker to frame 0 and let's go to trapcode form and let's open up our layer maps and inside the layer blabs inside the displacement map I will animate my strength here so let's set a keyframe let's take a look here I will change the active view to two views because I want to see the top view right here and I will increase the strength now see how far we can take this oh I have to go to the negative value so you see that looks pretty cool and I want to even take this further so we can really make this quite big let's say a value of minus thousand 100 as a starting point here let's set a keyframe at frame 0 and let's say that this transition will last about two seconds so after two seconds or maybe after three seconds don't now we can change this later on I will set it to minus a I don't want it to be completely flat I still want some depth in here maybe I increase it to minus 120 to get a little bit more depth here maybe even more this is too much so let's say 180 minus 180 ah too much 150 yeah let's let's leave it on 150 for now and what I want to do now is I want to create a quick camera animation so let's move our cursor here in frame 0 let's select our camera let's take a look here and you see what the camera is doing and I reset my rotation on the camera control I should rename this here to camera control and normally I select both of these layers and select one color so that I know that these two are linked together ok perfect and now I want to create a slide camera movement so I know that in the end of this camera move after about three seconds let's say or maybe I speed it up later on you will see I want the camera to rest in the more or less the same position as it is now so on a C value of minus 1280 let's set a keyframe here and now in the beginning it should travel through all these particles so we'll move it forward until we don't see any particles anymore and this is approximately right here so a value of around 720 pixels is fine so let's go back to our one view and let's create quick run preview and see what this does and now you see we are traveling through our particles it's cool but a little bit boring so what we want to do is we want of course to add a little bit of a rotation here so first of all let's go back here and let's set the rotation of our chem control layer so not the camera but the camp control I want to change the Y rotation to a value of let's say - 90 degrees I don't know maybe this is too much but I will try add a keyframe on frame number zero now let's move out here and I want this to stop at around minus 20 degrees let's see what this does now you see now we have this really cool path here through our through our particles maybe the minus 90 is a bit too much maybe I want to start at minus 70 because then the path is a little bit more interesting through the particles and this looks quite good okay there are few visible in the beginning so we can change the X amount here the x position of the camera until we see normal particles so let's say 850 is good okay now we have the basic animation of our particles and the basic animation of our camera so I will make a quick round preview and you see if you take a close look at the border here and this is always a little bit of a problem that you have to work around so if we play this now this run preview you see that the particles on the side here are flickering around and this is because we are moving through the noise and this is distorting or moving our particles I do not want this to happen so I want them to stay in place and this is why I will turn off that the fractal influence for now so let's go to our track platform layer and let's go to our displacement here so at the end of our transition animation set a keyframe for the X displays and for the C displays and set them both to zero because now that particles are not displaced nothing will move around here and the same we will do for the size so effect size keyframe and 0 now let's take a look at these keyframes here and now we can you know over the next 2 seconds or three seconds we can increase these values so let's say we had a displacement on the X of about no we can increase this quite a bit let's say it 1,200 is good value and on the CX is also quite a bit you know that this gets really interesting like 1800 probably two seconds is way too fast now so let's increase this duration to about 5 seconds let's see now it's nicely loading apart here yeah I think that this looks pretty cool and of course I also want to increase the size effect this can happen a little bit quicker so let's change the size to five at around five seconds let's see so now let's select all these keyframes right click and go to the easy ease function you can press f9 on your keyboard as well this creates a little bit of a smoother curve here another thing that this should be OK for our tutorial emotion here you can play around with the timing here on your own and create your own look but for me I think this is pretty good the only thing I want to do is I want to increase the size effect so let's say effect this y 15 looks quite good yep like so so I want them to get bigger when they are distorted okay pretty cool now we do the same we will simply select these keyframes here and easy stem to keep your assistant Easy's so our whole animation gets a little bit smoother okay now let's say we want our footage to be visible for about five seconds so at around eight seconds I will change the Y rotation on my camera control layer from minus 20 to plus 20 and now we have this smooth transition here or this smooth rotation I should say and then in the end we can move away from our element again so let's set a position keyframe on our camera position and let's move out for three seconds here let's pull back quite a bit like minus 4,000 okay and in the end here we can fade out the transparency of our or the opacity of our trapcode form layer so set to keyframes from 100 to zero easy stem and it's good and one more thing I want to add in the end when we are moving out I want my whole footage to be displaced and this is also very simple to do simply set your cursor your time marker at around nine seconds and then enter our footage mask composition and what we are going to do here is we will fade out the mask so we will simply change the opacity here so select the layer press T for opacity or transparency set a keyframe and over to seconds we will set this to nearly I don't know 40 or whatever and again easiest is keyframes I would recommend you that if you create a really nice or if you want to create a really nice professional-looking project that you do not only easy ease these values but to go into to go into the graph editor and really play around with these curves and create nice dynamic motions but for this tutorial I will leave this because yeah it takes too much time and I'm here to show you the technique of the particle setup so what the changing of our mask does is that after a while when the transparency of our mask fades you see that the whole the whole footage gets distorted quite a bit and this is a pretty cool effect together with the fade-out okay so I think this is really looking quite good I want to add one more detail and this is I want to add some depth of field so let's select the camera layer let's press AAA on our keyboard and let's turn on the depth of field and now nothing is happening why it's nothing happening I can increase their purchase so let's say a value of 50 maybe and now you see something is starting to happen but we need to increase this quality of more so 200 and now something is happening definitely and this looks not too bad but the distance the focus distance is just a little bit out of place so let's activate our second view for a moment and now we will take a look here so in the beginning let's say at second number one I want this focus distance to be really close to our camera so let's decrease the focus distance and to something like yeah maybe something like 420 is equal value here and set a keyframe let's press u here to reveal a keyframe now let's move on to second number two and let's say that in this case I want this part here to be in focus so I will increase the distance bit like 700 around 700 and it creates an automatic keyframe here and at the end of my movement I want this focus to be exactly here right in the middle of my footage and this is pretty cool okay so let's change to one view again and now what we're going to do as a final step I will add a quick background and then I will make a preview render of what we created so let's go to a new layer layer new solid this will be our background VG okay drag it down here so I will pre compose this quickly by pressing ctrl shift and C on my keyboard and create a background composition because I want to add a few elements here now let's go to our background let's create a second new layer and you solve it and I want to make this such a very quite dark blue here okay okay and now I want to create some masks I take my lips tool let's say here and button I want to have one mask and press mm to reveal the mask properties and fade it out quite a bit or feather it quite a bit decrease increase the mosque expansion just to make some kind of a flaw here like so now create another mosque mm favorite increase this bit like so and another one right here mmm better it quite a bit okay so doesn't look too good but it doesn't matter should be enough for a tutorial maybe I will decrease the opacity a bit to about 80% so let's go back to the main command see it adds a little bit of something at least and now I will create a preview render in full quality of our 11 seconds and I will see you when the preview render is finished okay so the rendering has finished so let's take a look at the outcome of our tutorial the particles animation is quite nice but I do not like the camera animation so much so I would spend here a bit more time to play with the graphs and with the keyframe interpolations but this is something that I leave to you you can play around you a little bit longer I think that the tutorials already long enough and I think that the outcome is quite cool so really hope that you enjoyed this tutorial and thank you very much for watching so let me remind you that if you want to save a lot of time you can also purchase this digital corporate slideshow on video hi if you see that it's a lot of work to set these effects up especially if you create a long slideshow and add all the details so you can save quite a bit of time if you want to use this effect in one of your projects I also want to invite you to visit my website which is www.hyken.com gråvik in motion comm that you can browse through all my After Effects templates maybe one of them can help you out for one of your projects you can of course also find stock motion graphics freebies and my other tutorials and I also offer freelance motion design services if you want to be up to date then please subscribe to my youtube channel or follow me on Facebook if you have any questions feel free to contact me anytime you can write a comment here under this video or you can use my contact page or also my email address which you find on my or also my email address which is displayed up here so thanks again for watching I really hope that you enjoyed this tutorial and I really hope to see you soon goodbye you

Channel: graphicINmotion

Views: 476,165

Keywords: after effects, motion design, motion graphics, videohive, graphicinmotion, after effects project, after effects template, free after effects project, free after effects template, trapcode form tutorial, trapcode form training, trapcode form layer maps, layer maps, 3d photo, particles, trapcode form, form tutorial, after effects tutorial, after effects training, tutorial, 3d particles, create 3d photo, trapcode form slideshow, slideshow tutorial, quick maps

Id: rk0xPt1_A00

Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2016