Circles in After Effects

Making circles in After Effects seems like a trivial exercise, but there are a ton of approaches to their various forms in design.

Circles come in movement and repetition, from expressions & scripts, as Shapes, masks, particle effects like Particle World, Bubbles, Ball Action, from the Circle effect, CC Sphere, Polar Coordinates, Wave World, Radio Waves, halftone effects (Card Dance, Particular, effects), and so on.

A few of the many circle-related tutorials and resources for After Effects are sampled in Circles in After Effects on PVC.

Build a glassy orb in After Effects

In a new tutorial Galactic Orb, Andrew Kramer builds a zoom animation inside a glassy sphere (ala Orion's Belt) in After Effects with only built-in plug-ins. He starts by building the orb using real-life textures and then animates a camera through 3D particles. Looks good.

Update: after viewing the tutorial it's now hard to see a whole sphere!

For another approach see Creating a Glass Globe by Kurt Murphy.

Free particle experiments from Mattrunks +Chilltorial

Mattias Peresini aka Mattrunks has some new and older Trapcode Particular project files on his blog and on Red Giant People. Mattias' motion design website, Mattrunks, is in French and automatically translated if you surf with Google Chrome.

His free After Effects video tutorials are intriguing but aren't available in English yet. That may change when an inexpensive membership system comes online allowing complete downloads. It'll be interesting to see what the worldwide AE community really looks like as Mattrunks and other non-English After Effects websites are translated. Hopefully the Adobe TV Community Translation project will find volunteers for its supplements.

Here's the render of Mattrunks' Cell Shading Experiment using options in Particular 2 (What: no RTs?!). The project file for this and other recent experiments are available, as are several more from two slightly older sets (1, 2).

Cell Shading Experiment with Particular from Mattias Peresini on Vimeo.


Update: Chilltorial shows how to create something similar in Shading Particles with Particular -- in Thai!

Frozen in time, a free Particular project

Peder Norrby posted a free CS4 AEP of his Trapcode Particular experiment Frozen in time, which uses a Light Emitter driven by a wiggle expression, Aux particles trails that are frozen in time using a Physics Time Factor. Here's a render:

Frozen in time from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Re-creating the 'Lost' smoke monster

Red Giant TV has a new tutorial and project by Seth Worley, Episode 52: Re-creating the Lost Smoke Monster. The tutorial features Trapcode Particular and 3D tracking with the Camera Tracker plug-in from The Foundry.

Update: BTW, @Oddernod posted some intro tips for Trapcode Particular on Twitter,

• Been playing w Particular a TON lately - quick tips: work w lots of small particles (less than 3) at low opacity (less than 5%) set to ADD mode
• use Glow Spheres as particle type, set to big size & feather values, & low opacity. Use motion blur set to subframe
• crank shutter angle up & play w levels & opacity boost. Work in 32-bit Linear for some terrific glow blends
• Study those Physics settings! Wire up a Expression Slider to Particles/sec to act as a multipler for working vs render values
• Treat Particular like a 3D app's particle system: use Motion Preview mode to quickly design the movement, then design the look.

Procedural Disintegration: 3D layer to particles

Similar to effects discussed earlier in Shatter and disintegration: techniques for our time, Quba Michalski has a new After Effects tutorial video, Procedural Disintegration, that shares a "method for disintegrating/dispersing a 3D layer into particles. The method shown here has been optimized to produce maximum amount of particles at lowest computing cost (more stuff flying around, faster renders)."

Other Quba tutorials with context can be found in previous AEP posts.
This 70-minute tutorial requires Trapcode Particular and VC Optical Flares or similar. Project and MP4 downloads are available on Quba HQ, plus there's Vimeo versions for mobile viewing. Here's a preview the current tutorial:

Update: see also the "layer removal" tutorial for Particular, Dealing With Spontaneous Particle Combustion by Ben Watts at AEtuts.

Aligning Particular motion paths

Red Giant posted QuickTip #25: Aligning Particular Motion Paths:

Motion paths in Particular can be tricky. Harry Frank brings you this overview of how to set them up, and a foolproof way to align the spline in 3D space with a simple expression. ...There's also a preset for AE CS4+, to use (with a try/catch thing so it doesn't error). Expressions used in this tutorial:

Particular Emitter Position XY:

pos = thisComp.layer("Motion Path 1").position.valueAtTime(0);[pos[0], pos[1]]

Particular Emitter Position Z:

thisComp.layer("Motion Path 1").position.valueAtTime(0)[2]

Red Giant QuickTip #25: Aligning Particular Motion Paths from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Light glow on 3D surface in AE + particles project

via @EdenExposito, Video Copilot has a new After Effects tutorial video, Light Glow:

"In this quick motion graphics tutorials we’ll create a natural light glow illuminating from your title onto a 3D surface. This tutorial also includes tips for generating a simple chromatic glow effect."

Update: Andrew added Light Particles Project to "recreate the effect with particles instead. The idea is having bright glowing particles that emit light onto the surface as they hit without having to hand animate the interactions. In the end, I used the shadow technique from our particle shadows tutorial using a copy of the particles from the top view to simulate the shadow, only here I used the copy as colored light."

Procedural dispersion with Trapcode Particular

@rymden notes a new "layer removal" tutorial for Particular, Dealing With Spontaneous Particle Combustion by Ben Watts at AEtuts. Here's the preview; Ben says:

"In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to build up a procedural dispersion effect using Trapcode Particular. This is great for burning off logo’s, text or even 3d renders. The color and motion of the effect can be changed easily as well as the wipe angle thanks to handy global wipe control we will construct."

After Effects-customized transitions for NLEs

Rob Mize has a new After Effects tutorial video on how to Create Customized Transitions for editing systems like Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and Avid. Rob uses Auto-Trace and the "Puppet Tool to animate a bug graphic; then uses CC Particle World to duplicate and control the graphic for the transition."

Flocking tutorial for Cinder by Robert Hodgin

For advanced explorations outside of After Effects, check out the 5-part flocking tutorial for Cinder by Robert Hodgin that was noted by @blprnt. It contains the same logic used to make the Bait Ball video below. Cinder is a free, open source, peer-reviewed C++ library for creative coding, and the Cinder team recommends advanced Processing skills -- which is still beyond most of us.

Happily though we have Trapcode Particular; see Flocking Experiment with Trapcode Particular + new versions for renders, projects, and advice from Peder Norrby.

Bait ball from flight404 on Vimeo.

Volumetric smoke: Particular tutorial

Peder Norrby posted an After Effects tutorial and project on making Volumetric smoke with Trapcode Particular:

"After rendering the final clip I noticed I had to change the Particle>Size over Life curve so the particles size faded out rather than just disappearing abruptly. I also setup Aux>Opacity over Life so the auxiliary particles faded out (using opacity)."

AE/Particular Volumetric Smoke Tutorial from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

More this week in After Effects

Here are some AE items new this week that were not already mentioned here:

• Channel effects tutorials on 'luma to alpha' (part1, part 2) from Felt Tips on Vimeo.

• Learning the After Effects Graph Editor by John Kostrzewski on Fuel Your Motionography (more in AE Help, in CMG, and from Mylenium).

• AE Quick Tips #6 Super Smooth Curve from Felt Tips, which also explains the Graph Editor (see Ease and Wiz also, especially Ease and Wizz: alternative keyframe interpolations for After Effects by Chris Meyer).

• Update (pictured) from Mike Cardeiro of his script Trajectory, which lets you align layers in a comp evenly in 3D between 2 nulls, with delay controls for animation.

• ActivateDisabledExpressions, a script by Lloyd Alvarez, will go through selected layers, an entire comp or several selected comps and activate any disabled expressions.

• DuplicateLayers-n-UpdateExpressions, another script by Lloyd Alvarez, will duplicate the selected layers and if any of the layers have expressions referencing any of the layers being duplicated it will update the expressions to point to the newly duplicated layers (watch the demo).

• Update to The LoopMaker script by Lloyd Alvarez, which "loops any layers, footage or comps with one click™."

• Several tutorials and articles on AEtuts.

• OpenEXR workflow in Maya and After Effects CS5 by Guru Vaidya

• A New Trapcode Particular Preset: “Sparkler” – Including Motion Sketch Tutorial by Nick Campbell.

• AE Tutorial – Rusty checkerplate from Shortformvideo

• Both parts of Automatic Animation from Motionworks are up (Auto-Keyframe mode, Motion Sketch, Wiggler and Wiggle expressions, creating motion paths from Illustrator path, Shape Layer Wiggle, Text Wiggly Selector, and various automated effects).

• Dallas AEUG member John Begg put together a few expressions and "imagery to create an easy-to-use CC Sphere project [rendering a planet Earth]. The expressions are hooked to a Comp Light so it appears that moving the light around the scene changes the lighting on the sphere." For similar projects, see AE 3D Earths with & without 'Knowing' lava and Fly around CC Sphered layer in After Effects.

Making DNA strands with Trapcode Particular

Alain Lores posted a tutorial that covers a flexible method of producing a nice-looking DNA strand effect using Trapcode Particular, Tut-01 DNA with Particular:

Tut-01 DNA with Particular from Alain Lores on Vimeo.

Looping Particular the "right way"

A few years ago Chris Kelley posted a few After Effects tutorial videos on The Mograph Blog. Trapcode Particular expert @graymachine says one of them is the best thing since waffles: Loop Particular the Right Way.

The other video tutorials are Nesting Cameras in After Effects Using Expressions and Linking Particles to a Null with Particular; his Mastering the Render Queue was also useful, though it lacks the default Windows menu theme that maybe be not better in blogs.

Flocking Experiment with Trapcode Particular + new versions

Peder Norrby posted a flocking experiment done with Trapcode Particular; he says:

"In this first test I emitted 40K particles (using a large Box emitter) on the first frame and they are affected only by the Turbulence Field (a 4D perlin noise fractal that is used as 3D displacement). The "birds" are simple black circles.

All movement was made using Physics>Air>Turbulence with a rather large displacement of 4000 px. Then I set down Turbulence>Scale to 1.0 and increased Evolution Speed to 150. In this first test I emitted 40K particles (using a large Box emitter) on the first frame and they are affected only by the Turbulence Field (a 4D perlin noise fractal that is used as 3D displacement). The "birds" are simple black circles. Viemo's compression really doesn't like this clip, download the original file to see it without artifacts."

There more info including example starling flocking and a downloadable AEP at Trapcode Sharelog.

Starlings Study 01 from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Update: Najork on Vimeo has a Re-work of Peder Norrby's Starlings Study, with "polygon sprites." Plus version 2 from Peder is available, 'This time I used the "Sprite" particle type with a 20x50 px comp as particle; a small triangle. I used Orient to Motion to make the triangles point in their direction of flight. The number of particles was set down to about 4K.'

Starlings Study 02 from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

3D Outlined Text Using Particles

AEtuts posted Make Your Own Smooth 3D Outlined Text Using Particles, a tutorial by Roman Komurka. There's only 99 steps in text and pictures in this unique tutorial!

See also Must.have.3D.text and click the tag 3D text to see what other lengths AE users will go to get 3D text effects [update: Adobe take notice, please]. Here's Roman's preview render:

Create water with displacement and particles

Dave Scotland has another After Effects Quick Tip on Premiumbeat.com, How to Create Realistic Water with Displacement Maps and Particles:


After Effects Quick Tip - Creating Realistic Water with Displacement Maps and Particles from Premiumbeat on Vimeo.

Underwater explosion scene with AE & 3D

In Depth Charge!, a new After Effects tutorial video which creates an underwater explosion scene with AE & 3D, Video Copilot aims to help you learn to solve problems and combine techniques to:

• Composite multiple explosions to create a underwater charge
• Build volumetric lighting AND shadows in AE
• Basic concept of a 3D animation pipeline for After Effects
• Combine multiple render passes in AE
• Add glows and camera shake
• Tips for adding realistic bubbles with the Foam plug-in

For some background info see Anatomy of an Underwater Explosion at How Stuff Works.

Nulls vs. lights as emitters in Trapcode Particular

Harry Franks has advice on Nulls vs. Lights as Emitters in Particular in Red Giant Quicktip #18:

"Some people like to use Nulls or Solids as emitters in Particular, and some like to use Lights. But when is it best to use one or the other? Both have strength and weaknesses. Here you'll learn where an when to use them. Hey - it's not glamorous stuff, but this is some good Trapcode Particular info that will help you out when you need better control of your emitters."



Red Giant QuickTip #18 : Nulls vs Lights as Emitters in Particular from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.