Spirals in After Effects

Spirals are used as design guides and elements or paths for text, shapes, particles, and layers. Here's a few resources for using and creating spirals in After Effects and other Adobe applications.

Think outside the box —  and inside the sphere — with A 5-Part Exploration Of After Effects Spiral Filters by Brian Maffitt, the grand daddy of spiral tutorials (pictured). This is from an era before the Path Text plug-in and the Textacy text engine!

... see the rest at PVC, Spirals in After Effects.

Spirals and After Effects

Spirals are used as design guides and elements or paths for text, shapes, and particles. Here's a few resources for using and creating spirals in After Effects and other Adobe applications.

For an updated version of this article, see Spirals in After Effects at ProVideo Coalition.

Golden Ratio preset for After Effects

James Chiny is offering a free Golden Ratio preset for After Effects at HYPOLY. It generates an overlay of a Golden spiral and rectangles using a Stroke effect. Be sure to check out his other downloadables, like his Ellipse Tool Plus preset (noted in Ellipse Tool Plus from Hypoly).

See also Lightroom's Golden Ratio & Spiral guides, an earlier AEP post with some related resources.

Make a spiral with Trapcode Form

Peder Norrby shows you how to use Trapcode Form to make a spiral shape in Form Spiral - Quick Tutorial.

You can find other tutorials on Form at Red Giant, various news items on AEP, and some free spiril-ish presets at Mylenium.

Form Spiral - Quick Tutorial from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Quick expression for circular and spiral motion paths

Adam Everett Miller presents Ewan Smith's downloadable AETuts QuickTip – Creating Circular And Spiral Motion Paths:

"Here’s a simple expression, using a little bit of mathematics, that will let you create circular and spiral motion paths. The expression can be applied to anything in After Effects with a ‘position’ property to create a variety of effects. Here it’s used with a light and Trapcode Particular."

Update: Motion Graphics Exchange wrote out the expression for you in Creating Circular And Spiral Motion Paths.

A few spirographs in After Effects

Spirographs in After Effects had it's 15-minutes of fame several years ago and lost in the mists of time around here anyway, except for tutorial/project posts from Chris Zwar, Ayato, and Michele Yamazaki (now only in her book).

... this post was updated on ProVideo Coalition as Spirographs in After Effects.

Note: code from comments by Jason Lee Peacock,

I've recently been looking into this topic myself, but within a 3D space (thanks to the modified code of Dan Ebberts) http://twitpic.com/1ao7d0 , having seen this via Quba Michalski http://qubahq.com/2005/08/sine-sphere/ 

http://twitpic.com/1bscaz .. Literally clueless to the math ( http://tinyurl.com/yeg37lt ) I just kept tweaking Dan's code until I got the result I was after..

r = 200; //radius of sphere
Theta = Math.PI*time*5*Math.sin(10)/2;
Phi = Math.PI*time*1/2;
theta = ease(time,Theta,Theta);
phi = ease(time,Phi,Phi);
sinPhi = Math.sin(phi);
x = r*Math.cos(theta)*sinPhi;
y = r*Math.sin(theta)*sinPhi;
z = r*Math.cos(phi);
center = thisComp.layer("Null: Center").position;
center + [x,y,z]

Concentric Rings Projects

Mark Coleran has a blog full of project demos and interview links, and has posted a version of his Concentric Rings Project:

"Recently Satya Meka created a tutorial for AETuts based on a sequence that was done for The Island. The sequence involved the creation of a concentric ring animation that was stepped off using expressions to delay the motion and create an unusual rhythmic effect."

Note: Responding to readers requests, Satya recreated the effect in Cinema 4D and has created a bonus addendum tutorial full of XPresso goodness at AETuts.

Optical illusions + mind illusions

Discover Magaine's Bad Astronomy posted a fun optical illusion on simultaneous contrast in The blue and the green [via Brinkmann]. The responses to the post are also interesting.

There's more from the original author, Akiyoshi Kitaoka. Shown below, the spirals of light green or light blue are identical (R=0, G=255, B=151; scaling may change the content):

Also, as noted by Keith Lang in his blog UI&us, there are also implications for user interfaces -- and not only because of optical illusions, but also because of what might be called "mind illusions," which Daniel Goleman has made a career out of explaining. See Lang's The Art of Expectations, and the video below from TED:

"Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic."

Update: For briefs on illusions relating to the perception of time, see MindHacks and a Philip Zimbardo video on The Time Paradox. And, to remain on topic, click the picture to view the motion 'after effect' from Akiyoshi Kitaoka:

Lightroom's Golden Ratio & Spiral guides

Teh interwebs have noted The Tremendously Lazy Rule of Thirds and comments, but the most interesting tidbit so far, via tgaul, is that Adobe Lightroom has Golden Ratio/Curve guides in the Develop crop tool (hold down the o key).

There's more on the use of the Golden Ratio at Pendery.org (in Lightroom) and in Layers magazine. Layers has another tutorial, a video that shows you how to construct of the Golden Ratio and spiral; see Illustrator: Golden Section.

For tips on creating your own spirals, see the AEP post Taming the Spiral. [update: see Ellipse Tool Plus from Hypoly too]

It's a wild world, so there's no reason to get stuck on one schema. There's whole other orders of pattern available in Penrose tilings and Islamic patterns. But some roads can be too ethereal for suit everyone, like Christopher Alexander's ideas on design, complexity and order, or film editor Walter Murch's observations on the similarities of between the Pantheon, the ratio of planetary orbits, and musical scales.

AE & Motion apprentice text + 3D spiral text

Chris and Trish Meyer have posted After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #4: Animating text in After Effects, which follows on #3 which introduced text in AE. In this video, they "show how to master Text Animators, including Range Selectors, the secret to creating cascading animations, and more."

This follows yesterday's meaty post by Trish Meyer, Animating Text in Apple’s Motion: A primer for After Effects artists.

Also, older but fun is text in a 3D spiral, pictured above, from 3D Type QuickTip by Ko Maruyama, which is reminiscent of a very old tutorial by Brian Maffitt.

free 'Droste Effect' Pixel Bender filter

subblue (Tom Beddard) just ported over the Mathmap v10 Droste Effect filter to Adobe's Pixel Bender Toolkit (see also subblue's flickr page). The filters can be used in After Effects and Photoshop CS4 (and in some cases Flash 10):

"The real creative possibilities open up with After Effects when animating the parameters with a video input! You can download the script here where there are also installation instructions and a quick start guide."

As noted earlier, there are animations available (not from AE) at Leiden University's Escher and the Droste effect; see the frames below from an animation from A logarithmic image transformation by Jos Leys.

Taming the Spiral

If you're into swirls, Luanne Seymour's blog discusses Taming the Spiral tool, referencing other good stuff including Swirly curls in Adobe Illustrator from Veerlr's cool blog, and Layer Magazine's Spiral Tool Mysteries - Solved!

Update: Layers magazine Tip of the Day 16 Oct 2007 adds 'Spiraling Circles,'
"Here's a cool trick that's the result of a conversation with my friend, GarySped, from the Layers Forum. Click on your Artboard with the Ellipse tool (L) and in the window that opens, make the Width 1.25". Then click on the word "Height" and fill in the same value, and then press OK. With this newly drawn circle still selected, go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. In the window that opens, type in the following specs: 80% for both Horizontal and Vertical Scale; 1.0158" for both Horizontal and Vertical Move; 60 for Rotate Angle; and 25 for the Number of Copies. Now click OK to make the circle spiral. Cool trick Gary!"

Update: see also Ellipse Tool Plus from Hypoly, a preset for After Effects.