Trapcode Form and Particular have some complex controls over the fractal fields. In episode 9 of RGTV Live, we’ll demystify these controls and show you how to use them in your design.
RGTV Live #9: Working with Fractal Fields
Red Giant TV Episode 65: Warp Projection
In this multidimensional episode of Red Giant TV, designer I’ll walk you through creating a 3D environment from a 2D image, all in After Effects. This won’t be using traditional camera projection techniques – nor will it use vanishing point in photoshop. Instead, I figured out a technique for warping images to build 3D layers. You’ll also learn some great compositing and color correction techniques to finish the job off right.
Special thanks to hollywoodcamerawork.us/ for the use of their footage!
Creating a Rocket Ship Trail of Letters
In this QuickTip, I’ll guide you through the set-up and expressions required to emit a paragraph of letters from a moving After Effects layer.
Trapcode Form 2
If you’ve not heard, Red Giant and Trapcode have released Trapcode Form 2! I’m so very proud to have had a hand in this.
Many ask if I am involved in the programming of these projects. I’m certainly not a programmer, even though I’m big expressions nerd. My role is more about brainstorming new ideas, functions, tools, and how those are integrated, how they are functional. Plus, lots of testing, testing and more testing.
Once the plug-in begins to take shape, we start to focus on marketing it. That’s where I worked on two new tutorials and a commercial video.
What’s New in Form 2?
• Bring OBJ’s into After Effects with Form’s support for 3D models and 3D sequences
• Get the Particular 2 features you love, like Textured Polygon and Streaklet particle types
• Illuminate your particles with Shading for visual depth and tight integration to AE lights
• Full Layer Map support gives advanced animation control over particle size, rotation and color
• Expanded Spherical Field features let you distort a sphere into any elliptical shape
Red Giant TV Live #1: Using OBJs in Form 2
The first live episode of Red Giant TV live. In this episode, we explore Form 2′s OBJ Import Features.
Cosm
A quick experimental study using Trapcode Form 2 exploring some of the new features. All of the OBJs you see here are included with Form 2.
Music: Song of Mourning by Celestial Aeon Project
Creating a Motion Billboard Animation
In this episode, I’ll walk you through creating an awesome motion Graphics billboard project. You’ll learn about 2 kinds of particle systems, color correction, lighting, reflections, and just generally making stuff that looks really cool.
Newton Physics Engine Experiments
The folks at Motion Boutique were kind enough to send me a copy of I’ve been experimenting with mixing the Newton physics engine for After Effects with Trapcode Particular. Although it’s still not a substitute for something like Krakatoa or Fume, there’s some cool possibilities here.
Newton is incredibly easy to use. So far, I’ve not needed any additional reference or tutorials on it. Just pop it open, experiment and you shouldn’t have any problems. The short story is this: create your 2D layers in a comp, access Newton from the composition menu, and solve. Just like any dynamics system, you’ll have to define what objects are dynamic, static, etc.
In this example, I used about 20 null objects, and parented a light to each (this is begging for a script to speed along the process, and I hear Motion Boutique is working on it.) From here, I used these lights as emitter objects and created some basic Particular settings that mimic basic fire.
The biggest shortcoming I’ve found in the process is that Particular forces the user to choose between Bounce and Air Physics. The impact of this is that I can either have my particles affected by turbulence and wind, or I can have particles bounce off surfaces. You’d think the bounce would sell this more, but I opted for the Air physics and some turbulence.
This is just an early test. I plan to fine tune this and develop for a future tutorial.
You can get a demo of Newton at www.motionboutique.com