Holy Monday batman! I decided to release the Tron-Pilot Project file created in After Effects with a short video walk-through. I talk about creating the 3D text and building a few expressions. It doesn’t demonstrate every little detail but it should be enough to help you through the project file.  For the background blur, try using a photo of a city with the After Effects lens blur.

Watch Tutorial Overview

Watch Sample Video
Download Project CS4

In our recent tutorial we created glowing lights for a 3D title but I wanted 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.

Sample Video

Project File (CS4+ Particular 2)

I know it’s been quiet on the blog lately but we are working hard behind the scenes on many new things.  A new website revision is launching soon along with a couple new tutorials and even a full-length blog show.

Until then, here is a cool project file using some elements from the Free stock package. Everything is put together in After Effects including the title and particles so you should be able to modify and customize. I may have used a couple of Optical Flares as well.

Sample Video

Download Project

I was playing around with the text animators in floating point color (32-bpc), and created some interesting results.  With a high floating point color, the text creates a more vibrant result. Check out the 3D Sparks Tutorial for more information on the subject.

With a little more work, I could probably even make them suck a bit less. That’s called confidence!

Sample Video
Download Project File (CS4+)

One of the many uses for a particle system plug-in like Particular is the ability ‘visualize’ music through the formation of particles.  I’ve seen some amazing examples over the last few months and this is one of my experiments called Red Smoke.

Watch Sample Video

Download Project (CS4 & Particular 2 required)

About this Project:

After I extracted the keyframes from the audio amplitude, with this technique, I linked the particle birth and the velocity to the sound intensity with expressions. This made the bursts of particles shoot out farther for the louder notes and tighter for quiet parts.

The original comp was actually black with colorful particles (See sample) but I wanted to create something a bit more unique so I inverted the luminance and colorized part of it so it would be more dramatic Red on Black.

To get away from the sandy look of small particles I used a vector blur set to “Perpendicular” to blend it more naturally.

There are about a 2 million particles per frame so the render took about 4 hours but I lowered the rate while working to speed things up. I also offset the final audio a few frames to match the visual since the birth causes a slight delay.

Side Note: Harry Frank did a pretty in-depth tutorial at RGTV.

If you have any questions, post them!

Using the Audio Waveform plug-in I’ve built several comps with interesting looks, including  many with 3D space. I linked some of the waveform settings to a control layer to offset multiple copies.  You can swap out your own audio and make changes to the control layer.

If you want to make some more serious changes, delete all of the copies except for one. Then make changes to the settings and then duplicate it a dozen times or so.

Most of the concepts used to offset multiple copies can be found in this tutorial. You can also extract keyframes from audio with this animation tutorial. And, if you are new to audio in After Effects check this blog post too.

Watch Sample Video

Download AE Project (CS4)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a free project file so here is one I’ve been messing with lately… It uses the CC Hair plug-in to create random moving fibers and then I used the Mirror plug-in to add a classic… well, mirror effect.

Download Project File CS4, just change the font to something you have.

View Sample Video

So I’m still getting over a little cold but I wanted to make something shiny so here is a project file that uses 3D looking text with a billion layers to create depth and shadows. Everything was created with After Effect and there are no Lights in the scene.

Watch Sample Video

Download CS4 Project File (I don’t have CS3 on my laptop)