Friday, July 4, 2014 at 4:41PM Yoshihide Sodeoka has made a colorful, playful and quite psychedelic music video for My Pands Shall Fly's beautiful track "Rainfall".
Yoshihide used "tons of Particular, some Form, Starglow and Echospace" when making the video.
Read an article and interview about this video from The Creators Project
Also check out Yoshihide's website and listen to My Panda Shall Fly on soundcloud.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 at 3:21PM Making nebulae with Mir and Form. Examples of generated nebulae:
Add a bit of Vector Blur!
Three examples movie:
Here is the tutorial on using the AEP (download below)
Download Nebula Construction Kit AEP: nebula_construction_kit.aep
These images and more in high-res in the flickr album.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014 at 4:55PM 
This is a two-part tutorial on using Trapcode Mir for design. The first part covers how to make the look above. The finished AE project file can be downloaded at the bottom of this post.
In the second part, we look at some of the variations, for example these:
Watch the second part of the tutorial:
Download the finished After Effects CS6 project file: DesignWithMir.aep
Thursday, January 30, 2014 at 5:26PM I stumbled on this "painterly" effect while working on making fractal field visualizations with Trapcode Particular. I was using a quite large and dense Grid emitter, and tracing the particles' motion in the field by emitting aux particles:
I wanted to see how it would look with some colours and changed the Grid emitter into a Layer Grid emitter and placed a photo as source texture for the emitter. Here are two before/after for the effect:
There are no post effects added here, the pattern that reminds of a canvas is actually from the grid emitter. At first the particles are unaffected by the field, due to Turbulence>Fade In Time, and as time progresses they get more and more affected, leaving the aux trail all the way back to the original grid.
Here's what the build-up sequence looks like:
Download the After Effects project file and try it with your own images! Painterly.aep
By further boosting contrast (Brightness & Contrast effect) and adding Sharpen and Color Emboss the image looks even more like an oil painting on canvas:
NEW! Project file with emboss: painterly_emboss.aep (CS6)
Sunday, January 12, 2014 at 7:17AM Facing a tight three-week production deadline for the project, machenschaft decided to ditch the 3D apps and use GPU-based Trapcode Mir in AE to create their awesome graphics.
I asked Damir Zrno why they used Mir for this project, how it was used and what he thought of it. "First of all I was curious about Mir and wanted to give it a try. The short timeframe was the reason why 3D was not an option. I totally enjoyed the speed of Mir. There were mostly two kinds of Mir combined with a light setup; one was using an amplitude map (Fractal Noise) and the other without the map. After a couple of trial-and-error runs we had what we wanted. Pulling on some values changed every shot pretty fast into a new sculptures. 3000x800 vertices were used. Every extension was done with Mir, besides the packshot. Production was three weeks not including shooting in India."
