TAO psytunnel

Here's a little fractal tunnel dolly made with Trapcode Tao. Download the AEP (AE CC 2015) and have a play!

Tao Maelstrom and Plastic Vortex

I recently posted some Tao vortex videos on my Instagram (trapcode_lab) and got many questions on how it was made. 

Here's a quick explanation of setting it up:

To make the Plastic Vortex, the Material color was changed to Orange. IBL was setup with the "Dark Industrual" environment (very high Diffuse, like 1000 to get some diffuse from it). Here is the final video:

And here is the AE project file for it: Tao_Plastic_Vortex_CC12.aep

To make the "Tao Maelstrom" effect the Fractal settings were changed to use the positive side (positive Amplitude) of the MultiSmoothRidge fractal. Also the different Fractal>Individual Freq were changed. And a texture was used to create the lines on the surface. Here is the final video:

Here is the AE project file: Tao_Maelstrom_CC12.aep

Depth of Field was added using AE's built-in Camera Lens Blur effect. A quick blur map was created using a shape layer with a Fill Gradient. Note that Lens Blur has a "Blur Focal Distance" that selects where in the gradient the focus is.

Tao Generative Graffiti

I’ve lately been doing some experiments with using Trapcode Tao to generate graffiti based on audio. I use Trapcode Sound Keys to extract keyframes from audio that I then link using expressions to TAO Lights (AE lights that paint Tao paths over time).

I’m using the “Build-up” mode in Tao to write-on the geometry. Since I wanted to work with full music tracks (ca 5 mins) this builds up a HUGE geometry and becomes very slow to render. I’m experimenting with a new mode “Build-up and Remove” that builds only a part of the geometry and disregards the rest, that way render times becomes more manageable. I’m not done yet but this will likely be released with Tao 1.1 (a free update). 

With the current version of Tao (1.0) you can set this up for 30 second clips but with several minutes it becomes to clunky. It’s based on this tutorial: TAO flowing ribbons - but in addition to the wiggle the output from Sound Keys is added in so it moves the light, and hence paints the path based on audio. If this is something you’d like to see a tutorial on, let me know in the comments below!

In this last one Trapcode Particular was used to create the pink/purple "bubbles" behind the structure:

Tao Dark Fibers Preset

This project is based on the Tao Flowing Ribbons Tutorial, watch it to understand what is going on!

It is quite heavy to render so it's helpful to set down Segments to 500 and Repeater to 10 when working with the motion.

Download project file (AE CC12): tao_dark_fibers_CC12.aep 

Tao Cylinders Preset

Download project file (AE CC 12): tao_cylinders_colorful_CC12.aep