Volumetric Smoke with Trapcode Particular

Particular Volumetric Smoke from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

This was an attempt at creating a volumetric looking smoke effect. It was totally improvised so it shows how I experiment to get the settings right.

After rendering the final clip I noticed I had to change the Particle>Size over Life curve so the particles size faded out rather than just disappearing abruptly. I also setup Aux>Opacity over Life so the auxiliary particles faded out (using opacity). Tutorial:

Particular Volumetric Smoke Tutorial from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Download AE CS5 AEP

Starlings Study 02 - flocking using Trapcode Particular

Starlings Study 02 from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Continuation of Starlings Study 01

This time I used the "Sprite" particle type with a 20x50 px comp as particle; a small triangle. I used Orient to Motion to make the triangles point in their direction of flight. The number of particles was set down to about 4K.

Download CS4 AE project file

Starlings Study - flocking using Trapcode Particular

Starlings Study 01 from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Starlings flock experiment with Trapcode Particular
Download AE CS4: AE project file

In this first test I emitted 40K particles (using a large Box emitter) on the first frame and they are affected only by the Turbulence Field (a 4D perlin noise fractal that is used as 3D displacement). The "birds" are simple black circles.

30 seconds is probably pushing it a bit, a 3-5 second clip would sell the effect of starlings much better. But I wanted to see how it looked during a longer time. The effect could be improved by keyframing Wind and/or using a motion path to move the flock and perhaps animating the camera, adding some handheld shake and zooming in/out. I'll leave that for future experiments.

Vimeo's compression really doesn't like this clip, download the original file from the Vimeo page to see it without artifacts.

All movement was made using Physics>Air>Turbulence with a rather large displacement of 4000 px. Then I set down Turbulence>Scale to 1.0 and increased Evolution Speed to 150.

For comparison, here is some real footage of starling flocks:

Download AE CS4: AE project file

Cloudscapes in Trapcode Form by Dan Sollis

An experiment using Trapcode Form to generate organic effects - in this case, a cloudbank. 

The After Effects project is available to download from the Digital Distortion website. Optical Flares was used for the sun flare effect - though I've also put an optional AE lenseflare in there (disabled by default) for those who don't have that plugin. You should get it though - it's awesome!

Project is for AE CS3 and above.  The soundtrack is "Sarcophagus" by Conelrad

Pyro Pack

The Pyro Pack was made in 2004 for Particular 1.0 / AE6 but will also work in v2 (after an automatic conversion). It contains a bunch of different pyro-related presets such as explosions and fireworks.

View reel (10MB quicktime) :: view docs :: download PyroPack (docs included)