Inside the Nebulae – tutorial and AE project

An imagination of flying in the gas clouds of space. Actual images of nebulas taken with the Hubble space telescope were combined in After Effects with CG gas clouds and stars made using Trapcode Form and Starglow.

Tutorial:

Download AE CS5 project file

Smoketrail

A spherical map of the sky (from Dosch Design) is mapped using Trapcode Horizon to the background in this comp. Trapcode Particular was used for the smoketrail.

Download AE 7.0 AEP - smoketrail.aep

This example is covered in the Horizon tutorial at around time 8:30

Trapcode Horizon and Particular. Some pretty advanced expressions to guide the smoketrail and the trailing camera. Note that since the camera is moving quite a lot, the spherical map has to depict something at infinite distance for it to look right. Two different cameras are used, one that follows the smoketrail in flight:

And another camera that stays on the ground simulating a hand-held view of the smoketrail. Note that this is the exact same animation - it is the same comp - but with second camera: