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:

Particular v2 - Massive

Particular v2 - Massive from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Download AE CS3: AEP

Eight pre-made comps with Trapcode Particular v2 using massive amounts of particles. Download the AEP and play with the settings! There are seven extra comps in there as well - so 15 comps all-in-all! + one edit for benchmarks. Uses Trapcode Lux, Form and Horizon in some comps.

The massive amounts of particles are generated using the Aux system which is a function that allows emitting particles from particles. The Aux particles create trails from the main particles. These are then in turn affected using different things like gravity, turbulence etc.

Took me 45 mins to render the "edit" comp (consisting of eight comps, 47 secs in total) using my MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. What's your render time and hardware? 

How about hooking up Emitter Position to Sound Keys? Could be worth a try!

Design & Music by Peder Norrby / Trapcode / Rymden

Download AE CS3 AEP

The music is available under Creative Commons Attribution license for download: http://soundcloud.com/rymdenmusic/pentagram-mstr

Poly Blink

Sample AE project for Trapcode Particular v2. It also uses Lux and shows how well Lux and Particular integrate now when Particular supports shading from comp lights. The setup is like this: the particle texture is a pre-comp with some simple polygon-shapes. The emitter is run in the beginning of the comp, creating the poly-based shape. After that time is frozen by keyframing Physics Time Factor. The camera is rotated to create some motion.

The intensity of the lights were manually keyframed to match the audio. The background gradient was made using Trapcode Horizon.

Download AE CS3 zip archive