Zen Alien by Cassidy Bisher

This is a trapcode particular experiment I worked on. Really working on the lighting and shading features in trapcode particular.

Vimeo Render http://vimeo.com/31113848

Download CS5 project file here: Zen Alien

Kung Fu Panda 2 stylized fire effect

I was watching this pretty cool video of how some of the fire effects were created in Kung Fu Panda 2 using After Effects and Particular (link). After a lot of watching i figured out how it was made and set about recreating the effect - which I think came out really well.

As a lot of people were interested in it, I thought I'd share the AE file - it is made in After Effects CS5 using Trapcode Particular.

Download CS5 project file: playingwithfire.aep

Particular Smoke Tests

Just testing some smoke elements as sprites with Particular in AE - there are interesting possibilities here!

These were quick initial tests. Could be improved by keying the smoke in the pre-comp if it needs to be composited on top of something.

Thanks to Andrew Kramer for posting the smoke clips! Get them here.

Download the AEP

3D Set Extensions Tutorial by Andrew Kramer

Very inspiring and informative tutorial by Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot. It covers 3D camera tracking (using The Foundry's CameraTracker AE plug-in), matte painting, masking, color correction, sky replacement and uses Trapcode Particular for the fog/smoke. Highly recommended!

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_set_extensions/

Volumetric fractal smoke - 2 approaches

Two little experiments to create pseudo-volumetric smoke objects in After Effects, one using Particular, the other using the built-in fractal noise plugin in AE and an awful lot of layers.

Both have their own unique look. The Fractal noise version took hours to render compared to the Particular version (which took about 30 mins). The project files are free to download and reuse under a Creative Commons license from the Digital Distortion website.

Particular version:

Fractal noise version:

There are issues with visual artifacts when you get closer in to the fractal noise version (you can see the individual layers, creating an ugly "scanline" effect), so hopefully someone else out there can improve the technique and share it!

Update: Based on feedback, I've done a new version of the Particular one, using a custom smoke comp generated using fractal noise. This gives kind of a hybrid look of the two approaches.

The project file is downloadable here.