Mir Smoke with Particular Dust

I was experimenting with creating smoke with Mir. It's basically two blurred layers of mir with slightly different settings. Added some dust with Particular too. It's not perfect but pretty cool. The comp was made so it can be extended to any duration (uses no keyframes, just time-based expressions).

Download project file (AE CS6 or later): MirSmoke_CS6.aep

Realistic Dust Hits using Trapcode Particular

An amazing tutorial by John Einselen where he shows how to create realistic dust hits using Trapcode Particular. It also covers an advanced depth-compositing techniqe utilizing Particular's Z-Buffer input.

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.