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

3D Angel wings with Trapcode 3D Stroke by Chris Lorance

This video covers a slightly less conventional use of the Trapcode 3D Stroke plugin. The 20-minute tutorial explains the creation of the wing strokes, rigging to null objects, and animation and compositing tricks.

Advanced 3D Wings in After Effects from Iaenic on Vimeo.

ADDENDUM
There is a really cool rework and extension of this here: http://vimeo.com/29663169

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

Dynamic Shadows with Trapcode Particular by Andrew Kramer

Andrew Kramer has a technique for generating shadows for Trapcode Particular.

Watch his awesome tutorial here.