Here are more tutorials that can further help me to create and produce a particle animation in the form of smoke.
Below is an animation that I created using the tutorial above, which was a quick and simple one to follow. However I would like to push this one further, turning the smoke from a stream to a spherical shape which I could then make it to react to a musical track, I could also add more layers of smoke using different colours.
Below is a move complex smoke tutorial using the trapcode particular plug in. He also goes in to how to add shadow to the particles and how to manipulate text with it, this tutorial will be difficult to follow for now as I'm not able to get a copy of the trapcode at this point in time due to the cost of it.
The Purpose of this post is to show my experiments thus far as well as evaluate them as to how I could improve the work done as well as talk about how I accomplished the animation.
The tutorial above is a very en-depth video about how to create particle in Adobe AfterEffects as well as highlighting what plug-ins to use.
The plug-ins that where mentioned are, Trapcode Suite (particular), Optical Flares and DNxHD Codec. These plug-ins enable the user produce animations like these to this extent.
It also goes in to how to to make the particles movement and appearance more natural but using blur effects, adjusting opacity, size and life of the particles. This tutorial alone gives me enough information on how to create my own particle animation which I can start experimenting with.
This second video shows me how to make an object in AE respond to an audio track that has been imported in to the composition.
This video uses the basic AfterEffects program for this tutorial, so no plug-ins are involved which makes this tutorial more accessible for me as I don't need to worry about downloading the necessary plug-ins required. I found this tutorial very easy to follow as it highlights all the details of the process as well as showing the short cut commands, accelerating the process. Out of this tutorial I've only used the portion that explains how the animate the reactive object.
The reason behind not using the other parts of this video is because I already have pre existing knowledge how to edit and manipulate the images that where imported in the video.
Above in an animation using the tutorial above as a guide, I found this tutorial easy to follow and it allowed me to produce the animation below, I will however will overlay a particle effect on top of this and see how this'll work.
In this segment I'll be looking in to creating style boards for the purpose of in what way I'd like the particles to animate, like ripples, particles emanating from a source, creating waves with the particles or creating outlines with the particles or particles that move like a gas.
I've found a few examples of particle animations that move like the way I intend mine to do so.
This animation uses light sources where the particle then stream out from and as the video progress multiple and mobile sources are then added. I could use a similar style however instead of using rays of particles I could have them pulsating from the centre.
In the animation below, the particles used in a different manner whilst still using a light source its more mobile. When the light source is moving its looks as if its travelling through water, leaving smaller particles giving this effect. This form then progresses to add more, smaller, light sources.
I can use the style of mobile light sources as well as particle streams, I could also used the colours used in this animation.
The final animation I'm looking at to help develop my own style uses particles to create a 3D music visualiser. It uses a broad range of colours and act just as music visualiser would work but when visualiser reaches its peak it turns in to particles that animate similar to smoke.
The form of the visualiser also changes as the video progresses, changing to abstract shapes. The section of this video I'm most interested in starts at 1 minute 52 seconds when the visualiser takes on the form of smoke or gas. I find this section to be most interesting as I intend to have my particle to move like smoke.
After looking at these video's I now intend to use layers of particles each using the colours I mentioned in the previous post and have the particles animate like smoke with a light source in the centre.
In this post I'll be discussing the colours that can be used with either of the two tracks I've chosen, Hall of the Mountain king or Back in Black. For this I'll be creating a separate colour board for both of the tracks.
For the background colours I think that black would be the best to use, this is due to that if i use bright colours the animation itself would be much more visually appealing, much like the particle animations that i reviewed in the previous posts.
But for the particle I need to use colours and tone that mach the track I'll be using, either back in black or hall of the mountain king. For Back in Black, I think reds, purples and blue tones much like the ones below.
For The Hall of the Mountain King I'm thinking of using yellow, orange, red, white and perhaps a shot of pink. the idea behind this is I'll use less aggressive colours, in this case white at the beginning for when the song has a slower rhythm and as the pace progresses the addition colours will be added to the animation, in this case yellow for mid point and red for the crescendo where the rhythm is at peak and more dramatic.
