• Adobe After Effects

  Car leaking oil – how can I make particles drop a little and then fly off to the left?

  Posted by Matthew Belinkie on December 29, 2012 at 2:30 am

  I’m doing a long animation of a car driving down a road in 2.5D. The car is seen from the side, static in the middle of the screen, and the road passes by underneath. The road is actually a really big circle, which means I can just rotate it to get an infinite loop.

  The effect I need now is oil leaking from the car. So imagine little black blobs that drip from the bottom, hit the road, and then sweep offscreen to the left at the same rate as the pavement. The easy way to do this would be not to see the oil actually falling out of the car – you just see the slick appear behind it. In this case, I can simply create a large circle of oil rotating along with my road layer, and make a mask that hides it until it gets behind the car.

  But I would like to take it a step further and actually see the oil dripping before it hits the road. The way I’m imagining this working would be to create a particle generator right at the bottom of the car. I want the particles to fall a little bit, stop falling when the hit the “ground,” and immediately sweep off to the left. Tricky!

  I could fake it by COMBINING the two effects I mentioned – there’s a particle system that makes the oil drip, and right beneath where it drips there’s a layer of slick that is parented to the moving roadway. So we see the oil drip and we see the slick on the road. The problem here is that the random particles won’t actually match the pattern of oil that’s appearing where they fall. I can probably make it look close enough by making the slick more of an oil spray, rather than something splotchy where you actually can see that the slick doesn’t look anything like the leak. This may be my best bet.

  Anyway, hopefully you guys and visualize what I’m trying to do. Any ideas? Thanks!

  Vishesh Arora replied 13 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Vishesh Arora

  December 29, 2012 at 7:21 am

  Matthew

  I would suggest you to make drops usings a solid with masks of different shape and size. Particle system(If you are using CC particle World) will not create the effect of drops easily and you have to struggle a lot to match the FEEL of particles and the slick .

  Vishesh Arora
  3D and Motion Graphics Artist
  Films Rajendra

  Blog:
  https://digieffects.wordpress.com

  Demo Reel(3D):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHPgIJU_BR8

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