• Adobe After Effects

  Trapcode Particular – sand heap animation

  Posted by Tim Hildebrandt on April 23, 2015 at 12:46 pm

  Hello guys,

  I am relatively new to Trapcode at all. For a new own project I need to animate some kind of a hourglass in 2D space.

  So I thought about using Trapcode Particular for creating the sand streaming down to the bottom. All that is fine, but now I want to get a realistic shaped sand heap/pile bulding up as you would see it in real. I made this, but it doesn’t look good at all (example #1).

  Then I came up with the idea to use two paricular layers and give them two different floors with different rotations and let the particles slide down thoses layers (example #2). But this doesn’t look realistic either.

  How would you get this problem solved? Thank you for your help!

  Tim Hildebrandt replied 11 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Michael Szalapski

  April 23, 2015 at 4:14 pm

  If the shape of the pile changed a bit as it grew, example 1 wouldn’t look too bad. It also grows a little too fast.

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• 

  Tim Hildebrandt

  April 25, 2015 at 4:15 pm

  I played around a little bit and followed your instruction to change the path over time. This actually helped and after I tried some effects on the stroke (what didn’t work very well) I will now keyframe the shape over time by manual. See my example #3 here (probably gowing too fast again). For the real project I’ll get some good results doing it this way, I guess. Thank you for that hint.

  But now another problem came across. As the pile is chillin’ there I now want it do go away in the same way it came up. In fact a reverse, but I don’t want it to be reversed. I want the pile resolve to a sand beam again and flowing up the hourglass again.

  The dissolve effect I got with the pile as 3D layer and used it as the layer in the Emitter Type Option. With the air physics I can now achieve that the sand is going up as the pile disappears, but how do I get the particles to form a beam out of the shape? Do you get what I mean? I can upload an example picture if not.

  Thank you for help!

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