• Adobe After Effects

  3D Particle Playground?

  Posted by Andrew Schuurmann on January 25, 2006 at 6:52 pm

  Here’s what we’re trying to create — a particle emitter that spits out question marks (“?”) in 3D space so that it looks like they’re flying past us. I can’t seem to do this with the standard plugin set for AE 6.5 (no $$ for extra plugins on this project): If I use Particle Playground, I can make it spit ?s, but I can’t do it in 3D space. If I use CC Particle World, I can do the 3D space thing, but I can’t make the particles into ?s (just line, star, shaded sphere, etc. from the pulldown menu).
  What I’m trying to avoid is creating hundreds of ? comps and then animating them all in 3D space (tight deadline).
  Is this possible? Any thoughts?
  Thanks.

  Andrew

  AE 6.5.1, dual 1.25 Ghz G4 OS 10.3.8

  Mike Clasby replied 20 years, 3 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Nils Palmen

  January 25, 2006 at 8:00 pm

  i’m not a pro – but did you ever work with partical illision? – there are alot of standard plugins that will do the trick – make a quetsion mark i illustrator or photoshop – load it in – pull the handles – and see the birdy smile …

  trapcodes ‘particular’ will help you even better – lot’s of knobs to turn.

  anyway – you could make 1 comp let’s say settings 100 – 100 square pixels with a quetsion mark – put it in another comp in 3d space – copy that layer 100 times – and put them newt to eachother (or even over oneanother) and just change the Z-value for every composition … dunno how long in time you want them to be flying – but iv’e done this trick for another kind of fly thing myself … not too much work – just copy/paste … and if you are fimiliar with expressions and animating it will be done in no time.

  good luck
• 

  Nils Palmen

  January 25, 2006 at 8:03 pm

  btw – make a composition in illustrator or photoshp with 100 rows and 100 collums of question marks … put this in AE – put the effect carddance on it (also create a layer with light and dark colors – for the depth effect of carddance) … copy this layer a few times – fly trhough it with a camera … i think you can find a tutorial on this one … look at ayato’s website – carddance effect – for the idea of this principal …

  again, goodluck 😉
• 

  Trey Selman

  January 25, 2006 at 8:43 pm

  CC Particle will work.

  To use custom particles with PW use the textured polygon or textured square particle type and whatever is on the layer you have put the PW effect on will be the particle. you may need to adjust the birth and death size as well as other settings.

  1. make a comp
  2. make a text layer with a “?” at about 60px for font size
  3. select the “?” Text layer you just made and apply the CC PW effect to that layer
  4. choose textured polygon as the particle type (or textured square)
  5. change the birth size to 2.0 preview

  adjust other settings as needed!

  Trey Selman
• 

  Mike Clasby

  January 26, 2006 at 1:42 am

  That’s good to know about CC PArticle. I’ll check that out Try, thanks.

  But another way is to Check out Dan’s “Building a 3D Particle Generator” byclicking on Dan’s head (top of page) and then scrolling down.

  You can swap out the particle (they are psd’s, but you can use any layer, or a comp – make a “P” with text in it’s own comp). Swap by alt dragging onto a selected layer.

  You might need to adjust things like gravity (open expressions up, anf life, etc).

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