• Adobe After Effects

  Using Particle playground to make an image into particles and blow it to side of a mask

  Posted by Heidi Kumao on January 30, 2020 at 3:27 am

  OLD SCHOOL creative problem:
  I’m trying to sweep an image into particles that pile up on one side of the screen and stay there, maybe bounce a bit but stay there.
  I want to use a cannon as a “hose” to fire away at an image that is the designated Layer Exploder. This shouldn’t be so hard, but something is not working.

  I set the Layer Exploder to be a specific image -(I set the Radius of New Particles to start at 2.00 and immediately go to 0 so AE only creates one set of particles to make this image)

  I turned off Gravity forces.
  Under Repel:
  Repeller is: Cannon
  Affects Particles from: Layer Exploder
  Force = 1
  Force Radius = 30

  I’m not seeing the Layer Exploder particles respond to the cannon. The cannon fires its particles and the layer exploder layer just does its own thing.

  Not sure what I’m doing wrong.

  I tried to do a lot of this by using Trapcode Particular and the layer emitter feature (I’m very new to using Particular so I’m sure I am missing something there too…) but you can’t use Air and Bounce at the same time and Bounce only lets you set ONE WALL and ONE FLOOR at the same time so I got a little frustrated. I need the screen to feel like it’s a 4 sided box where the particles hit the sides and bounce around like a pool table.

  HELP!!
  Thanks!

  Michael Szalapski replied 6 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Michael Szalapski

  January 30, 2020 at 4:12 pm

  Note: you don’t need to keyframe the radius of the particles of your layer exploder down to 0 to make them stop after the first frame, you can also (if it’s precomped), just trim the image source to the first frame only. The Layer Exploder does not create particles where the source of the layer is transparent.

  As to your particles not being affected, I don’t know what the issue might be. I’m not having an issue getting them to work. What radius do your cannon particles themselves have?

  Also, I’m not sure this plan will exactly do what you want anyway. WIthout gravity, the particles are just going to bounce all over the place; they’re not going to settle against the boundary. You’ll need some gravity and then some friction in the perpetual property mapper to keep them still until the repel force hits them and then to keep them from bouncing around infinitely.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up