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Snow Paticles
Is there a plugin or method for moving snowflake (shape from file) particles around a masked rectangle? AE7
Thanks
Jim -
4 Replies
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I am not sure what you are trying to do. Do you want to emit particles from a point travelling around the rectangle?
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Yes. Sort of. I want the flakes already around the shape, but slowing moving in clockwise direction.
Thank you
Jim -
If all you want to do is emit snowflakes around a rectangle, then after effects has this capability built in. Here is how.
1. Create a new comp your finished size and length.
2. Create a new solid layer – name it rectangle. this is the shape that the particles will be created around, so the dimensions are important.
3. Import your snowflake and place it in the comp as a new layer. Turn off its visibility.
4. Create another new solid layer and name it “particles.” Place the effect “Particle Playground” on this layer. Under the “Layer Map” rollout, choose your snowflake layer from the “use layer” dropdown. Adjust the size, velocity… accordingly.
5. Now, go back to your “rectangle” layer and select the “Mask Path” from the Mask rollout. Hit “Ctrl-C” to copy. Now, go to your Particle layer and hit the stopwatch on the position control of the particle playground effect. Next, position the time slider to the first frame you want the emitter to start moving on and then, with the position rollout highlighted, hit “Ctrl-V” to paste. Now, you should be able to scrub through your animation and see the emitter travelling along the rectangle path over a 2 second period. Obviously, you can adjust the key frames to make it however long you need.What you have just done is simply transform the rectangle mask into a motion path and applied that data to the particle emitter’s position. By default, afx makes a 2 second animation around the complete path and makes the keyframes roving, that is, the two inside corner keyframes automatically space themselves to maintain smooth motion when you adjust either the first or last frame.
I hope this is what you needed.
Cheers and good luck
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In that case, take what I posted above and turn the velocity of the particles to 0 as well as the gravity. Now you should get just the particles emitting around the path. I forgot to mention that if you want your particles to stay put for a while and to stop generating at the first corner, you are going to need to key frame the particles per second from what ever rate you need to fill you rectangle to 0 at the point when the emitter makes its way back to the point of origin.
As for the spinning, I cant find a rotate control in particle playground. Maybe I am overlooking something. But you can keyframe your rotation in your hidden snowflake layer and that should rotate all of the shapes in your rectangle. If you dont want all of the corners spinning syncronized, simply adjust the time offset (slightly) under the layer map rollout of the particle playground effect. Note, your layer needs to be longer than your comp or the snowflakes will begin to disappear. If you need to, just precomp your snowflake layer and make it significantly longer than your final comp.
I hope this answers your questions, but I would be happy to help out if you still need it.
Good luck.
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