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Aurora Borealis/Vista Aurora Screen saver effect
Hey everyone,
I’m wondering how you make an Aurora Borealis effect? Something similar to the Vista Aurora curtain screensaver?
https://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista5365_rev_029.jpg
Any ideas? I know trapcode does something like that. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Max
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3 Replies
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Kathlyn once did a tutorial long ago in a website far far away and it had a formula that basically went like this…
Kathlyn said:
I used to live in Soldotna on the Kenai Penninsula in Alaska and have seen the Northern Lights and I played around with some plug-ins and came up with something that looks like the Northern Lights.
Try placing the DigiEffects Strange Nebulae effect from the Aurorix plug-ins set two or three times in a row; placing them side by side so that you’ll end up with a pretty good looking aurora. Add enough blur to get the look you want.
1. Start with a black solid above your background movie.
2. Add DigiEffects Aurorix2 Strange Nebulae; set it to “smooth”.
3. Apply John Knoll’s “Unmult” filter (available free with a Google search for it).
4. Transform to rotate the “Nebulae” — also play with the scale height and width.
5. Add compound blur.
6. Wave Warp -Sine. Set wave height to 25, width to 50 and wave sp to 20.
Like I said, it looks pretty cool and you can tweak the settings to your exact likes.
With best regards,
Kathlyn Lindeboom
That was the formula she came up with for those who have the DigiEffects plug-ins set Aurorix.
I am sure that there are many other ways now, this recipe was from long long ago.
Ron Lindeboom
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the jpg you provided, looks like it could be made with fractal noise (animate the evolutions & in transform, unlink the uniform scaling and adjust to stretch the image as needed, adjust bightness, contrast, and complexity as needed). then add colorama (try the deep ocean output cycle preset, adjust as needed). then maybe some fast blur and glow.
i think that can get you in the ballpark… you may want to use a few layers of fractal noise with different evolution settings and composite them with different blending modes…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
The way I’ve done this in the past is to begin by creating a simple red wavy line (it doesn’t have to be red, but a pure saturated color works best, you’ll see why later). Try a very wide and short shape layer and apply Wave Warp to this (I get so much grief around the office for using Wave Warp… Hey, if it works, it works). Get a nice looping flowy motion to your waves, I usually turn the speed down to 0 and animate the phase so that I can control where a loop begins and ends (the waves look the same at 0° and 360°). Next apply some Fractal Noise set to the ‘Multiply’ blend mode to this layer and then apply a Radial Blur (or CC Fast Radial Blur… it’s faster) and move the center very far down so that the wavy line now stretches into blurry light streaks. You can blur this some more if you want at this point.
Now I take this blurry mess of a line and pre-comp it. In a new comp add bring instances of the blurred line pre-comp in, set them all to the ‘Add’ blend mode and apply a Hue/Saturation effect. Now you get to play with the Hues of each until you have a set of colors you like, you may also want to desaturate some. Place these at various scales, positions and offset them in time (having a loopable wavy line helps) to randomize each line’s appearance. At this point you can pre-render your pre-comp to save on render time if desired.
This is one approach, while I’m sure there are dozens of others that give good results as well.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
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