3D fractal noise

[Filip Vandueren]

You could add a fractal noise to the inside of a CC sphere, so it would react to rotation, check out the podcast for the tutorial on creating a skybox:

https://cowcast.creativecow.net/podcast/creating-a-skybox–202

[Darby Edelen]

The only way that I’m aware of to create something resembling a 3D fractal is with Trapcode’s Particular or Form effects. These have ‘turbulence’ and ‘fractal’ fields that generate four dimensional noise and apply it in three dimensions to alter properties such as position and size of particles.

Here’s a sample of some particles in Form with a fractal field applied:

You can read a bit more about 4D perlin noise here:

https://www.trapcode.com/help/particular/physics_air.html

Of note in the above description is that the standard Fractal Noise effect in AE is a cross-section of 3D perlin noise. Animating the evolution property moves the plane that intersects the 3D noise and determines the cross-section. So it may be conceivable to apply the same fractal noise to multiple 3D layers, offset the evolution and Z-position on each and get a 3D representation of the fractal noise. However, I expect this will not be as accurate, and will take much longer to render.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I decided to try using AE’s fractal noise on multiple 3D layers to see what the results looked like. After setting my 80 layers up in a pre-comp with expressions to control the evolution/scale/etc and animating a camera around it… I’m pretty impressed. The results are better than I thought they would be, although it is definitely noticeable when the layers are perpendicular to the viewing plane (they disappear). Also the render took over 10 minutes, where as the previous sample took less than a minute.

It’s interesting to see how this works, but I’m not sure that it would be useful or worthwhile in most cases:

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Alan Tonn]

could you not instead of doing a plane that is parallel to each other layer, have layers at 45 and 90 degrees as well to allow for the rotation to not show the dissapearing of edge on layers?

i know, that would probably take even longer to render… 🙂

[Darby Edelen]

[Alan Tonn] “could you not instead of doing a plane that is parallel to each other layer, have layers at 45 and 90 degrees as well to allow for the rotation to not show the dissapearing of edge on layers? “

Unfortunately, to be accurate this would require that the Evolution property work differently. You would need to be able to rotate the cross-section of the 3D perlin noise to match the rotation of the solid it is applied to, and I don’t believe this is possible.

The easy way to fake this would be to create a 2nd fractal noise system rotated 90° on the Y-axis, and perhaps a 3rd noise system rotated 90° on the X-axis. However, it still wouldn’t look quite right and you would be increasing render time dramatically.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[David Bogie]

Do you know anyone with Apple’s Motion? The emitters for most of the particle systems can be instantly switched to 3D systems. It’s an illusion of course, the planes are flat, but the emitter creates several parallel planes (all attached to the original layer) to carry some fo the particles out into 3D. It’s cool, really cool. (But, after using Motion for several years, I just cannot get my head around it, I always revert to AE.)

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”