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  • A basic graphic depicting atomic activity

    Posted by Joey Bania on May 29, 2010 at 12:09 am

    Good people of creative cow.

    I am relatively new to After Effects, not having needed to use it until this point. Now I am in desperate need of a simple graphic showing how atoms behave in different states of matter.

    What I have in mind is a similar to the ones at the top of this page but with a little more style and a little less gif. That said, I don’t have a lot of time to make it so it needs to be relatively simple.

    How would I best go about this? I found this tutorial but it’s from 2003 so a little outdated I guess.

    Any help would be much appreciated!

    – P

    Joey Bania replied 15 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Simon Bonner

    May 29, 2010 at 7:27 pm

    Hi Joey,

    You might want to experiment with the CC Sphere effect to create a spherical ‘molecule’ that looks genuinely 3D. Then bring that comp into a new comp and animate it moving about, perhaps in 3D space (along X, Y and Z). You could use the Wiggler to make the motion random. For the solid, you could parent all the molecules to a null object and then animate the null: that way they will move in unison.

    You might also find Dan Ebbert’s expression guide useful for this kind of animation: https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/looping-wiggle.html

    Simon Bonner

    youtube.com/simonsaysfx

  • Joey Bania

    June 6, 2010 at 8:06 am

    Thank you very much for the great tips. I followed your instructions and after a lot of mistakes and lessons learnt, I came up with something I was relatively happy with (considering it was my first foray into AE!

    Id you’d like to see what I came up with it’s in this video, about 23 seconds in.

    Thanks again!

    – Joey

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