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  • AE and Particular

    Posted by Matthew Mccarter (macattack) on December 20, 2007 at 2:57 pm

    Hey everyone!

    I’m working on a promotional video for our church’s groundbreaking ceremony for our new building. I had an idea to get stock footage of a dump truck, but as the dirt falls out, so do pictures of our church members and church events. They need to blow towards the camera and then as one picture passes by, we see a whole sea of pictures that come together to form a picture of our new building, ala ayato’s photo mosaic.

    However, I need to know if Particular can do the pictures as a custom particle and can I get some wind to blow them towards the camera?

    Kevin Camp replied 18 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Kevin Camp

    December 20, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    particular can use your photos as custom particles and you can create a wind like effect to blow the photos using a directional emitter and adding ‘turbulence’ to the system within the ‘air’ physics parameters.

    the problem you may encounter with particular is if you want 3d rotation or tumbling of the photos as they get blown around. particular can have the particle rotate, but only as a flat 2d rotation (the particle always faces the camera). i remember seeing an expression to get 3d rotation, but i can’t seem to find it, and i seem to recall it effected all particles the same, so they all still faced the same direction.

    cc particle world can have independent 3d rotation of custom particles using the textured quadpolygon particle. however the nice turbulence control settings in particular are not in cc particle world. there are ‘turbulence’ settings in the physics model, but they effect more how the particles get emitted, not how so much how the particle behave after they are emitted. it may still work, but there is not as much control as particular…

    Kevin Camp
    Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • Matthew Mccarter (macattack)

    December 20, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    Thanks Kevin for your fast response.

    I think I might just put all of the photos 1 frame apart in a new comp. Then set the particle to be random still frame.

    Or to get 3D rotation, I could build a couple of comps with pictures rotating and render that out with alpha and then proceed like Kramer’s 3D cell tutorial, but make multiple instances of particular using the rotation. There would be many photos I think I’ll only hand animate a couple just to make sure the pattern wouldn’t be noticable.

    What are your thoughts on that?

  • Kevin Camp

    December 20, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    yep, that sounds pretty good….

    you could have them all tumble, potentially all with in one particle system, if you create the tumble as you have mentioned.

    each photo tumble would need to loop and the loops need to be the same duration (i.e. each loops at 5 seconds). then you could bring all the tumbling photo comps into a single comp and sequence the clips (an option when you drag all the comps to the new comp icon, or within keyframe assistant).

    now when you set particular to use that comp as a custom particle, you can set the time sampling to ‘split clip – loop’ and set the number of clips to the number of clips in the tumbling photos particle comp… particular will then pull the individual tumbling photos as individual particles, looping the tumble as the blow about.

    Kevin Camp
    Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

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