After Effects

[Benjamin Tattersley]

Right i can tell you how to do the effect of some smoking text engraved into wood as if its been branded on if thats what you mean. So first precomp the following in separate comps: your text completely pure white and the outline of the same text in the same position if you like as well although its not necessary, but will help you ass some more depth and realism. Now get an image of some wood or something and put it in a new comp. Take your outline text comp and place it in your main comp now, and place the filled text comp beneath it in the same position. Now fill the outline text with a darkish grey using the fill colour effect and set the transfer mode to something that gives a burned look to your wood. Now this next bit only works with trapcode particular. So take a new solid and apply particular to it. Set the emitter to your filled text comp layer and make something smokey with your particles and then duplicate your particular solid and make the emitter your outline text layer, and bump up the opacity to make it look like there is some dark smoke coming from the burned outline of the wood. Now apply cc glass to the wood or an adjustment layer, whatever you think gives a better result and adjust the settings until you get an inset look (make sure you set the bump map layer as your filled text) i would suggest checking out andrews healer tutorial for more info on cc glass. now apply some fractal noise to a new solid and use the trackk matte as alpha matte your filled text precomp and put it in the correct position in the layer stack and you have a quick editable burned in wood text look 🙂 hope this helps!