creating a soundwave particle animation

[Kevin Camp]

particle playground will allow you to use a layer map with it’s ephemeral property mapper property… you could use that to effect the x position of the particles.

so, first you’d want to create your layer map with undulating grayscale waves… you might try wave world, setting the producer to ‘line’ rather than ‘point’ and making the line tall enough to fill the comp (i’m basing direction from your sample). set the view to height map to see the grayscale map, make adjustments as needed for the wave animation.

bring that map comp into another comp and hide it. add a new layer and add particle playground to it. for starters you can use the default emitter settings (cannon) but increase the radius to fill the screen and set the velocity to 0. also set gravity to zero.

if you ram previewed, a bunch of small, red squares would just start popping up on the screen…. open the ephemeral property mapper and choose the wave layer as your layer map. set ‘map red’ to ‘x’, ‘operator’ to ‘difference’ then set min to -100 and max to 100…

ram preview and see if that’s getting you close to what you are after…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[David Bogie]

That demo only has one set of particles and they’re just looped and repeated. If that’s all you need to do, hand animating 50 individual particles is easier than trying to use Particle Playground.

Shoot, I don’t know anyone besides Kevin Camp who has ever even OPENED Particle Playground. Kevin is the only guy on the planet besides Brian Maffitt who can say “ephemeral property mapping” with a straight face.

bogeisan

[Kevin Camp]

i must admit, being the geeky, computer effects nerd that i am, i was kind of excited about using particle playground… i never use this effect anymore, mostly because it’s so damn slow, but also because i rarely need to use a layer map to effect particles, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity…

but knowing bogie is a fan of mr. maffitt’s card dance, a similar effect could be done with card dance and the wave world layer map…

take that wave world comp into a new comp and hide it. create a new layer and add card dance. try a row value of 45 and a col value of 60 (it’s kind of arbitrary, you just need enough particles to see the wave action).

then set the gradient layer 1 to the wave comp. set x position source to ‘intensity 1’ and set z position source to ‘intensity 1’ and set y rotation source to ‘intensity 1’ (these are assuming the wave movement is left to right). also adjust the x and y scale offset values to around .5 to give the cards some separation.

now, since card dance is 3d, you can add a camera, set the card dance effect to use the comp camera, and use the orbit camera tool to rotate the scene around some and you’ll see the wave action in 3d.

the positioning of the ‘particles’ will be much more regular and the 3d action of the wave seems more like a grid of squares on the ocean’s surface, but it is still pretty cool… and it render’s much faster.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Bruce Walker]

Thanks so much for the suggestions!
At the moment I’m forging ahead with using many off-set pre-comps to recreate the compression waves.
But I’ll try and play in particle playground as well.
thanks again.
cheers,
bruce

Reality is just a collective hunch.

[David Bogie]

> but knowing bogie is a fan of mr. maffitt’s card dance, a similar effect could be done with card dance and the wave world layer map… < Brian Maffitt had a tutorial for Card Dance back in the AE5+ days that used all four color channels of a movie layer to drive four different aspects of Card Dance with four different grayscale movies. It was a singular moment in my comprehension of using grayscale layers as compound sources. bogiesan