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Creating and controlling a shoal of fish
Hi,
I’m working on a corporate project and am unsure how to proceed on a certain aspect of it. The basic outline of this section is:
Underwater.
A shoal of fish swim around.
They make a subtle imitiation of the logo.
This resolves into the logo.One problem I have at this moment is I’m not sure how complex the logo is going to be. If it’s very intricate we’ll scrap this idea and do something else. But for the sake of argument lets assume it’s the COW logo as line art. This means we probably won’t see the finer points but the general shape should be recognisable.
First problem is how to create the fish. I thought either do it like Aharon Rabinowitz’s flock of birds, which would mean either lots of manual work or working out some expressions, which I’m comfortable with. The other way would be to somehow use particles, but I’m not at all good with them so if anyone has any ideas on how that would work let me know.
I feel this has come out rather unclear, but I’ve had difficulty putting it into words. It works better when I explain it with hand gestures…
I’ll give you my idea for it and you can put your thoughts in if you want.
Create a single fish in whatever app/use a photo.
Create a shoal of them by duplicating them a humber of times.
Add some variety with an expression on a colour correction effect relative to the layer number.
have them all move parented to a null, add a bit of wiggle to their movements.
Make their Z property affected by a greyscale image of the logo. Fish over a logo bit will be closer to the camera. That should hopefully make the logo image start to stand out.
Doing it thie way should mean I can generally make the fish move wherever I want and the logo should start to reveal itself.
Might need to do something clever with lighting to make it stand out more.
Obviously will need to make some fairly convincing water.
Also, might be nice to be able to make the fish scatter at the end. I guess I could add an expression to them all so that at a certain time they all move off in different directions. Not really important yet.Right, that’s started to come together in my mind. Does is seem possible? Do you reckon I can make it look fairly good?
ps(I realise a 3d app would proably be better suited. It’s on my list of things to learn…)
pps. sorry for the very long post.Cheers,
Patrick Hearn
Brainwave Media Limited -
4 Replies
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Sounds like you have it pretty well under control. If you want realistic water go to The Anvel. These project files should be useful.
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Your ideas are not to much off, but if you really want to be clever, you should try to wrap your brain around Trapcode’s Particular. You could do most of what you describe with it in a much easier fashion by simply animating an emitter and have your fish follow it by inheriting the emitter’s motion. You could even get a good logo transition by using a time-reversed layer/ layer grid emitter. This would save you some headache since you can always replace the emitter layer even if you don’t know the exact shape and nature of the logo.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Joe Chao did a tutorial along these same lines using Particular, sounds like it would be helpful in this situation.
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Excellent. Really good to know I’m not barking up the wrong tree. I’ll have a look into using Particular. Something I need to get to grips with anyway. Unfortunately we’re now going for a different approach on that segment of the video. However, I like the idea enough that I think I’ll do it anyway for my showreel.
One quick question before I get down to it: in Dan Ebberts’ “noise() – After Effects Hidden Gem of the Week” article he mentions a number of plugins allowing luminance values to be accessed with expressions. That article’s quite old and 2 of the plugins mentioned are out of production. Is this functionality included with newer versions of After Effects, or should I get Anarchy Toolbox? Is there another option I could consider?
Thanks for the input!
Cheers,
Patrick Hearn
Brainwave Media Limited
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