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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Creating text from smoke in CS3

  • Creating text from smoke in CS3

    Posted by Christo Leone on October 29, 2008 at 8:44 pm

    Hi all.

    I need to be able to generate a smoke screen and make text appear out of the smoke as well for the title sequence of our movie.

    I recently had a look at the tutorial “Making Titles or Objects Turn to Smoke and Disappear” by Tobias Lind. (It’s on the cow server) It looks exactly like what im trying to do. Its pretty old but all of the plug-ins he used has been standardized. It all works great until the blur part. I don’t think I have the right kind of blur because it doesn’t look the same as the video. I’ve tried all the blur’s that comes with CS3 and the look that I could get was the Vector blur and that doesn’t look too great.

    Any idea’s on how I can get this working? I have particle playground 1.5 as well and am playing around with that to try and figure out how to make a smoke screen.

    thanx allot for you’re input.

    My rig is AMD Athlon 64 Dual core, 2ghz ram, Adobe After Effects CS3 with the trapcode plug-ins.

    —————
    Cheers vir eers

    ~ You are only limited by you’re ignorance ~

    Christo Leone replied 17 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • David Bogie

    October 29, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    The old Turbulent Displacement is very cool but it’s just a Fractal Noise-style generator that feeds a displacement function. Youc an do the same with Fractal Noise and, erm, Displacement Map. But you can also use the Fractal Noise to feed Compound Blur.

    TubDisplace requires additional blurring to turn it into convincing or stylized smoke.
    Vector Blur is interesting but it helps if you have an interesting source image. Try adding CC Force Motion Blur, too.

    Knowing how to use the CC Time Blend FX is also key to using this ancient method.

    You coudl also use any of the particle systems to create some smokey simulation that is moving in the direction you think you want your letters to go and then us that as the grayscale source for your displacement fucntions.

    I don’s think Dean Velez still has his wonderful freebies available but he did incredible fire and smoke effects using even simpler techniques.

    https://motiongraphicslab.com/

    https://leaders.creativecow.net/leaders/velez_dean/

    bogiesan

    This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

  • Kevin Reiner

    October 30, 2008 at 1:55 am

    Maybe try trapcode’s form

    https://www.trapcode.com/products_form.html

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  • Christo Leone

    November 4, 2008 at 9:51 am

    Cool thanx for the input. I’ll be looking into all of those shortly. That video he has in his tutorial is exactly what I need but to get it like that on the MUCH newer CS3 is proving to be a big problem.

    thanx again.

    does anybody know of any free plug-ins that can be used to create a similar effect?

    —————
    Cheers vir eers

    ~ You are only limited by you’re ignorance ~

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