dots populate from center point

[Scott Novasic]

use particle Illusion or manually do it yourself. YES, I said manually do it yourself. Im sorry, but im one of the old school guys here. If you cant get it right with a plug in, spend a few hours manually doing it.
Thats all it would take. A lot of people think they are saving days worth of time with these plugs.
Not true. I would manually create the balls, duplicate and fade at my own taste. You have all the control.

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Michael Szalapski]

You could post this question in the Expressions forum. There’s likely a way to do opacity over time relative to a layer’s distance from a null layer.
I’m not good at the expressions like that or I’d give a better suggestion.

However, I tend to agree with Scott. It’s usually better to do this yourself.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Chris Forrester]

Depending on how you have setup your CC_Balls effect this might work for you.

If you duplicate your layer and before CC_balls add a RAMP effect AFTER the CC_Balls (If you do it before we will get the extra shading from cc_balls that we do not want). Set it RADIAL and position the ramp so the start point is where you want the fade to start from and drag the end position out so you have some nice variations of greys.

Now if you have not done to much distortion to the original setup of the CC_Balls plugin, say with a large scatter or many twists then the balls will be colored with various shades of grey from your center point outwards. You can use this as a luma track matte to reveal your original CC_Balls effect. (Therefore this layer needs to be above your original CC_Balls layer).

To do the reveal you will need to animate another effect after the RAMP, maybe THRESHOLD if you do not want such smooth transisitions or level/curves/Exposure to keep some of the grey values and have a smoother reveal. Just remember you will want to make the ramp go from entirly black–thru to lighter colours–and finishing on white (depending on how you set your ramp up, and if your using luma track matte or inv. (inverted)luma track matte). Hopefuly you get the idea.
If you are not used to track mattes I would suggest a glance in the manual or some of the tutorials online here :-).

Now this is doing something similar I hope to your circular mask. But if you build a solid that is tailored more to the original ball setup with no distortions (in there grid like setup) that has each ball a different value of luminance you should be able to do more complex procedual reveals by stacking up various mattes that you create and animate to reveal the balls as you want.

Hope this helps a little with a method that is more procedual, like I said it does have its limitations dont scater to highly or twist to much otherwise the balls are not so close to there original surrounding balls.

Failing that…Then I whole heartly aggree with doing it by hand 😛 Especially if it is just a case of revealing those few balls. Even if you use a similar trick of creating a luma matte. I would paint on a solid so the balls are more darker as you move from your center and use it as a luma track matte or if precomposed you might choose to use GRADIENT WIPE (under transisitions) lots of ways to do this. I just prefer more procedual methods.

Regards
Chris Forrester
demoreel http://www.chrisforrester.tv

[Kevin Camp]

i’m sure you’ve got this finished by now, but particular was probably the way to go.

what you needed to do was use your circle mask animation as a layer the emitter. first make the mask layer a 3d layer and hide it. add a new solid and add the particular effect. under emitter, set the type to ‘layer’, set the layer to your circle mask and layer sampling to current time.

set the particle to ‘sphere’ and feather to 0. adjust the size and other particle attributes as needed.

if you don’t want the particles to continue randomly popping up as they dissolve in, animate the particles per second to go from something like 10000 to 0 over 1 frame. that way all the particles will be generated at once, but the expanding circle layer will dissolve them in as it animates.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Robert Paynter]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I tried doing myself and 1500 layers were a bit much to control. The Particular tip was great