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Emitting / falling sparks (e.g. from a lightsaber)
I’ve recently more or less wrapped up my second AE task that I set up for myself. A lightsaber thing. The longest portion of that task was the acquisition of usable lightsaber sounds, which I ended up having to (almost entirely) rip from the movies and isolate / remaster myself. But it’s the results that count.
As a final touch, I want to add a brief shower of sparks to a couple of the hits, because simple flashes just aren’t terribly convincing 100% of the time. A “brief shower of sparks” can be seen in, for example, the Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 video when the lightsabers begin doing damage to the overhead meshes. Those sparks are so well done that it’s somewhat difficult to tell for certain whether they’re an effect (barring the obvious safety hazard of a true pyrotechnic). I’m confident that the same level of quality can be had for my video, since they are really just bright, animated lines.
I have struggled with Trapcode Particular for a while. I can’t seem to get results that look good OR integrate with my original video in a lifelike manner (read: not looking like they came from a circa 1995 3d application). One thread in these forums suggested that Particular had a preset that was specifically designated as a spark generator. This must not be true for the demo version (although a friend who has access to the full version tells me he doesn’t see any “spark” preset either).
So I guess that’s what I’m after. Either a preset that looks decent, or the variables leading to such a preset, or something. All this SEEMS like it should be intuitable, and indeed that’s what I was more or less expecting, but remember that this is literally the second thing I’ve ever done with AE, so I have a lot to learn.
My video is 480p60, for what it’s worth.
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1 Reply
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Particular should have some “welding” sparks – a blue and an orange I believe.. you could edit those to suit your needs…
if you wanna make your own.. you can play with the birth rate (keyframe it like b-rate: 0, skip 3 frames, b-rate: 20(adjust to your prefs), skip a frame, b-rate: 0.
that’ll give you that brief “burst” .. play with the physics (speed and gravity specifically) .. also the “particle type” – change that around till you find something you like….
also – I can’t remember where it is, but turn on the motion blur – this sells the effect pretty well even if it looks a tad lousy before.. it hides what makes the shot look unreal..
I hope my late-night ramblings help out – good luck 🙂
-Jeremy
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