flying flies

[Vince Becquiot]

I saw a video once on Fly trainning:) (China I think)

I think that if you want “descent” results you’ll have to go 3D.

But, you could start with motion Sketch and the smoother.

Tutorial: https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/unguren_ben/motion_sketch/index.html

Cheers,

Vince

[Sn1979c]

Do you know of any tutorials on how to create particles move on a random way in an specific area of the screen?

Thank you for your help and your quick reply.

SN1979c

[Julian Sixx]

Hi
Trapcode Particular has got a preset called t-swarm flies that may help you

[Mike Clasby]

Dan Ebberts had a nice swarming expression, wiggle really, on his web page, but alas
it looks like he lost his domain name, a sad day for expression hackers.

This will work, not as elegantly as a particle system but quick and easy, you’ll know if you like the look
in no time.

If the man isn’t moving it’s real easy with a wiggle expression. See below if you haven’t used expressions.

Put your fly (psd, or other file with transparency) where you want it to hover.
Alt + Click the Position Stopwatch for the fly layer, type (or paste) in this wiggle expression:

wiggle (5,60)

Adjust the 5 – frequency (how often the fly changes direction, and 60 – amplitude(how far the fly goes before changing direction) to taste.

Duplicate the Fly layer (Ctrl D) as many times as you want flies, they will spread out a bit and all swarm around the man.

If the man moves, the quick way is:

Start with a new fly layer.

Make a new null layer (Layer>New>Null Object) and position it with keyframes to follow the man’s movement down the timeline, then Alt + click the Fly Position again, and pickwhip to the null position to get this:

thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).position

Add a dot “.”, and your wiggle expression to get:

thisComp.layer(“Null 2”).position.wiggle(5,60)

Dup the layer again, all should follow the null which is following the man.

You can also motion track the man’s head or something but is probably more complicated than you need since swarms are a bit sloppy by nature.

[Andrew Shanks]

I recently had to do a few shots with swarming bee’s attacking a couple of people. After trying a few things in After effects, I ended up using particle illusion to do the job, using a tiny photo of a bee for the particle shape then tweaking various settings until i got the right feel. Although i have not used Particular, you would probably get an even more convincing feel with it (being that it can work with your after effects 3d camera to give a convincing 3d perspective feel, ….my particle illusion bee’s were okay, the client was rapt, …but to me it did feel a bit 2d)

Goodluck!

andrew