generating flock of birds – particular?

[Sam Moulton]

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/bird_flock1.php

[Sam Moulton]

then do this one

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/bird_flock2.php

[Peder Norrby]

Trapcode Particular supports animated custom particles. Here is an example of a flock of birds:

https://www.trapcode-people.net/filedetails.php?fileid=14

Peder Norrby / Trapcode

[Aaron Zander]

more spicificly what you want to do is either pre comp, or to save render time pre render your bird animation. Than bring it in use it as a custom particle map and make sure your are sampling the entire animation and using a loop. Than you will have each bird represented as a particle (or other way around) what you than want to do is get your PPS up to say 30 for 1 second, and than set it to 0, have your life be longer than your comp, and animate away.

[Darby Edelen]

[turnesol] “Since Particular does not support custom particles with embedded motion, I am stumped. Can anyone help me?”

Whaaaaat? Then how did I do my flock of birds with it? =O

Just make your bird in a pre-comp animating in a loop, a ‘flap-cycle’ we’ll call it =)

Drop this pre-comp into your final comp, apply Particular to a layer and set it to use a Custom Particle, choose your bird ‘flap-cycle’ pre-comp and set it to begin on a random frame for each particle and loop.

Now tweak your settings to resemble a flock of particles.

I believe you can even enable Collapse Transformations on your custom particle layer, although Particular might have some minor issues with it.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[A.Zander] “Than you will have each bird represented as a particle (or other way around) what you than want to do is get your PPS up to say 30 for 1 second, and than set it to 0, have your life be longer than your comp, and animate away.”

In the ‘options’ dialog you can also set Pre-Run to 100% so that there is no period where birds are ’emitting’ or appearing on screen.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA