How To Integrate Particles Into Video Footage?

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

First off, you’re rotoscoping isn’t as difficult as you may think. You’ll only need to rotoscope for the short segment where the particles move behind your talent. That’s no more thab 3 seconds and it only covers part of the head region. The talent is pretty static and that’s going to make things easier.

I once did a whole bunch of these type effects using multiple instances of CC Sphere.

I believe that Particular has a Z-position for the emitter. Once you’ve cut out your talent. Place a copy of the original footage on a seprate layer. Only the roto-ed layer needs to be made a 3D layer. Then just animated the position of the emitter so that it goes around the talent at the required time.

For this, just start out with x and y positions for the emitter. Once that’s fine, set the z-position accordingly.

HTH
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com – Adobe After Effects Project Files
https://www.myspace.com/rorkrgbspace

[Darby Edelen]

Well, for one the particles stay in the same position after a cut, which is a little odd. Other than that I would recommend changing their blending mode to Add (you may have already done this) and playing with their individual opacities/random opacity (some sparkle at the end of their life might be nice)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Conseannery]

Thanks a lot guys!

Btw, I need to rotoscope the bike as well. But I guess you are right, it is not as tedious as I made it.

What is this CC sphere thing you mentioned? A particle generator?

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Depending on the trajectory of the particles, youmay be able to get by without roto-ing the bike. IMO, it’ll still look ok if the particles were in front of the bike throughout the entire duration. As long as the particle stream makes it around the buys head, you would have sold the 3D-ish look to the viewer.

CCSphere wraps things around a sphere and other than rendering the entire sphere, it allows you render either just the front or the back of the sphere. So, in my case, after roto-ing my subject out. I placed them in between each instance of the front-only and a back-only instance of the sphere, which contained a flight of particles.

Kinda hard to visualize it. But once you’ve messed about with CCSphere, you’ll have a better idea.

Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com – Adobe After Effects project files
https://www.myspace.com/rorkrgbspace

[Darby Edelen]

[Darby Edelen] “Well, for one the particles stay in the same position after a cut, which is a little odd.”

I thought I’d expand on this. It would be simple with Particular to cut between two separate Camera layers when the cut occurs in the video. This way you would be using the exact same particle system, only it would be viewed from a more spatially correct perspective (low-angle looking up?) and you could ‘cut on action’ so that there is a slight delay after the particles leave the first shot’s frame at the top, and before they enter the 2nd shot’s frame at the bottom. I think this would build the best spatially cohesive effect.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Conseannery]

Hi RoRK,

I just roto-ed the biker and made it a 3D layer.

I then tried to make the particle stream go around the biker in a circular motion, so that it first goes behind the biker and then a couple of frames later goes in front of it again.
Going behind the biker works just fine, but I can’t make the stream go in front of the biker again although I adjusted the Z position that it is clearly in front of the roto-ed layer.

Am I overlooking something?

Tx.