Making a Hurricane/Cyclone

[Darby Edelen]

What you can do is create a radial gradient in Photoshop, or in AE and pre-comp it.

Then create a cloudy looking evolving and rotating fractal noise in another pre-comp.

Place these two pre-comps together in another comp and use the radial gradient as a luma track matte for the fractal noise as well as to drive a Time > Time Displacement effect on the cloud pre-comp.

This doesn’t give you an eye to the storm, but you should be able to mask one out fairly easily.

Here’s an old one I made:

https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2337851367281373845

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Dylan Usic]

Wow! That looks really nice! I am completely new with Trapcode Particular so I was wondering if it would be possible to turn the image you created into a displacement map and use that with Trapcode Particular? If you know how to do this could you go through the steps for me?

Thanks.

[Steph Foster]

or you could put fractal noise on a solid layer and keyframe evolution over time.

Now put an adjustment layer above it with a twirl effect on.
Key frame rotating the adjustment layer.

I made a project using this technique and it didn’t look too bad.
drop me an e-mail if you’d like the project file.

steph.p.foster {at} gmail {dot} com