Matrix bullets ‘a la Kramer’?

[Darby Edelen]

Trapcode’s Particular would be a great way to accomplish this. If your bullets are freezing then the hardest part would be making sure that the perspective on them looks correct, other than that you can create a particle system using Particular that emits pulses of rings, animate the emitter (you could use a light) and then use that as the basis for an adjustment layer with a displacement map.

There are a lot of details that you’d have to figure out for yourself, I may look at doing this myself in a bit but until then this should be a decent foundation to begin from.

Other options include using Wave World to create the distortion, but having this line up properly with the bullet will be somewhat difficult.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Here’s something I put together with some spare time today:

It’s not very polished but it gives you a good sense of what you can accomplish with a particle system following the bullets. If I have a little more time at work next week maybe I’ll add some secondary distortion, I can send you the AEP as well if you like (which might take some time as I should write up some notes to explain what I did).

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Mbevilacqua]

Wow! This is great!
Yes please do send in the .aep even without notes it’ll be a great starting point.

Thank you in advance!!

[Scott Geersen]

I had to do this a while back for a low budget film, and I also used particular. But for the distortion i cheated… I think I used Panopticum’s Lens filter to create a torus lens (donut) reflecting the scene (you could do that without special plugins though). This piped into particular as the custom particle with transparency and growing in size from particle birth time. You can make the particle (the pre-rendered torus) a 3d layer in it’s own comp, and use expressions to tie the x/y/z rotation to the camera or emitter’s x/y/z rotation in the main comp if necessary, to account for perspective shift, since particular particles always auto-orient to camera.
Add in some turbulent field in particular to make the “trail” less like a perfect straight line. I know the bullet trails in the matrix follow a straight line (i had frame by frame reference) but honestly when you’re up close to the bullet it looks better if the “heat” or “air ripping” from the bullet is disrupting it’s own trail.

The only thing you can’t do is have the distortion from the old particles distorting the new particles: I mean, looking from the rear through the older “rings”, you’d expect to see through them as if they were glass, and the distortion rings in front should be visible through here too… the best compromise with AE is to use particle transparency, a blend mode, and variation in size/position to create the illusion of this. That said, you simply can;’t beat having a 3D friend render a particle animation for you, because that way when you look through the old particles you can see the new ones up ahead and everything is being distorted by everything else, cos that’s the way the 3D materials and rendering work.

To sum up: I tried many different 2d solutions including various glass and distortion filters from tinderbox and sapphire, and in the end, a simple pre-rendered disc set to a particle emitter worked better than anything else.

[Josh J. johnson]

Darby that was nice I would like the ae file as well. Did you use any of the built in particle effect systems in AE or trapcode? What did you use to make the bullets?

Email- triplej9923@hotmail.com

[Mbevilacqua]

Sorry forgot email was not shown in profile!
email: mbevilacqua@gmail.com

Scott great explanation and that torus would add in what was missing from Darby’s example to make it look just like Matrix bullets.

Best thing is you can also play around a bit with the camera if the shot allows it (which mine does) so it’ll look 3D.

I’ll give this a try, thank you very much!

[Darby Edelen]

Sorry I was away for the weekend… Okay, so I’m not really sorry, but I didn’t get a chance to update my .AEP this weekend, I’ll work on it this week when I’m not busy with work (fat chance) and hopefully have something to send you by the end of the week.

I have some ideas for refining the effect that I’ll include.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Aikiguy1]

Darby,

Is there anyway I could appeal to your kindness and get you to send me a copy of this .aep??? I’ve been trying to re-create this effect and just can’t seem to get it right. I would REALLY appreciate it, sir!

Thanks,
Gary

[Fabiano Chaves]

sooo did anyone get this working, ive been playing with particular foir a while and cant get anything good…im just trying to revive this thread.

if anyone has any of the AEPs that were mentioned above it would be great if you could send it to me!

thanks

[Pgcstudios]

Very good effect, my friends and I have been trying to do this for awhile, is there anyway you can email the file to me too? jedimasterpgc@aim.com thank you very much!!!!!