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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Particular plugin help

  • Particular plugin help

    Posted by Ted Harisson on June 4, 2008 at 5:21 am

    Hi,
    I am trying to create a footage of (around 30 people’s) black footsteps walking over a white background, and I need to conform the footsteps to the path they walk in. It takes I guess thousands of footsteps to fill the path, So I thought using particular.
    It does generally a good job, but I don’t know how to make the steps (basically a custom layer kind of particle (a footstep)) follow the path.
    all footstep are placed with one single orientation.
    Any suggestions ?
    Is particular a good choice ?

    Ron Coy replied 17 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Ron Coy

    June 4, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    no, I’m pretty sure you can’t easily control the particles the way you want to… at least not orienting them to a path. I’ve not tried it, but you can possibly paste a path into the xy cooridinates of the emitter, and have it follow the path, but the footsteps aren’t likely going to look like a walk pattern. They won’t align themselves to the path, as far as their orientation along the path.

    Then use multiple layers at different sizes to look like different sized people.

    Of course, I’m not the ultimate expert for such things, but I have used the plugin pretty often.

  • Ted Harisson

    June 4, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Hey there ron !
    This is quite what I did, but I couldn’t find a way to make the particles follow the path.
    Think there is anyway to accomplish this ? Using Flash maybe ? After effects ? 3DSMax ? Maya ?

  • Ron Coy

    June 4, 2008 at 7:56 pm

    I think using gradient wipe with a set of footprints that are colored from white to black, and each is a darker value of grey for each step will do the effect that you want. It will be a pain to set up, I’d imagine, but you can have up to 255 shades of grey I believe, so that would make the number of footprints available for the effect work out. You can vary the length of the effect, and size of the footprints, and layer them so that you have many more than the initial set up.

    Just put a black layer as the background, and it should work out. You might have to precomp the footprints layers…

    There may be a simpler way… I’m still figuring it out.

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