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problems with trapcode particular
hi everyone!
I’m currently doing my senior thesis and starting to use Trapcode Particular more. I’m doing a sequence where the man is trying to do homework, but isn’t focused on what he sees on the paper and want letters and numbers to loop around on the page…how do go I go about doing that?
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13 Replies
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Do you want these letters and numbers actually on the page or do you want them drifting off the page?
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
I want these letters and numbers on the page…just looping around the page.
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I would recommend looking at Text Animators for this. If you don’t need the letters to change in 3D space it should be much easier. There are quite a few text animator presets that you can browse in Bridge (Animation > Browse Presets… > Text). You may find one that will work for you with very little adjustment, or you can get an idea of what is possible and try creating one yourself!
I would think the harder part of this is getting the letters/numbers to look like they’re on the page, have you thought about how you will accomplish that? Are the scenes where you need this effect shot on tripod?
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
My friend did this in a previous project where he held the camera and custom made particles where they just sat on the paper and just looped over and over and it looks pretty real…Probably created his own particles and used the orbit tool to get them as close as possible on the paper (and it looked pretty real)…anyways, I tried looking at the text and it won’t let me import them into AE..keeps saying doesn’t support that file for some reason…am I missing a step?
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You can’t import a text file, if that’s your question. You have to copy the text and paste it into a text layer inside of AE (created using the Text tool… cmd-t on Mac or ctrl-t on PC).
Again, particles will only make sense if you want the letters to move off the page. Otherwise it would only complicate things.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
oh, ok….What would be the steps I could take to create that with particular or any effect….doesn’t have to be third party plug in…
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oh, ok….What would be the steps I could take to create that with particular or any effect….doesn’t have to be third party plug in…
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It sounds to me like a job for motion tracking. This is assuming that you have something good to track (the corners of the page would work well).
AE’s trackers are relatively rudimentary, but if you can get a good track of all 4 corners of the page then you could use the Perspective Corner Pin to pin a pre-comp with all of your text in it.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Alright, I motion tracked the footage, but how would I go about getting the letters to loop around the paper and eventually move off the screen? Would I have to custom create it or could I still use one of the presets?
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[Michael Jurkowski] “Would I have to custom create it or could I still use one of the presets?”
That depends on the look you’re trying to achieve. Some of them can be very simple to make yourself but effective, such as adding a Wiggly Selector and a position property with a high value (this is all within the Text Animator, and will affect the position of the characters relative to their normal position). You could animate the value to go from no change in position to a massive change in position. In this case the text would look normal and then slowly begin to go haywire (random motion across the page).
I’m not clear on what you mean by ‘looping’ though, do you want the text to move left to right? up and down? the characters to change randomly (i.e. ‘a’ becomes ‘!’ becomes ‘®’ etc)? These are all possible, but need different approaches.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
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