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Trailing lights effect
If anyone has ever seen the movie Akira, when they are riding their bikes at night, the lights on the back of the bikes leave a long streak of color as they move. Does anyone know how to achieve this look in After Effects?
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4 Replies
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Try effect>time>echo, and mess with the settings. AFAIK, you can’t get a really continuous streak without loooong render times.
Try searching the COW posts & archive on “streak” or “echo”.
Steve
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I thin’k it’s possible they just drew streaks and animated the position, no? Akira was done late 80’s I think so I would imagine it was a simple animation technique. I could be absolutely wrong but just a thought.
I once wanted to get a comet tail looping around a logo. I tried animating a little sphere in an orbit then trying to crank on a lot of motion blur. Looked steppy. Echo looked more steppy. But then when I actually just modeled a long skinny cone in 3D and made it loop around a circle spline with it’s tale conforming to the circle spline, it looked smooth as silk. So this xperiment makes me think that if the Akira thing looks smooth, it may be just a moving pre-drawn cone like streak.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
i’d say you need to render only the borders of your object, and make sure you have continuous movement and use echo, the more frames you get mixed, and the smaller they are, the more continous the streak will be. Also if you get irregular stuff in the trail then you might want to blur&alpha back up a lot to get uniform content…
(yeah i know it looks nasty) -
Particular can do this very quickly and easily.
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