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Trapcode Particular question
Posted this on the Trapcode site but it doesn’t appear things get answered quickly over there and as usual, I’m pressed for time. Here’s my post:
Working on my first ever project with Particular. I’m using the firestarter preset as a meteor crashing into earth to kill off the dinosaurs. I have the meteor flying in from upper left, as though close to the camera. As it reaches earth, I simply want it to shrink into the distance so as to disappear right before impact, which then is a big explosion sending smoke into the atmosphere. So, what setting do I play with to make the fireball and trail get smaller? Seems like everything I do either makes only the smoke trail shorter or broken up, but the fireball stays the same size. How can I uniformly shrink this so it appears to disappear in the distance?
Thanks in advance,
Steven -
5 Replies
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What you need to do is link it to a light. Create a new spot light ( you must name it “Emitter” for this to work. Place your light in z space behind the camera and set key frames. move forward in the time line and move the light forward to wherever you want it to hit. Now go into your particular settings and twirl down the emitter settings and set emitter type to light. now your comet will follow whatever path you have made with your light.
-Shawn
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There are probably a couple of ways you could accomplish this. I’m not familiar with the preset, but I’m guessing that you should just be able to animate the emitter’s Z position so that the emitter is actually moving away from the camera (and getting smaller). If you need to exaggerate the Z depth to make it appear to shrink into the distance even faster you could decrease the Zoom property on your camera, however this will affect the rest of your comps 3D layers as well.
The other options involve animating the Size property of the Particles and Aux System down, but this might be harder to do convincingly.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Couldn’t you just keyframe the entire layer to scale down as the meteor gets farther away from the camera? Then it would all scale down uniformly.
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Scaling doesn’t work quite the same way as moving something away from the camera. I suppose you could get passable results this way for some effects, but the other problem is that trapcode only renders particles in the layer’s bounding box. Moving the emitter isn’t hard and it should give much better results than scaling the entire layer.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Shawn,
The Z depth is what I couldn’t find in the controls, so the light thing makes sense. But, when trying this I must be missing step. When I change the emitter to light, the emitter disappears. I checked that the icon for the light follows the keyframed path, but when I change the emitter to light, the particles have disappeared entirely. Should I be keyframing the point of interest at all? Is that part of the problem?Kelmedia,
Yes, the first thing I tried was precomposing and scaling down the layer. Two things are bad with that, first the particles are cut off at the edge of the layer, second it just looks wankey because the perspective goes way off. I knew there was something better out there because AE combined with Particular HAD to do better than that! And they will…once I figure out what I’m doing!Thanks everybody,
Steven
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