Trapcode Particular – repeated photos in grid mode

[Michael Szalapski]

Manually placing photos in a grid is fairly easy to do in Photoshop.
However, doing it in AE with an expression would be even better!

Check out the grid code on this tutorial: https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/noise.php It should help.

Then you could use your grid precomp with Card Wipe for your transition if you wanted to.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Not sure of the final result you’re after, but Card Dance may be a better tool.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Walter Soyka]

Another option for manually creating grids — PlaneSpace [link]. I think this one’s a must-have if you need to arrange large groups of objects, but maintain more control over them than a particle system allows.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Joseph W. bourke]

Walter’s right about PlaneSpace – I purchased it as part of the Red Giant Effects Suite, and it’s indispensible. If you look on my website in the Video Gallery:

https://bourkemedia.com/?page_id=7

And click on the Waters Corporation clip, at about :42 seconds you’ll see a couple of spherical matrices created in PlaneSpace. They were created by simply dropping the clips into a comp, then applying Spheroid Creator, one of the many options in PlaneSpace. To have done this manually would have blown the budget out of the water (no pun intended). The depth of capability in PlaneSpace is huge, with options you have to play around with to see the power. You can even set up a spherical matrix, turn on “animate postion”, then go in and change the settings, and you can animate between different sizes and layouts of spheres.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Jim Darski]

Wow, lots of cool stuff! Definitely got to get my hands on Plane Space…
Still, without Plane Space, what would be the best way to make a photo grid that forms a Christmas tree – 2 dimensional one – and be able to keyframe fading in (opacity) of the rows of photos? And not to have photos repeated.

Thanks!

[Michael Szalapski]

One way:

In Photoshop place the photos roughly where you want them and then use the align tools to make them a proper grid. (Or even turn on grid options and speed that process up.)

Import the PSD into AE.

Pop the PSD precomp into your main comp.

Create a Ramp (gradient) on a new solid.

Posterize the ramp so that it has a band of color per row of pictures. (Maybe use Mosaic instead?) Line it up with your picture precomp.

Precomp it (move all attributes).

Apply the gradient map transition to the PSD precomp and use your Ramp precomp as the map.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Jim Darski]

Thanks Michael,
I took some expression class some time ago. I’ve forgotten most of it but I do remember it was possible to write an expression that if one object intersect with another its opacity will change. Maybe that would be a way, using a big solid for example as an “effector” effecting the opacity of photos to reveal them (by moving the solid) … The photos would have that expression.

Though, your solution seems to be much easier to execute. But how would you make sure that banding aligns with photos? My photos are sort of rotated randomly and overlapping each other a bit (so it more looks like a random pile).

[Michael Szalapski]

I like your idea of a large “effector”. That’s how I would do it in Cinema 4D.

It’s a random pile? Well, that changes a few things. I think all of us were thinking your photos were in an actual grid-like form.

Actually, I still think Card Wipe or Card Dance would be the thing for you. You can use fractal noise in a precomp as a map to move the cards around and rotate them to give them the randomness you need. Then you’d do a similar transition to what I mentioned, although you might not even need the posterizing part of it.

Another alternative – ignoring any of the previous suggestions – would be some form of a Follow The Leader expression applied to your photos’ opacity. https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/follow-the-leader.html

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Particle Playground is another option. Here’s a tutorial I wrote a while ago that will be helpful in this instance – https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kahlenberg_roland/game_pp.php

Cheers
RoRK

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