[Doyle Lewis]

As always our man Andrew Kramer has a solution.
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/advanced_3d_light_rays/

He creates interactive volumetric lighting without having to use a 3d plug in like C4D or anything.

If you are determined to use 3D I can give you some thought son that.

In C4D I’ve done it for a few projects by turning on volumetric for the spot light then building cookies out of planes with random holes cut out of it (using Boole objects). You then have to turn the intensity of the spotlight way up, but that generally does the trick.If you are rendering objects with it then I would suggest Putting those objects in the lights exclusion feild and then lighting them with GI instead using planes with luminance as off camera lights.

Below is an image that I had modeled textured and rendered in C4D. I got the volumetric lighting using the techniques I described above. If you have any more questions about doing volumetric lighting let me know. Or if C4D project file would be useful to you I can upload it and share it with you.

Hope that helped

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

For both effects you are really going to have to learn Particle simulators. Here are the ones I suggest with a link following them that is a tutorial of how they work.

Trapcode Form:
https://www.redgiant.com/videos/getting-started/item/378/

Trapcode particular:
https://www.redgiant.com/videos/getting-started/item/346/
https://www.redgiant.com/videos/getting-started/item/362/

Element 3D
https://www.videocopilot.net/help/element/tutorial/basic/3d_replicator/
https://vimeo.com/45440541

Particular might work for both effects so I have attached two links to it. For the rose petal effect though element 3D might work better, but that’s only if you can get your hands on a rose pedal 3d model.

Hope that helps. It will require you to buy some software but those are the only ways I know how to do it. You might be able to do the first effect with cc particle world which is a bundled effect in After Effects already, but it would be more difficult than using trapcode.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

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[Doyle Lewis]

Yeah You can totally do fabric for blue or green screen. The difficulties that I see you possibly having are lighting issues. How do you plan on getting the entire inside of the suitcase evenly lit for a good key, (blue screen effect)? Along those lines for this particular case I might be hesitant to use fabric because if it is not stretched perfectly to fit the inside of the suitcase you may have lots of folds which will make keying the color out a pain. If I were you I would do some test shots using blue paper on the inside. Paper, (especially construction paper) unlike fabric lays flat and will not get folds. Then it just comes down to you trying your best to light the inside of the box as evenly as you can. In the corners I feel like you will have some issues no matter what, but with a little bit of rotoscoping you can probably hide any imperfections in the corners.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

Use this plug-in and set matte to on. Don’t colorize though. This will change your black to an alpha channel better than screen or multiply blending modes would.

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/color_vibrance_plug-in/

It is a free plug in just hit the download project files button and drop the plug-in into the “plug-ins” folder under After effect’s “support files”. Below is the file path you would have to take to drop it in.

C drive->Program Files->Adobe->Adobe After Effects CS6->Support Files->Plug-ins

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

As a side note the wind speed on Trapcode Particular will control how long the waves are when they come off the gear. I just changed mine to about 85 in the x direction and it works a lot better.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

7524_bendfoamtest.aep.zip

So this is more of a proof of concept than a full solution to your problem so I hope you understand that it is not exactly pretty.

So I ran a stroke around the outside of the bottom gear and animated the start and end percentage so it looks like there is foam being fed through the top and spit out the bottom, but none on the right side of the gear. Then on the bottom of that gear I placed an emitter for trapcode particular. It picks up where the bottom stroke ends and animates up and down with the gear on a loopOut(“cycle”) expression so that I only had to place a couple keyframes. The emitter moving up and down with the wind blowing the particles to the right made the sin wave you were looking for with the foam being pushed out of the gear.

Like I said this was just a proof of concept and the seams are pretty evident, but it should be a good building block for your effect. Hope that helps.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

If I am understanding your question correctly, I would take that mask you have and do a “generate stroke” effect and animate the “start” slider from 0% to 100%. Then animate the “end” slider the same way except delayed and then loop the comp.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

Hey Jon Colando,

So I’m the guy who made the template John sent you and am happy to answer any questions you have about it. But to start I’ll just break down the basics of using it. If you have more questions about how to customize the expression or anything else then we can get into that but it is built to give you full control just using the sliders.

So it is built in such a way that you can duplicate the comp and use a new comp for every sentence of your singalong. This is at least the way I have found easiest to use it. So you will want to open the comp for your first sentence click the text layer and type in the first line of lyrics for your song.

Now there is a precomp named “Ball image here” open that precomp and replace the white ball with whatever image you want to use for your bouncing ball and delete the white circle. The white circle was just a place holder to give you approximate scale and in case you didn’t have an image you wanted to replace it with. I generally do this step first because often the shape of the ball changes how you want it to hit on the words.

Now all the edits you have left should be only on the layer on the top named Ball animator. I made this layer the controller for all the other layers and expressions so that you would not have to parse through any of the expressions yourself. If you hit the layer named “Ball Animator” and hit the letter U on the keyboard the keyframes for that layer come up. As you can see only one set of keyframes comes up. When I was building it I wanted to make it as simple as possible.

Now delete those keyframes. I like to delete them so I can set my bounces per second first and then animate position. Now open up the effect control pane (usually next to the project pane) and there are all of the controls for the “Ball Animator” layer. Use the “horizontal position” slider to move the ball into the center of the screen where you can see it. Next set your bounces per second using the “Bounce per sec” slider until you have a pace you like. Then Slide the “vertical level” slider until your ball is landing on the words the way you like. (The ball is dynamically linked vertically with the text so that if you move the text to the middle or top of the screen the ball follows vertically, the “vertical level” slider is more a calibration slider to account for different heights in fonts)The final slider to deal with during this animation calibration phase is the “Bounce height” This just controls the how high the peak of your bounce is. Adjust this until you like how large your bounces are.

Now to the final step; keyframing your animation. Start at the beginning of your timeline and move forward placing a keyframe on the “Horizontal Position” slider every time the ball hits the bottom of its bounce. You can do this either by eye or by using your bounce per second value to mathematically figure out where the keyframes will go. Don’t worry about changing the values of the keyframes yet, this is just about marking the bounces. Once you have marked enough bounces for every word or syllable (depending on if you want the ball to hit every word or syllable) then go back to the first keyframe and move the “Horizontal position” slider till the ball is all the way off screen. Then using the next keframe button to advance to the next keyframe. Now adjust the “Horizontal position” slider until it lands on the first word or syllable in the right place. Then advance a keyframe. Do this until the animation is complete.

So that pretty much it. Let me know if you have any questions.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

I just tried this with a wiggling null and a turbulent displace. by just pick-whipping the offset to the word position under the null I was able to get it to follow the null no problem. I’m thinking maybe you pick-whipped to one of the position values say the x or y. That is the only reason I can think of that that wouldn’t work. If it is correct yours should say:

thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).transform.position

If it is wrong it might say:

temp = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).transform.position[0];
[temp, temp]

or

temp = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).transform.position[1];
[temp, temp]

Even with the wrong expressions I posted above you would at least have the turbulent moving in just the x or y direction, you wouldn’t get an error. Is your null 3D tracked?

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

I fell Like we would have to see it. Hard to tell what to do with just a discription

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com