[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Try this:

https://gist.github.com/TomByrne/7816376

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

In my opinion the example doesn’t use Particular — with Particular you can create a much more realistic result than this.

They don’t rotate in 3D nor even in 2D. They just move around, first out from a center point then down, in a wave-like motion. It almost looks like motion sketch has been used to individually animate the particle positions only.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Essentially you want to do the child scaling by an expression that shrinks it more than the parent.

If the slider values change in the positive range, you could do it like this:

s=Math.max(0,[YOUR SCALING PARENTING OR CALCULATION HERE]-25);
[s,s]

wherein the “-25” is the scale at which you want the smaller circle to be 0, i.e. when the larger circle is at 25%, the smaller one will be at 0%. You can change this value to your liking.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Seems straightforward enough: duplicate the layer a number of times and use valueAtTime expression linked to the (animated) original layer for the rotation property of the duplicate layers along with layer index to offset the time.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I can’t. What is in the precomp?

Does turning off collapse transformations change anything?

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If the camera the footage was shot with is such that it automatically sharpens the image, this problem will occur. You will likely have to key the hair separate from the other (sharper) outlines. The outlines likely need a choke to get rid of the extra edge, wherein the hair doesn’t need such. In other words, two different mattes combined together in a precomp, and the result used as track matte.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Gaussian blur plus threshold would also give a very similar result.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Indirectly: Use one vector mask for the layer, put it inside a folder and add a vector mask for the folder. That way you can have two different feathers. You can stack this to get even more different feather settings:

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Are the images rotated differently from one to the other?

If not, I would try and approach it with the following action:

1) Trim the image so that only the moon is shown.

2) Resize to a specific size that you want all the moons to be.

3) Copy and paste into the master file. It will automatically paste into the center.

What is the “warping” that you are talking about? (What is warped and why?)

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You can use two Stroke effects on the same layer, one starting where the other ends.