[Matthew Keane]

Hi,

I’m pretty sure this is a limitation of the Grid Emitter – you can either use the ‘Traverse’ setting which works across the rows and columns as you saw, or the ‘Periodic Burst’ which updates all of the grid at the same time.

I’m not sure Particular is the best tool for what you want to do. Unless you need some of the other particle functions, like direction, velocity, etc, you might be better off using something like Card Dance, which can work on a grid of images and flip them (from an empty box to a ticked box). If you use a black-and-white precomp as a gradient layer, you can flip the images at random until the whole grid is full of ticked boxes.

The gradient layer drives the animation of Card Dance, but if your gradient doesn’t use greyscale values, but just pops from black to white, you shouldn’t see the transition. If you use Fractal Noise to generate some random noise, the Mosaic effect to force it into a grid to match your boxes, and then animate the levels from black to white, you should get a random grid effect that does what you want.

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

Hi Tom,

I remember your post about it at the time. Did you ever manage to find out whether the problem was an incompatibility with CS6 or with the PC? I’m still running CS5.5 on a Mac and, apart from the occasional hiccup with certain media, Camera Tracker has always worked well for me. I do wonder how much effort the Foundry will put into maintaining it now that Adobe has bundled their tracker into CS6 though.

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

I’ve had occasional problems with the Foundry Camera Tracker and CS5.5 when using HDV footage, and things went a lot smoother once I reimported the footage as ProRes, so maybe it’s not a fan of long-gop footage. Having said that, once Camera Tracker started crashing when trying to solve a clip, it seemed to keep doing so until I removed the effect from the clip and started again from scratch (maybe it’s caching the results somewhere?).

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

Just a wild guess, but if you transform your text into mask paths and animate between the different paths, that might give you a smooth morph between the different text phrases. Since the morph will occur as the particles are at their most dispersed, the change of text shouldn’t be so obvious.

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

You might also find some suitable images if you search for ‘equirectangular’ images.

There are some good quality HDR images on this site:
https://www.openfootage.net/

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

[Max Jackson] ” I don’t think there’s a way to do Particular in reverse”

I’ve never tried this, but what happens if you set the Physics Time Factor to a negative value once you’ve reached the point where you want things to run backwards?

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

I like TextWrangler, which is free and can handle all kinds of gnarly regular expressions for searching-and-replacing, which can sort out jobs like that in minutes.

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

Hi,

I use an Intuos (the PTK-440 model) and I find it works pretty well, even on a large-ish screen. There is a ‘precision’ mode on this model which means that moving the stylus all the way across the tablet only moves the cursor about a fifth of the way across the screen although, to be honest, I don’t use it much.

Not sure what to recommend in terms of tablet size. I quite like the size I have as it seems to give a reasonable work area, without taking up half my desk.

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

OK, so in no particular order, I’d try playing with Motion Blur, and/or Vector Blur as that gives some nice effects. You could add a wiggle expression to the emission settings to make the lines a bit patchier. To make things wispier, I think maybe you need to use smaller particles, but more of them (which will slow render times), or try using a streaklet to get multiple trails per particle. In the same vein, you could also try dropping the opacity of the particles, but increase the number of them so that the transfer mode helps build up the brightness progressively, so it would look like many filaments rather than one big ribbon. Oh, and I wonder whether your example uses the shading/shadowlet options to give the impression of shadows in the ribbons.

Hope some of that helps!

Matthew Keane

Freelancer based in Paris, France
– Motion Graphics, Video Editing & Effects, Watchout Programming & Live Operation.

[Matthew Keane]

Well one advantage of the Element plugin is that you can do it all in AE, but it sounds like you’re familiar with C4D so I guess that’s probably the way to go.