[Mike Park]

It is pretty easy. Take you dragon layer and duplicate it so that you have 2 layers. Next, find an animated flame movie somewhere on the web. If you cant find a flame, you can accomplish a similar effect using a new layer and apply a fractal noise filter and animating the phase over time. However, given the video, it looks like a flame movie would be best. Next, drag you flame layer overtop into the comp so that it is directly above one of your dragon layers. With your dragon layer selected, click the dropdown menu under the TrkMat tab in the timeline. Change the mode from “No Track Matte” to Luma Matte of the flame layer. What this will do is drive the opacity of your dragon image using the greyscale value of the flame movie, so that the lighter parts will be more opaque and the darker parts will be more transparent. Also, is it does not do so automatically, turn off the visibility of the flame layer. As for the other dragon layer, it appears that it is a simple wipe reveal. I would apply a new mask to it by going up to your pen tool and drawing a box around the dragon. Change the mask mode from add to subtract. Next, click the stopwatch next to the mask shape and animate the 2 right points sweeping from right to left to reveal the dragon. Finally you can feather the mask a bit to soften the edge. Place this layer above the flaming dragon and offset the timing so that the solid layer reveals over the flaming layer – if that makes any sense. Lastly, you may want to key frame the opacity of the flame layer so that the flaming dragon fades in. You only need to keyframe the flame layer as the opacity of the dragon layer is controled by it.

I hope this is clear and you can follow along. If not, let me know.

PS – did you say you have particular – If so, I may be able to help you approximate the particle effect. It looks like at least 2 particle layers, one with particles falling from top to bottom, and one with particles shooting into the foreground from the background. It also looks like a camera move forward. I agree with Darby that it looks like a custom shape has been instanced. You will need to play with the color, opacity and size using some fractal map to get the shimmering/glitter effect. Hope this helps

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

It looks to me that the initial reveal of the dragon is done using an animated texture as an alpha channel or luma souce. If I had to guess, I think it looks like flames. You would simply use the animated flames as a luma map for the dragon. There looks like a second reveal which is more of a wipe. Here you could use an animated mask with a feathered edge or create a custom wipe and use it as a luma matte as above. Then it is simply a matter of layering the reveals and keyframing the opacities.

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

Here are the files.

https://www.mediafire.com/?evrjot3mdty

It is a little big with all the rendered files, but hey, why not?

Look at the readme file

If you want, you could upload your footage to mediafire.com and send me the link via email. I could take a look at the acutal footage you are using and help you get things worked out. I enjoy helping others learn, I learned everything about graphics from others willing to share their time and experience.

my email is

park_mike@yahoo.com

Cheers

[Mike Park]

Ok, check this out – here is an easier way (faster) to do the effect you want using the best of both max and after effects.

In 3ds Max

Part I – Create the Bullets (pellets)

The first thing we need to do is make a bullet. We will create a geosphere, make a texture, then roughen up the spherical shape using a displacement map.

1. Make a new plane the aspect ratio of your footage ie. 4×3 or 16×9 or some multiple.
2. Create a new targeted camera and place the camera target in the middle of the plane
3. Go to the material rollout and under a new material change the diffuse color map from none to bitmap and choose your footage
4. Now create a new geosphere the size of the shotgun pellets you want to use – use trial and error for size, you can change later – make the sphere 4 segments
5. Next go back to your material editor and choose a new material slot. Call this material bullet. Under the diffuse map change it from none to noise. Change the noise colors from black and white to a dark grey and mid grey – darker on top – my values dark rgb = 42,42,42 and mid rgb = 160,160,160. Change the noise type to turbulence. I also scaled down the size from 25 to 10.
6. Go back up to the top of the material and copy the diffuse map to a new material slot by dragging the diffuse rollout button to a new map. Choose instance.
7. Back in the bullet material, under the map rollout, drag the diffuse map to the bump map and leave it at the default 30. Also click on the reflection map and choose bitmap and then your footage. Decrease the value from 100 to 10.
8. Finally on the bullet material, increase the specular to 115 and the glossiness to 40.
9. Add a displace modifier to the geosphere and set the strength to 0.15. Drag your noise map from the material rollout to the map under image and change the map type to spherical.
10. Apply this material to the geosphere. Test render to see if you like the look and adjust the material to taste

Part II – Create the initial pellet blast

What we are going to do is take the bullet you made above and use it as geometry for particle flow to use multiple times to generate your blast.

11. Create a new PF source and align it toward the camera.
12. Open the particle view and add a spin operator and change from 360 to about 50 – this controls how fast the individual pellets will rotate. You can change the variation of the spin to they spin at different speeds – I used 20
13. Next, replace the shape operator with shape instance. On the right, click pick object and select your bullet in the view port
14. Go to the birth operator and change it so that the bullets emit over only one frame. The default has them emitting from frame 0 to 30. Also change the amount to something reasonable for a shot gun. This will depend obviously on what size shot you are using, but I chose about 15.
15. Delete rotation as you are already using spin to control rotation.
16. Under speed, change the default to whatever looks good to you and add some small variation so that the pellets are not all aligned in one plane. Also make sure the direction is along icon arrow which will allow you to change the direction of the pellets by rotating the pf emitter in the main window. Also give it a little divergence – about 13-15 – this will spread out the shot pattern. Adjust to taste and shot.

Part III – Create the ripples

Now, the real fun. We will add a spawn event to the main particles which we will render and export and pull into afx as the source for a displacement map – Cool huh – this is much faster and easier than trying to displace the background in max. If you want to try the difference in time, change the material by adding a raytrace to the refraction map – then expect really longer render times – this way uses the best of both programs.

16. Add a spawn test to the main particles in particle flow. Choose per second and change the rate to about 30. Change the offspring to about 10, variation 20. Inheritance 10, variation to 25, divergence to 30
17. Create a new event by dragging a shape instance node onto the pflow workspace. Connect the spawn event handle to this new event.
18. In the main window, create a new geosphere, about 1/3 the size of the main particle. Change the segments to 1, and apply a turbosmooth modifier. Next open up the material browser and apply a plain grey material to the geosphere.
19. Back in particle flow, pick the new geosphere as the object in the new event.

You should now have smaller particles streaming out of the main pellets. You will use these to drive a displacement of you footage in afx.

Hide your bg plane and render out your bullets alone and then the trails. Make sure to render at the same resolution as your footage so that things line up properly. I use pngs with alphas.

Fire up After effects.

Import you footage, your bullet pngs and your trails.
Drag you footage to a new comp and then drag and drop on both our bullet footage and trails. Bullets on top, trails next and finally your footage. Hide you trail footage.
Select your footage and choose Effect>Distort>Displacement map
Change the displacement map layer to your trails. Change the red and green to luminence and adjust the horizontal and vertical displacement to taste.

There you go

You may also want to add a blast effect, like a powder explosion with a few sparks coming out of the barrel. Check out http://www.detonationfilms.com for some ideas and free footage.

Let me know if you need any more help, or if you would like for me to send you my max file or afx file

Cheers

[Mike Park]

Try this. Make a pellet in max using a geosphere and map it with a material. You can search the net for a good refrence pic. the ones I saw were dark grey with some specular and relatively glossy. Set up a pf source emitter in max. go to the particle flow rollout and change “shape” to “Shape Instance.” Pick your geosphere as the instanced object. Now change the pflow emitter to emit 15 and start at 0 and end at 1. Change the velocity to whatever speed fits your scene. Also remember to change the direction of the emitter to along arrow in the speed section. Now you will see 15 objects emitted over one frame from the pf source travelling along one axis. You can change the divergence and spin to taste. Render it out as .pngs and import into afx. Apply whatever distortion you want behind the pellets. If you want to do it all in max, you can search for tutorials which use the “matrix” bullet effect and I know there are some tutorials out there which will demonstrate how to generate the distortion behind the pellets that you want.

Hope this points you in the right direction
Cheers

[Mike Park]

I think the answer to your question depends on what type of shot you want and what look. If you shot is full speed, then the bullets would be nothing more than motion blurs. For this effect, you could animate a layer with pictures of bullets moving toward the camera at high speed with an alpha channel and motion blur turned on. Or you could use a plugin like Trapcode Particular and have true 3d balls flying at your camera. You say you have access to 3d max. Depending on how good you are with max, you could create small spheres animating toward the camera in slow motion or use a particle generator such as pflow or one the the simple emmitters in max. Simply, put, there are a bunch of ways to create this in both afx and max, and it largely depends on what software you are comfortable with and what look you need. Both programs excel at different things.

[Mike Park]

It sounds as if you want to isolate the foreground image – person walking – from the background and apply different treatments to each. To do this you will have to “cut out” your person walking so that he/she is seperate from the background. You can do this with alpha maps – black and white maps which control opacity – or keying, if you used a green or blue screen, or you can rotoscope a mask by hand.

[Mike Park]

do you have any reference in the photograph that you know the height and width of like a wall or window. If so, you can recreate this element in AE and then align the element to the picture. That is the easiest way in my opinion.

[Mike Park]

This problem intrigued me, so I had to find the answer.
I came up with 3 basic possibilities.

1. Use a 3d program
2. Add texture to your ball map in photoshop or in a precomp in after effects or
3. Use a work around that I came up with

The tutorial, complete with texture maps, very basic instructions and the afx comp itself can be found here:

https://www.mediafire.com/?lnninw930jt

If you have any questions, please let me know. Also, since I took the time to figure this out, please let me know if you found it useful and let me see your final result

Cheers

[Mike Park]

That seems strange. If you want to send me you comp to take a look at, I would be happy to try to troubleshoot. It appears that you are doing everything correctly.