Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Sandeep Sajeev] “off topic – you’re using a pen to drive Motion right? Have you been able to wrap your head around the insanity of the hand/brain work required to use Gestures?
I’m looking at the documentation now, and it seems ridiculous to me. Are you using them and/or do you know anyone who is?”
I’m afraid I’ve found it very hard to get friendly with Gestures – as you say it’s a lot of rewiring of the brain and hands to get used to it, and I can’t persuade myself that it a more efficient way of doing anything.
In the manual it says: “Note: The Paste command may be a bit tricky to master”. In fact they’re all tricky to master, and the Paste command is virtually impossible.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I also found that a minute amount of Dazzle (the least possible so as not to see the “star” effect) plus Glow gives a very natural looking shimmer effect. The Dazzle accentuates any changes in luminance in the particles and the Glow softens the resulting sparkles and makes them more “believable”.
I think as you have shown, a lot of getting a great result depends on compositing trickery – of course you need to get your basic particles looking good but it’s the extra treatment that you add which makes all the difference.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Of course another way to get a specular look for your particles is to use the Indent filter which can product some pretty amazingly photorealistic results with quite a bit of user control over the “lighting”.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Sandeep
That’s just a brilliant effect and your clear and simple description made it easy to recreate in a couple of minutes.
Such a great example of what you can do with clever compositing. Love the use of the edge filter to get that look! Extremely specular!
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Gareth
Sorry, didn’t mean to offend you – it was meant as a gag 😉 Though I would say that often it does take a lot of “wasted” time before you can get really good results, especially with particles – and that applies to whatever app you’re trying to do them in.
I’ll leave it to Andy to explain a bit more how to do what you’re asking since he’s been kind enough to step in. His tutorials are excellent and very informative so I’m sure he can point you in the direction of making something pretty amazing.
Best of luck with it.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Sandeep Sajeev] “I’d say that the example you posted is really not photo-realistic. “
I’d totally agree with that – looks quite flash but photorealism doesn’t really come into it, in my view.
Motion particles are very easy to get good results with – with a minimum of learning about how they work. The way you get really good results is by experimenting liberally and really getting a feel for how all the parameters actually work.
As Sandeep rightly says, your not going to get feature film quality results – or rather you probably could, but you wouldn’t get them terribly easily. For that you do need the high end platforms.
By all means do the tutorials, – but you’re not going to get good at it until you put in the hours.
Motion graphics, huh? It’s a real PITA that it actually takes work to get decent stuff made 😉
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
And here’s a slightly better example using the same techniques but with a little more refinement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlbAmzpoeVI&feature=youtu.be
As Andy says you can do pretty much anything with particles in Motion – you can do some amazing things with cameras that look astonishingly 3D.
As I said, though, the presets are not any good for this kind of thing. In fact, the presets are generally pretty poor and don’t really convey what Motion can do in terms of the photorealism of particles.
Simon Ubsdell
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Here’s a very quick demo of what you can do in Motion creating your own particles from scratch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtsjdcDxx2A
For this very rough test I used the various Dust elements that you can find under Content in the Library.
Bring them all into your project.
Select one of them and hit E to make an emitter.
In the Emitter controls, set the Shape to Circle and the arrangement to Random Fill. Increase the radius till they cover the area you want.
Then simply play with your cell controls till you get a movement that you like. Make sure to add randomness wherever you can, in other words, with the birth rate, speed, angle, spin and scale.
Add Simulation behaviors to get the overall movement of your particles the way you want it. Use a negative gravity if you want them to fly upwards for instance. Vortex and Wind can help here too to get some interesting movement.
Make sure you use the Additive Blend option. It’s worth changing the Opacity over Life so that the particles fade in as they are born and fade out as they die.
Then simply rinse and repeat. You can simply duplicate your first effort and change the particle cell image to one of the other dust elements. Use the Random Seed option to make sure it’s generating a different random pattern.
The more layers of particles you can add, the better your shot will look. If your project starts to slow down too much simply export out a few of the layers (preferably as ProRes 4444 to maintain the transparency) and then re-import, remembering to disable the originals.
How good it ends up looking is going to be down to how much effort you spend on getting all the individual particle systems as good as you can get them and how many layers you can stack up before you run out of steam! Don’t try to do too much with a single layer as the repetition of the patterns will give the game away.
Finally don’t forget to add blur filters where necessary to increase the photorealism and take away some of the excessive sharpness of the particle cells.
That’s a very short explanation of a long topic. Hope it’s of some use. I’m sure there are detailed tutorials out there for this kind of thing – if not I’d be happy to make one for you.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
The answer is easy – you just need to take time and put in the work 😉
You could certainly easily get this look in Motion. Lots of layers of different particles systems at different depths, lots of filtering with glows, a layer or two for the simulated light source, etc.
And maybe also shoot your own dust layer to add to the mix – finely shredded toilet paper is a classic trick for this.
In fact you could probably do something a lot more convincing than this if you tried. I just don’t buy the movement of some of those particle layers – they really give the game away.
Though I should add that you need to start from scratch and build your own particle systems – the presets that come with Motion won’t give you anything like this effect.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Tanner
That’s really good to hear. Thanks for the feedback.
Happy clients are always good news 😉
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com