Another link in the chain on the Particular season, this one is made up purely using Particular (well, almost) and as demonstrated can be put to use to come up with a number of different and interesting kinds of effects, i touch on this a little in on the VFX page too.

I came up with this effect using Trapcode’s Particular with a simple custom particle used in a slightly unconventional way. Simple effect and one of the start of the Particular season i’m running here at rhys-works.com, so check it out.


I know a couple of you have been long awaiting this one so i’m sorry for the delay, hope it’s worth it, enjoy.

The long awaited lightsaber tutorial remake. Credit to Ryan Wieber and MasterZap for the methods combined here.


A few things of note, i failed to specify at the start of the tutorial how to duplicate layers; it’s ctrl+d. Also, if when going through your frames the handles on your bezier curves get a little muddled and elongated, which can be a pain to correct, ctrl+click to remove them, then ctrl+click again to reinstate them on every frame for the curve mask points and it’ll be a fast way of getting a nice clean curve back. Thanks again for that one MZ.


Visit the tutorial page to download the project file

A magic ball effect, i’d been aiming to one of these for some time. Hopefully i’ll be able to get a tonne more done in the future, including some more elaborate effects. At the moment it’s the old text tutorial, but i’ll be video-ising it as soon as i can.


After playing in Adobe After Effects with fractal noise for a while I eventually developed this plasma energy ball effect that I liked. Generally this is a simple effect that focuses around fractal noise plus a few adjustments, a clip of the ball in action can be seen below as well as a screenshot and a tutorial.


Download the clip here 400KB, right-click save as



Click for full-sized picture





Tutorial

Required: Adobe After Effects

Optional: Trapcode’s particular and shine plugins

Open up your copy of Adobe After Effects.

Continue reading →

I made this in-depth tutorial with the intention of creating something without plug-ins in AE and, by-in-large, was successful, although the process is a little extensive, you can get some nice results. For the moment it’s in the ‘old’ format, so it doesn’t quite adhere to the new rhys-works.com design but hopefully i’ll be fixing that some time in the future.


So i hope this helps out some of you guys looking to make the popular matrix effect, if you have any trouble, drop me a line.


The font used can be found here