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.
Hi,
I would like to see it but your like provides a blank page…. Please review the tech issue and reply once document is visible.
Thanks,
-D
Hi Darel,
The link is working fine for me, do you have the latest version of Flash installed and enabled? This could be an issue. Let me know if this helps.
Flash ball is great
Hi,
Nice AE tutorial. I was wondering if you could shoot me an email coz I would like to feature your top quality tutorials on my website Luv2Help.com. We are a trusted partner of Pixel2Life.com. Let me know if you would be interested.
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hi
can u provide it in html?
many people still dont have flash9
thn
Hi,
Regardless it’d still require Flash to view the video i’m afraid.
Flash is becoming more and more of a necessity for your average web page today, as such i feel the advantages of using Flash outweigh its disadvantages. For something so video-orientated as a visual effects website i pretty much have to take advantage of the uses of Flash.
In what version of after effects was this made? cs3?
because i can’t find the effect you are using.
Hi,
As mentioned, the plugin is Trapcode’s Particular. Check out trapcode.com. It’s widely considered the best and most used particle generator for AE by some distance and is part of my Particular season at rhys-works.com.
I really kinda hate those tutorials when the author/teacher teaches too fast, clicking here and there.
Very very bad teacher.
But good lessons, keep it up!
First of all, good tutorial. I’ve been looking for this effect forever. Unfortunately, I’ve got a big project coming up in which I planned to use the effect, but I’m an idiot. I have footage that I would like to match the effect to (spinning knives) but with the preset made in the tutorial, it causes a black streak on the bottom of the “trail” when I add the footage. Is there a quick and easy way to fade it from blue to a transperancy rather than from the original blue to black method. That’d be great……but I’m an idiot. In Trapcode Particular, I don’t notice a way to animate it. All the controls I would normally animate with are disabled on this customized particle. How would I keyframe its motions? I’ve tried just animating the transform controls of the entire layer and it looks awful.
If you could respond with some answers I’d really appreciate it. I’m kind of on a deadline with the project and I really wanted to have this effect featured.
thanks
Hi,
Off the top of my head (and i just did a little test to make sure it works) then i’d probably make use of the alpha of the trail to create transparency. Unfortunately, the full process isn’t a straight ‘fix’, so there’s a little bit of a process involved.
The problem you’re getting with the black trail is as you say, the colour of the custom particle. Because Particular demands that the custom particle be pre-comped we can’t just fade it off into transparency; transparency itself is usually handled by black anyway in AE, so screening the results does the maths on black parts of the particle and -can- yield acceptable results in removing the black parts, but in our case, it doesn’t look all that great in the footage i tested on.
So, what i tried was to:
:1) pre-comp the trail into a new ‘alpha’ comp
:2) apply a channel shift to the layer
:3) shift all channels to alpha; your trail should now be shades of white and gray
:4) duplicate the layer, and move it downwards to an area where you want the trail to start fading out
:5) apply a levels and blow this new layer out to black
:6) apply a blur (fast will do) to get a fade-off, i duplicated this layer to enhance the fade
:7) create a new comp from the original trail comp, drop the alpha into this comp
:8) select both layers and pre-comp them
:9) in the pre-comp set the alpha comp to ‘stencil-alpha’ over the trail comp – this should now fade the trail comp properly based on how you did your alpha comp
:10) finally, you can take the pre-comp layer (of those two comps) and drop the footage underneath, this should yield the results you’re after.
Good luck,
R.