Spy vs. Guy

Red Giant is a plugin and software company that creates software for filmmakers and visual effects artists (Among other things, they are the company behind Trapcode Particular and the Trapcode Suite). For the past few years, they have been creating short films to demonstrate their products.  This is their most recent, demonstrating among other things, their new product Bulletproof.  The short is very well done, funny, and displays some very good visual effects.  Even better, they have included a behind the scenes showing how they achieved their results, as well as the programs they used.


I really enjoyed the short, and it was a great bonus to see behind the scenes as well.

Circular Motion in After Effects

image source

For my name project, I needed a way to constrain a point to the perimeter of a circle, so I searched for a good way to do it with expressions.  I found a couple of neat expressions that were very useful on Motion Graphics Exchange.  Here's what they posted:

The expression can be applied to anything in After Effects with a 'position' property to create a variety of effects. Here it's used with a light and Trapcode Particular.

For Circular:
radius=300 angle=time*200 x=radius*Math.cos(degreesToRadians(angle))
y=radius*Math.sin(degreesToRadians(angle)) z=0 centre=[640,360,0] add(centre,[x,y,z]) 

For Spiral:
shrink=time+1 radius=1000/shrink angle=time*200 x=radius*Math.cos(degreesToRadians(angle)) y=radius*Math.sin(degreesToRadians(angle))//z=0 // no depth z=time*time // with depth centre=[640,360,0]add(centre,[x,y,z])

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These are very useful expressions that are really easy to use, because they are set up with variables that you can change to fit your specific circumstance.  Here's an example where they used the spiral expression, and by animating both the "z" position and the radius, they were able to get a neat animation of a christmas tree.

Fun with Particles

So last class I was really intrigued by the particle playground effect we used for the smoke. I started looking around and there are a number of different particle generators in after effects. I guess we'll just have to play with them all to see what is best. Anyway, there are a ton of different functions a particle generator could have. Immediately I thought about snow or precipitation or things like that. I began to look for some tutorials and I found a very cool and pretty easy to do one on video copilot. It is using a particle generating effect called trapcode particular to make cold breath. He alters a lot of the effect setting in order to make the breath realistic and it looks really cool. He also did a quick color correction to make the scene look like it was really cold, turning up the blues and what not. I thought it was pretty cool and definitely practical if you needed to shoot a cold weather scene and we happened to be having unseasonably warm weather.