Creating Sparks using Trapcode Particular in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jake and I am motion designer. Today, I'm going to show you how you can create sparks using the tripod particular plug-in, these effects which you can see on your screen. They all were made using techniques which I'm going to show you right now. It's not a problem if you are new to After Effects or two particular plugin itself. We'll go through basics. We'll work our way to more complex techniques. I'll be showing you multiple examples of using simple setup to get realistic and visually satisfying results in a couple of minutes. By the end of this class, you'll be able to create sparks from nothing, colorize it, composited into real-life footage, and finalize the deal. Look to the finished video product. I'll be happy to see you in my class as also your result after following all the steps. So let's get started. 2. Generating Particles: And using Adobe After Effects 2020. And it doesn't really matter what version you will use as long as you have red giant plugins, we will use red giant trap code particular, and at the end, a bit of bread GI and VFX glow. But main focus of this class is on using red giant tripod particular. So as you can see, I'm using standard layout, so my interface should be similar to yours. If you cannot see any of the panels which you see on my screen, for example, effects and presets. You can just go to Window and enable it from here, Effects and Presets, effects in presets or any other panel. So let's import our footage. Just let mouse double-click here. This footage is provided to this class and click Import. So to create new composition, we need to grab this BGN video and drop it here on your composition, or on timeline, or here on this icon to create new composition. So as you can see, I already pre-made this part of the effect. So we would have something to work with real life example. And if you are interested in how to make this part of effects, you can search on Skillshare M Jake, to find my page changed here. You can find this tutorial which covers this part of the effect in this class. Also, I pre-made our latest parks, but now we are going to learn how to create sparks from nothing and resource step to this class. You also find this particular source. So let's drop into this composition to see it also. And as you can see, it's basically the path where we want to generate our particles. It could be anything. You can just click on this text tool and type some text. So basically technique which I'm going to show you right now, is applicable to any kind of source only thing which you need to remember that you need to have Alpha Matte. So for example, on text, you can see that we have Alpha Matte. And basically the way we are going to generate our particles is from RGB value. But you may notice that this particle source doesn't have any alpha matte. So let's create one for this. I'm going to select this particular source and press Control D to duplicate it. So on top layer, I want to blow it out this because I'm going to use the luminous as a mad. I'll type here girls and apply on this top layer, just bloated out like this. So I would have only white value. And with this layer below, I can click on this toggle switch to see this track matte and apply luma matte. And if we solo this layer below, you can see and now we have our Alpha Matte, which is crucial for generating particles. So I'm going to disable all the sound. And let's precompose these both layers. So we have one by clicking one of them, press Shift and click other one and go to layer pre-compose. And I'll call it particle source and click. Okay, so as you can see now we have particle source which has a transparent background. So now let's create a new layer, go to layer, new solid. And let's go particular, because this plug-in we will use and click Okay, then an Effects and Presets. We can type particular, this is external plugin which you can download from red giant website. Lead drop it here on particular layer. And if we only solo this particular layer, we will see that it's already generates some particles. I also disable this transparency mode. So you can see this particular plugin basically generates particles. We have a bunch of settings which we can use to determine how these particles will behave. In our case, we want them to behave like a sparks. So first thing which we need to do is to go to emitter. And here we have emitter types, Lake point, box, sphere, grid, and others. In our case, you can guess the two we are going to use layer because we've created our custom source, which is this particular source, and it will use RGB value and ignore Alpha value to create particles. So let's choose this layer. And one thing which you need to remember, if you want to use layer, you need to make it 3D, otherwise you'll get an error. So let's click on this part Source, click here, and here we can change it to a 3D layer. So click on this icon to make it as a 3D layer and go back to particular. So now here, once we've shown this layer, as you can see if point, we don't have any options here. Unless change to layer, we have this layer emitter. So now we can choose this layer which we've created parts source. And if we increase this particles per second, which basically amount of particles, let's set it to 5000. You'll see that it generates particles just from our part source. Let's also set to auto. So this effect wouldn't be so heavy on our computer. And now we can scroll here on timeline and see how they are generated really random. But still we can see that it follows our path. And let me show you if we open this part source and once again, create texts here or any kind of shape. And let's go back to BG composition. You can see that particles now creates from these kind of layers set also, you can notice that it takes the colors of these sources. So if we select our text and change the color and go back to BG, you can see that it takes the colors. In next video, I'm going to show you how you can tweak the settings of colors as well. 3. Layer Emitter Types: So now let's see how we can even take this more. For example, if we select our particle, Let's maybe renamed this composition two main, right? Mouse click here and go to composition settings and rename it to main and click. Okay, so here in layer emitter we have a bunch of settings. You can use lightness as a size. So basically, what is more darker will be a smaller particles and what is brighter will be the bigger particles. And as you can see, this red is a bit darker than white. So this is why these particles are smaller and these are bigger. So this is basically how it works. Lightness, same with the velocity. Lightness velocity means that velocity basically the movement which we said in here, and velocity will be bigger if something is brighter, as you remember, this is brighter, spot will move a lot faster and this is a bit darker spot is remembered this red and this is white, way brighter. So as you can see, these parts moving faster than this. So as you can guess, lightness and rotation, it will rotate more here on the bright spots and less on the darker spots. And to kind of get an guess how everything works accordingly. I just don't want to waste too much time on each of these settings, because our main goal of this class is to generate sparks. So in our case, we want to use RGB particle color, so it will use original colors from here. So let's delete these examples because we don't want to use them. Let's go to main. So now we have this generating of particles. So in next video we will apply some changes to our emitter settings to make it look more like a sparse. 4. Direction and Gravity: So first thing which we need to do is to change direction. As you can see, it's set to a uniform, which means that it goes to every single direction, which is not what we want. In our case, we are going to go for this loop. We want our sparks to go up and down, fold from the gravity and outwards. So let's try to mimic this motion. Basically is the same motion as in my other class, like here. By the way, this class also is available in my profile page. So first of all, we need to change it to directional, which basically means that all the particles will flow in one direction. As you can see, it's not quite flowing in one direction because we have this direction spread sets to 20 and now it kind of lost a bit everywhere. So if we set this direction spread to 0, it will stay at place and you can even feel like it's going further away from us. So to change direction because we want them to flow outwards like this. And to us, we can change it here and X rotation. So let's change x rotation to 170. Basically we flipped this around, but with 170, we set a bit more upper angle. So it goes not only towards the camera, but also a bit up is you can see you. So if we flip it around to 180, it just will flow to us. But our case, we want our response to float a bit up. So let's set it to 170 and let's increase the velocity away up. I'll set mine to 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 550. So now as you can see, we already getting somewhere. So let's open environment and here we can see gravity. Let's increase our gravity. So it will feel like it's obeying laws of physics. I am going to set to 270. And that was again, see, we are getting somewhere. In the next video I am going to show you how to improve this look. 5. Organic Sparks Animation: So first of all, what I want to change is to add some randomized motion to this appearing effect. So here and velocity random, we can change it to 50. It will randomize the flow. So some particles will shoot out more faster and some will be shut out a bit slower. So this can be changed by velocity random. Also, I want to speed up this animation and the best way to do this is to go to global controls and change basics. Time factor. I'm going to multiply it by 3, which will make three times faster. And as you can see, now, it looks much more like a sparse. So let's close it here. Here, and let's maybe enable our footage to see how it looks together. So now we can work on our particle will look. So let's close this emitter tab and open particle. So first thing which I want to change is to decrease the feathering because if you can see the edges of each particle is a big feather and here a sphere of whether we can set it to 0. And now as you can see, each particle is more pronounced and I don't really like this look of perfect circles. I want more randomized kind of shape. The easiest way is to change particle type. I'll select my particle type to cloudless. And you can already see that we have some rigid edges by these particles are way too big, but with different kind of animation, it could look like rose petals. But for now, let's change the size to read a low value like 0.7. So it would look more like a sparks. And to see these particles better, we can go to effects and presets and apply an effect called curves. So let's apply it. Particular, we can increase the brightness just by dragging this up. And also we're going to increase the Alpha channel. It will make it a lot more visible as you can see. So let's close it for now. And now what I want to do is to change life per seconds. They don't really die out, they just fall on the ground. And for more believable look, I think live for a second should be less than 1 second. So let's set to 0.7 soon as you can see, it's die out much faster, but it already creates this kind of shape which we don't like. So let's add some randomness to this. I'm going to set to 77. You can set to 100 if you like. So in this case you can see that we randomize this kind of overall shape. So it wouldn't look like generated by computer with this light random, it gives more organic look. Now as you can see, some particles die out faster and some not so fast. We can also add some randomness to our size. Let's set it also to 100%. So some particles will be bigger and someone would be smaller. And we can also change the size of her life. I like to use presets because here we have some good presets which we can use sparse basically are big chunks of particles which burned out in atmospheres. So we want to start with real life size and over time, it will make it smaller. So this preset looks good. If you cannot see it, you can just move this edge to see it. We have a bigger chunk here. And while it's dine out, is turns to little, little chunks. By the way, if you wonder how you can quickly generate some random colors to your particles, let me disable this background. And here in color random, you can set to 100 and you'll get any kind of colors. And in our case, we want to use originals. And next video, I'm going to show you how to get these fire colors we should we use as original, you'll be able to colorize any foolish. And this kind of color scheme. 6. Colorizing Particles: So to get this color scheme, we can go to parts source and let's apply a tint effect to make it black and white. You can start on any of your polish with this tint effect. And then let's use an effect called color AMA. And here let's click on Output cycle and change to fire. And this is basically how you can easily get all fire kind of look, as you can see, it looks the same, maybe even better here and contrast parts. So let's leave it. Panelists disable it here. Let's also disable this solid layer. And by the way, this part source, we can just disable and put it down. Just don't delete because this plugin uses this composition, but you can just shut off. So now when we have these colors and when we have all animation which we like, maybe you would want to have a bigger size, like to 1. Let's set it to a bigger value. So it would be a more visible in this class, it should be much more visible. And this is basically how you should work. First of all, you need to get the lock and dynamic of your particles. And when you are happy with your result, you can close this particle and open emitter and really crank up this value. I've used 60 thousand particles. As you can see, it's pretty big value, but if you use R0, your computer should be working fine. So now when we have them so many, I can really change this particle size to a smaller value, more like my original value. My original value was 0.7. But for this video I am going to leave as one. So it would be a much more visible. The very last thing which I want to show you, this, you can animate all of these properties, basically these ones for emitter. And you might be asking why you would need that. In our case, we would need that at the end, because as you can see here, they are shooting out real nice and beautiful. But here at the end, they just shouldn't out, just up. And I want them to shoot it out a bit more like into us. So as you remember here in excitation, we can change that. So here let's create a keyframe by clicking here on this stopwatch. And if you press U on the keyboard, you'll see this key-frame. Key-frame, basically the point in time, we should remember the value of certain property. So in this case, this keyframe remembers this value of this excitation property. And later Here, I want to change this rotation to 182. So basically, I am going to rotate our emitter towards the camera. And as you can see, here is shooting a bit up 170 degrees and here is 182, if it's hard for you to understand this direction. So just imagine this is particular source and it shouldn't particles this way to the right like this. And here we are. And basic rotation which we are changing it set to this value. It said outwards from us, like this. So we are here and it shouldn't do this way. So we need to flip to 180 degrees like this. This is why here we have set this value and a bit up. So like this, so this value here, we flipped our emitter to the right, to us and a bit upwards. And here with this animation, we want to return back to us like this. So these particles were shooting upwards and to us. And here at this point it will shoot only at us. And you can see here that these particles shooting up. And at this point in time, it shows all it towards us. I hope it will help you to understand how this excitation works. And in the next video, I'll show you how to create a proxy and make these sparks look better. 7. Examples and Optimized Workflow: So let's create a proxy. It's not really a proxy, but optimized workflow, what we can use, our selection tool then Solow this particular layer. By the way, if you don't want this shooting out animation, you can just set your velocity to 0 and now it's just dropping down. And if you change an environment hero gravity to 0, it will stay at place and you'll get this kind of animation. You can also increase life per second, like 25 seconds or maybe three seconds. And you'll get this kind of shield animation, which I've also used here inside as you can see. And if you look at this course, you'll find out how to create this kind of crystallized look inside your body. Basically it's really simple. Just add some Gaussian blur and set it to a bit higher value like 50, and then place it above curves so it would be more visible and just apply vector effect. And with this vector effect, you can increase amount and get this crystallized low. And if you increase even more, you'll get this kind of watery look. What is cool about this is that you can combine these effects. You can just duplicate this particular layer. And here, delete blur and vector blur and leave the curves. And you'll get this kind of mixed kind of effect. And if you go to toggle switches and set it to Screen, it will blend even better. But for now, we are creating sparks. So let's press Control Z a bunch of times to bring back our sparks animation. And let's create our proxy, which is basically optimizing our workflow. Basically, we want to render out this animation. So it would be not so heavy on our computer. So our computer would not have to calculate all of these settings. And I almost forgot before render, we need to click here on motion blur is you can see it adds up motion blur. Just make sure that you enable it here and here. It adds motion blur, which looks much more better. Then before, as you can see, now it looks like sparks. So you can go to composition and add to Media Encoder or adds to our Render Queue. In my case, I'm going to use Adobe Media Encoder. Let me show you both ways. I'll apply a Media Encoder and also let's add to Render Queue. Here under Render Queue, you can just select any of format which you like. You can leave at Avi and basically said audio too awfully Cauchy and select the location where you want to save it and then click render. But I'm going to use Media Encoder because it allows me to save an MP4 format which is a lot smaller size than AV or QuickTime. So let me quickly render this out. I click Save and then click here to save it. And this is basically how you can render your results to optimize your workflow. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to improve your look. We will add some motion blur as well as use Regia and plug-in glow, which will increase the look to really a nice finished product. See you next video. 8. Finalizing Sparks Render: So now when we render our flourish, we can just let double mouse-like here and import our sparks. Let me name it sparks and click import. And now we can just disable this particular layer. And let's disable the sound because it doesn't have it. So as you can see, it runs really, really fast. And now we can apply some other effects. We can even go to fall and it still runs really fast. So let's apply an effect called CC Force Motion Blur. Just type here in Effects and Presets. Cc force motion blur, right mouse click and drag here on sparse, we can increase the shutter angle to 445 and sample maybe to 50. And if we apply the curves effect once again and increase the brightness, you can see that with these both effects, we've kinda multiplied and added a bit of motion blur, which helps to blend with our footage. Let's enable our footage. Click on Toggle Switches and let's change this sparks to screen. Basically, this transform old makes visible only the brightest parts. We can also use Add, and it will be even more brighter. But in our case, let's use screen. So first thing which we need to do is to time it well. So these parks will appear with our background. And if you have real smart motion blur login, it will work even better. So let's use Smart motion blur and disabled these both effects. You can see this motion blur works much more organic. Let's maybe apply the curves effect here below to see it better and disable this DC motion blur in both ways are valid, but this real smart motion blur, a plug-in, works better if you do have it, you should use it. Also, I like to duplicate this park's layer and disabled this plugin. It gives this random kind of look where we have really crisp sparks, ladies, and also we have this blurred doubt, sparse. I think when they are goes together, it gives this much more crispy are interested in kind of localists see it with our footage. As you can see, it looks really cool. Also, we can use other red giant plugin. It's from the effects kind of department. It called optical glow. Basically it's really nice kind of glow. And by tweaking the amount and size, we can get this really, really cool looking low, I think it's the best law which I found in the long time. And to blend all of these effects together, I like to decrease the amount of low here, maybe to five. So it would be subtle and size a bit lower. So all the particles will blow. But I like to use this little easy trick is to use this part source, which we've used here, is basically this video. As you remember, what we can do is to apply Gaussian blur and drop it on this layer and increased or really big value like 200 maybe let's make it a bit tighter to 150. We can apply a color AMA effect from Effects and Presets just before the blower and set out with cycle to fire a preset, which we used earlier to get these nice colors. And we can copy from sparks are optical glow and drop it here on parked source. We can increase the size to really big value to get this low overall. And with this Gaussian Blur, we can control how tight this blow will be. We can also apply some curves effect and drop it here and maybe create this S-curve to introduce more colors to it. And once again, by playing with this course to get more contrast here, look at this Gaussian Blur. We can get this really cool colors. And with this amount, we can control the brightness and with the size, we can make this blow a bit tighter. But I think these values looks pretty good. And if we press a numpad, we can preview the result. So as you can see, we have this really nice glow which starts in our chest. And then we get into these particles which we just created. Now it really looks like a sparks and we get this really bright and interesting kinda look. So let's press 0 numpad to see what already pre-rendered. And you might be asking why this foolish, not really like this. It's basically because I've used a layer, new adjustment layer, added some curves, dropped blue channel, like this may be added a bit of red and less of green to get more hotter low energy beach towel. I just increased a bit of brightness and geographies here and shadow to get this more punchier and call kind of look. So now as you can see, it's basically the same. And once again, you can just duplicate one of these parks press Control D, and offset a bit if you want even more sparks. And with that technique of insight, you can add more particles inside to get this feel like gear was some matter. So this is basically how you can create these kinds of sparks. In the next video, I'm going to show you few more examples how you can use tropic particular. See you next video. 9. Bonus Exploding Sparks: So let's disable these parks and part source to see better what we are going to do. And let's enable our particular and let's watch this full to R0. So it would render faster and let's disable motion blur. And now as you can see, it renders pretty fast and maybe let's disable BG. So what I wanted to show you that sometimes in cases like bursts of sparks, for example, in this case, you can see that these parks just appearing and disappearing. So this part is basically the same which we used in our case. I use this shield to generate our particles. And as you can see, if we move the shield, these particles will still keep generated from position of our shield. Basically how it works here as well, when this shape moves it already here as well. But let me show you a bit more obvious example. And basically what I'm going to show you, if we have some kind of animation like this, it will be generated from this source. As you can see, I am going to change this direction too, uniform and velocity I'll set to weigh less value. You'll be able to see that is generated from this point here. Timeframe is too fast. Let's change this factor to one. And now as you can see, it's pretty much the same kind of movement, or maybe 22, as you can see, it follows just like here with this shield, this is how you can generate these particles and then just apply motion blur. And let's also see the example. Let me reset it. I'll get a delete this animation. And let's say that I want these particles just to explode like in this moment here. Just look at this shield. Here is you can see it's explodes with a lot of particles and then doesn't generate particles at all. And this is separate particular system. So to make this explosion, you need just to animate this particles per second and velocity. So basically here you can set to 0 and velocity to 0, thus keep you frames. And said two really big value like 60 thousand and velocity to really high value. So we would have some kind of explosion like this velocity at random. Let's set it to 0, and let's change this direction two directional as it was. So it will also explode towards us. We can set here direction spread. And a bit later, we can just set particles per second to 0. And now as you can see, we have this kind of animation where it's generating. And then dy now we can change life to maybe 1.5 seconds. And now if we preview, we get this kind of explosion which is shooting towards us. You can use as a confetti because it looks much more like in confetti with these kind of colors. But as you can see in this context, it really does look like a sparse. Just make sure that your angle is towards camera, and then it would look much more interesting. So if I press U on keyboard and make sure that our velocity is really big and make sure that our angle is more upwards, like to 155, it should be flying really towards us. Maybe let's change to 165. And as you can see, it's really a flying towards us. And with this velocity, you can really make it flow really fast and really to us. And with directions spread, you can control, like if we set to 10, you can control the shape so it will still maintain the shape which you created in your source. Now as you can see, it really looks like it's shooting at us and vacation this velocity, you can set it really high and it will fly really far like this. You can really make five worst with this kind of effect. With only these three properties, you can really make different kinds of loops. And only your scene will dictate what it will look like, for example, now when I'm looking at the time seemed more like a convenient, but we'll behavior of sparks so we could just make it a lot faster. Maybe this RGB curve messes up with the perception. As you can see, if we change the color a bit and if we copy it, glow settings from here, we can really sell the effect of Sparks. Thank you for watching my class. You can go to my Skillshare profile page, which is mgh. You can just type here mg and find my page. And you should totally check it out this school class, It's just only 11 minutes. And as a result, you get really cool fun effect. And also if you click on See More button, you can find this beginner friendly class, which covers how to make this part of the effect, which I think looks really cool and it's a great introduction to the Effects. If you have any questions, just leave them in the comments. I'll answer them as soon as possible. Thank you for watching.