Five*5

Worked through the Particle Shadows tutorial over at VideoCopilot. I figured that it could provide one approach to creating the shadows for the  INNER's in an efficient way. I'm right, but it will take tweaking. It was a reasonably quick tutorial to get the basics of the technique down-pat but it took a fair while to play with the details so that I could achieve the right volume to the shadows.

This was the raw result of the base tutorial. The objects cast the shadows correctly and according to plan, but there were issues with some of the shadows being to close to the ground in the sense that they were far to dark in comparison to what they should (in reality) be. I played with the settings further and improved on the issue but it was by no way resolved. I kept going and it frustratingly refused to improve to any degree that I would deem acceptable. Then I had a thought, which was something that I should have thought of at the beginning;

Yep. The objects had collided/passed through the floor plane which had created said abomination. So very frustrating that I had not thought to check earlier - I would have saved myself some serious time. But we learn from these mistakes. When creating the emitter I had tested and checked it thoroughly but forgot to recheck when continuing with the tutorial, when I made changes to the emitter. So I tweaked the settings on the emitter and moved the emitter higher and you can see comparison to a couple of attempts and the final attempt in the following video. The shadows aren't dark enough in my opinion, but I think that has more to do with the render than anything..

Five*2

Audio-driven Particles from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

Testing out AE Particular as well as experimenting with audio driven animation.

I've been itching to get into Particular for ages now and so I've been playing around with it's various looks and functions. There was one video that I stumbled across which particularly (pun intended!) inspired me to have a closer look at the more complicated applications of the plugin;

let yourself feel. from Esteban Diácono on Vimeo.

Isn't it beautiful? And at the same time soooo ridiculous?? That's what I thought. As you can see my attempt is not nearly as grand. The basis of the technique is not all that difficult, but understanding how the movement is driven and applying the various effects to create a look better than brightly coloured sand takes a fair bit of time, effort and research! A fantastic resources to get you started that I would highly recommend would be the tutorial at RGTV that I used. I am yet to attempt it with my own music, but that's coming! As is attempting it with sound fx.

But as far as a look that I like from a first attempt I like to think that it was pretty decent. The example was actually far longer, but the epic rendering times (even on my shiny quad core imac!) were extravagant - so I've restricted it to 8 seconds. I've thought about applications for this within my MAP work. My current thought so far is that it could be incorporated into the 'monster train' - the idea of having 'smoke' coming from it's nostrils, or even 'sparks' coming from the tracks that pulse with the sound of the train tracks clacking along would be great! You know the chooga-chooga-chooga part of the movement of the train? That part.

In my head it looks good anyway.