Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Particle assignment


Assignment 8



Return of the evil penguin!

I started this project off in photoshop.  The background is just an image that I pulled from google.  I drew the evil penguin with his lighter and I traced the TNT boxes from a cartoon image.  I also have a blue background layer that is made from a I  turned on its side in after effects in order to make a floor.  I imported all of these layers in to After Effects separately and made them in to 3D layers then spaced them accordingly.

I used text layers (just a bunch of underscores with a blur on them) to make the gun powder that the spark runs on and animators to make it disappear as the spark moves over it.  The spark is made of two separate particle system II effects on top of each other.  I made slight changes in the colors of them.  They are both line particles that fractal explosive with negative gravity to make them flow narrow and upwards.  The spark in the lighter is the same effect only the physic animation is jet sideways.

The smoke coming from the box is a particle system II effect.  The physic animation is set to cone axis and the particle types are faded spheres.  I had a hard time trying to get the smoke to slow down but who knows maybe there is just an item in the box with the TNT that becomes very smokey when on fire.  

The TNT box has an amazing Shatter effect on it (Thanks Ben!) making the explosion look really cool.  I had a bunch of effects added in to make the fire part of the explosion look the way it does.  The first one is a particle system II effect plus a Mr. Mercury effect mixed together to get that bubble of fire cloud shape in the middle.  The P.S. is set to a twirl animation with line particles and Mr. Mercury's animation is set to fire.   The orange dust cloud around the first effect is also made from Particle system II and Mr. Mercury but also has a Gaussian Blur added to it.  The P. S. has an fractal explosive physic animation and is made up of cube particles.  The Mr. Mercury is also set to a fractal explosive animation.  

Added on to this intial explosion are embers and two fire balls.  The embers are made from P. S. II with a Guassian Blur attached.  The P.S. II is adjusted to have a fire animation in a line particle format.  Then I brought down the birth rate to .1 and adjusted the radius so they would be spread out.   The two fireballs are made up of four layers, actually eight layers if you count the shape layers I used to mask their arrival position on the screen.  There are two layers on each fireball - one gray & black and the other orange & yellow.  I made the grey & black have less of a birth rate and less opacity in order to see through it to the orange particles in order to give it a smokey fire look.  The orange layers have a fast blur set on them.  Besides those differences the four layers are all set to P. S. II with a fire animation on a cube particle.  They all have Gaussian blurs applied to them as well.  Then I set them in place and had them move positions in order to make them fly.  

I also added in a camera and just panned across the screen to follow the spark.  Then I zoomed in to the picture on the z-axis in order to get closer to the action of the exploding TNT box.  

That pretty much sums up how I made this mass chaos due to evil penguin. 

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Text Assignment


Text Assignment from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

I used the first part of the Pledge of Allegiance for my text assignment. The word 'Pledge' has an animator on it to make it scale up as we fly by it.  I used an animator for rotation on 'allegiance' to make it pop up.  Then I used a stencil to put the American flag behind the word 'flag' and added a ripple effect to the word to make it wavy.  I used a shape mask to make 'the United states of America' ride on the twisty path.   I had the camera weave in and out of the words.  After we went by the words I had their opacity lowered so they would disappear. 

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Assignment 6

Evil Penguin!


Untitled from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

I don't know why I'm in an evil penguin mode but its working for me.  I love penguins, really I do.  I drew everything on photoshop, each on a separate layer.  (I traced the evil penguin from my favorite book: Evil Penguins: When Cute Penguins go Bad)  I brought the separated layers in to After Effects and made them in to 3D layers.  After that I arranged where I wanted everything and created a camera and key framed its motion.  I added animation to the snowball that the evil penguin is holding.  I'm not sure why the snowball is see through and then turning solid.  It shows up normal, as a solid, in After Effects.  Other than that this project was really fun I really enjoying using cameras and 3D in After Effects.