School of Fish:Using Trapcode Particular, Caustics to make a realistic seascape
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*Note: You can use the standard version of After Effects if you have Cycore FX. Download a Free Demo of Cycore FX. Cycore Effects is included on the After Effects Pro installer disk.
Trapcode Particular is one amazing plug-in. After toying with it for a few hours I settled on making a school of fish in the ocean as a tutorial. What's amazing is that I can animate one fish and Particular can generate multiple fish that are offset in size and movement.
The only footage item that this project includes is "fish.tif" which contains an alpha channel.
- Create a new project. Create two folders in your project - Comps and Footage. A folder called Solids will be made for you automatically in future steps.
- Import fish.tif into your project. When the alpha pop-up comes up, click the guess button. It should choose Premultiplied - Matted with Color. A medium teal should be selected in the color box.
Drag fish.tif down to the bottom of your project window to the third icon "Create a new composition".
- The new composition will open. You can change the background color if you wish. Composition > Background Color, or command-shift-b (Mac)/ctrl-shift-b (Win). I chose white.
- Scale the fish to 72%.
- We need to make the fish composition slightly larger because we'll be making the fish move. Go to Composition > Composition Settings or cmd-k (Mac) or ctrl-k(Win). Set the height to 100 pixels and the width to 120 pixels. While you're there, make sure that the duration is 10 seconds. Close Composition Settings.
- If you had to change the duration of the fish comp, drag the layer so that it fills the timeline.
- Now it's time to animate the fish. We're going to use CC Page Turn to simulate the tail moving. Effect > Distort > CC Page Turn. It will really only move toward us, but you will not be able to tell when it's fully rendered.
Copy the data into your comp just as I did. - Notice the expression on the fold radius. To apply an expression, you can select the parameter and go to Animation > Add Expression. Alternately, you can hold option-click the stopwatch next to the parameter that you want to add the expression to. The expression is 60*Math.sin(5*time)+99. I am not the best expression writer. I am much better at modifying other people's expressions, so if it looks strange, I apologize.
Apply Wave Warp to the fish layer. Effects > Distort > Wave Warp. The settings I used are on the right. Preview your fish. - Turn on Motion Blur for both the comp and the fish layer.
- Close the fish comp.