School of Fish, Part 3
The last step is making the bubbles. There are several great ways to make bubbles in After Effects, including the Foam plug-in, but since you downloaded the demo for Particular (or maybe you already own it), let's put it to use.
- Create a new solid called Bubbles. Place it below the adjustment layer. Just to make sure you have everything in the right order, here is a snapshot of the layer order for your reference.
- Apply Particular to the Bubbles layer. Here is the emitter settings.
- Notice the keyframes set for Particles/sec. Randomly throughout the timeline I set a keyframe with a value in the low to mid-100's. A few frames later, I set a hold keyframe with a value of 0. The purpose of the hold keyframe is to hold the value of the first keyframe steady until the next keyframe, when the values change immediately. This creates the effect of short bursts of bubbles.
First, set your keyframes. I set an Easy Ease In to the 0 keyframes. (Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease In). To set a hold keyframe, select the 0 keyframes. Go to Animation > Toggle Hold Keyframe. You can do them all at once if you shift-click each keyframe to select multiple keyframes, then apply Easy Ease In, then Toggle Hold Keyframes. - Here are the settings for the Particle and Physics.
That's it. Nemo.... Eat your heart out.