Smoke Text
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This combination of filters and keyframes produces text (or an image) that comes from smoke. Imagine ghostly text or text coming from a cigar or use green text and it can be noxious fumes. There's no health warning here either!
Besides being a versatile effect, it does not require any third-party filters. Although there are many excellent third-party filters that will do the job, I know not everyone can afford them.
What you'll need:
- AE 4.1 or Higher Production Bundle
- Download smoke.zip
Alright. Ready to smoke?
- Create a pict file with an alpha channel or ai file and bring it into AE. Alternately, you can use the text tool in AE to create your text on a solid. I created a pict with an alpha and I made the text white for that ghostly feel.
- Create a new comp (mine is only 3 seconds) and drag your text into the comp.
- Apply the scatter filter (under stylize). I set the scatter amount to the highest (127) and set a keyframe about a second in. I keyframed 1:12 with the scatter amount set at 0. Ease into this keyframe.
- Apply fast blur. Other blurs will work but fast blur renders the fastest (hence the name). I set the first keyframe to 50, and keyframed 2:00 to 0. Again, ease in to this frame.
- Next apply wave warp. I set the wave height as follows: frame 0 to -50, frame 27 to 40, 52 to -30 and frame 66 to 0.
- I also added some vertical scale to stretch the smoke. I scaled frame 26 to 100x150 and frame 52 to regular size (100x100).
- I also set the opacity to frame 0=0%, and frame 5=100% for a quick fade up.
- Experiment with the settings and if you come up with anything better or interesting, please e-mail me with it and I'll add more suggestions to the page.
Make your effect more organic:
Jason Brown, DFX (2d) Animator Sector14 Productions sent us the following tip: I found also that if you set up a separate composition that employs the Fractal Noise Filter on a solid, and then use that as a displacement map on the smoky parts of the tutorial, you can achieve a very nice swirly effect, bringing a little more realism to the smoke.
Need some help with displacement maps? Look here.