In this episode, I’ll show you how to add smoke to a scene.
I'm Mark Spencer from RippleTraining.com, welcome to Motion Magic where you'll learn
visual effects and motion graphics in under 5 minutes.
Here I am in Motion, where I have imported a photograph of a cabin on a winter morning.
I want to bring it to life with some smoke drifting from the chimney, and perhaps a subtle
camera move.
In the Library, I’ll select Particle Emitters, then the Smoke folder.
Many of these presets could serve as good starting points. I’m going to select Black
Smoke, then click Apply to add it to the top of the group in the Layers list.
Now I’ll select the emitter, and play some of the project.
We get a big plume of dark smoke. Not quite what I’m going for. I’ll stop the playhead
in the middle of the project.
First, I’ll drag the emitter over the chimney. Then I’ll zoom in close by holding down
Command-Spacebar and dragging right.
If this doesn’t work for you, you’ll need to first disable the default Spotlight shortcut
in Preferences, and I'll position the start of the smoke over the top of
the chimney.
Then, I’ll select the Bezier mask tool and draw a mask to hide the bottom bit of smoke.
In the Heads Up Display, I’ll invert the mask, press Shift-Z to fit the entire image
back to the Canvas, and click below all the layers to deselect the mask.
Now let’s make this smoke look a little more inviting. I’ll reselect the Emitter
and head over to the Emitter Inspector.
In the Cell Controls, I’ll enable the Additive Blend checkbox, which adds the pixel color
values of overlapping cells together, making them brighter.
That’s much too bright however, so I’ll open the gradient editor and I'll right-click
the white opacity tag, and make it a mid-gray color, which brings down the opacity of all
the cells.
I’ll also change the color of the cells when they are born, making them brighter.
And then, I’ll make them smaller by changing the Scale to about 23%.
Let's play that back.
The smoke is moving a little too fast for my taste, so I’ll change the Speed to about 200.
In the Layers list, if I click the disclosure triangle for the cell of the emitter, we can
see there are three behaviors animating the cells. I’ll select the Cell and go to the
Behaviors Inspector so I can adjust them.
The first, Scale Over Life, make the cells change size over time. I’ll change the Scale
at Birth to 100% to start them out smaller, and the Scale at Death to 700% so they don’t
get quite so big.
The next behavior, Random Motion, makes the cells move in different directions from the
ones assigned in the Emitter inspector. If I play now, I find the particles move too
much to my liking, so I’ll reduce the Amount to 100. I’ll leave the rest of these parameters
alone, but notice if I move the Drag amount to 0, how the particles shoot up unnaturally fast.
I’ll undo that change.
The Gravity behavior is normally used to make an object fall, but notice here that we have
a negative value, which makes the smoke “fall” upwards - pretty tricky! Notice that if I
set it to 0, how the particles barely move; they are now being overwhelmed by the Drag
amount in the Random Motion behavior.
I'll undo that.
So these behaviors interact with each other, and you
can play with the parameters while the smoke is animating to find just the right look.
If I play now
the smoke looks good, but there is no smoke on the first frame. To fix that,
I can select the Emitter, then in the mini-Timeline, move the playhead back home, and drag the
Emitter bar back until I have a full column of smoke. Then I’ll move the playhead to
the end of the project and press O to extend the emitter to the playhead.
This may take a moment because Motion needs to calculate the position of every particle
over the entire project.
As final touch, I’ll add a camera to the scene by clicking the Camera button in the
Toolbar. I'll click Switch to 3D, then I’ll use the Behaviors shortcut menu to add the
Dolly behavior to the camera.
With the playhead at the end of the project, I’ll increase the distance amount in the
Heads-Up-Display to get the ending framing that I want.
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