- Hello and welcome.
My name is Ben Brownlee from Boris FX
and we are gonna be looking at a quick start
to Particle Illusion.
So, in this exercise, we're gonna be looking at
how you create a motion background and a transition element
using Particle Illusion's presets,
tweaking those up and customizing those to our effect
and then taking them out to use them in our edit.
So, let's get started.
Okay, so let's start off in the Particle Illusion interface.
Now, I'm not gonna spend too much time going into this
because we'll be going in depth in this in future tutorials
but suffice to say, we've got the interface split up
into four different sections.
On the left hand side we have our presets and preset viewer,
in the middle here we have our parameters
for when we start doing any work on our particles
and in the top right, we have the stage which is where
all of our particles are gonna be living
and in the bottom right, we have our graph
and we use that supplement the parameter changes
we do in the middle section here.
So, the first part of our project is to create
a simple background.
And before, we do anything else,
I'm gonna come up to project settings to make sure
that my project is set up correctly.
Now, we have a number of different presets
that we can go for.
In this case, I'm going to be working at HD 1080p,
25 frames a second.
So, clicking on that preset does all the other
hard work for me.
I'm gonna take my duration down from 300 to 250 frames
so that's 10 seconds long with a frame rate
of 25 frames per second.
I'm gonna leave motion blur turned off.
We're gonna come back to this later.
I don't have to worry about mipmap settings,
that's for another time.
Now, the most important thing when you're starting out
with Particle Illusion
and in fact, when you're even more comfortable
with Particle Illusion is the presets on the left-hand side.
Particle Illusion has thousands of presets
that we can come into just by clicking down here,
nice and easily.
If you don't see all of these categories,
then it just means you have to go up and download emitters.
So, we go up to the help, go to download emitters,
that'll send us to the Boris FX website
where we can register and download the emitters.
When first looking for inspiration
for what particles to use, I tend not to use this tree view.
if I go up to view, I can go to my browse layout
and this gives me a much better idea of what the options are
for me, with regards to preset.
And I can even come up here and search in the emitters
so I can search for something like fire.
I could search for something like water
or even backgrounds
and this will help just to narrow my search
for what I'm looking for.
And we can preview any of these just by clicking on them
and we see a preview in the top.
I'll just search for dots to see if I can find
my starting point
and I kind of like basic dots new 5a
and we can see what these dots are gonna do
if I just drag them in the viewer up here.
This is the default behavior with this emitter.
So, I'm gonna go back to my default layout
and there's my basic dots, right at the top there.
Now, I'm gonna just add this emitter to our stage.
I can do this in a couple of different ways.
I can double click to bring that into
the center for our stage, just undo that.
Another way if I go up to view preferences
and have click in staged at emitter turned on,
when I have a preset selected in the left,
I can just come in and click
and create those directly onto the stage
and I can add more or less
as I go through.
I don't want any of these so I'm just gonna undo
with Control or Command + Z and I'm also going to turn off
click in stage to add emitter
so that I don't accidentally animators when I don't want to.
Apply on that.
So, let's come to the beginning of my timeline,
double click to add the emitter to the stage.
And now that I'm done with my presets,
I'm gonna change my view again to the edit layout
so this gives me more space to see what's going on
on my stage.
Now, by default, this emitter is a point emitter
so it means that all the particles are being generated
from a point.
I can move that point around just on the stage there.
We can even animate that up as we'll do a little bit later
but I can also change how these particles are created.
If I go over to my properties and open that up,
I can change the shape of that emitter from a point
to a line,
or to an ellipse,
or to an area,
or to a circle.
So, I'm gonna choose an area here
because I want to make this as a background
and I'm gonna make my shape to fill up the screen.
And now you'll see I have a few more particles
than I had previously.
In fact we look at the top right-hand side of the viewer,
you can see that I now am generating about
almost 17,000 particles each frame.
Now, this is too many particles.
So, to reduce number of particles in the emitter,
I can just come down to my number here
and turn this down to something a little bit more suitable.
Let's turn that down just to about six maybe.
I think she's looking pretty good
but I haven't think that these are a little bit too small
and they're different ways of changing up the size
within the emitter.
We have this rather tempting science parameter
and this does change the size of those particles.
So we change that up or down
but this might not be the best option for you.
You can see that even though the particles themselves
are bigger, they're actually not moving any further
away from each other than they were
when they were tiny particles
and that's because that movement is controlled
by the velocity, velocity here.
If on the other hand we wanted to change both apparent size
and velocity, we could use the zoom instead
to zoom everything up.
And this gives us the effect that I'm after.
If I wanted to change the color of these particles,
there are two different places to do this as well.
Pause this for one moment.
In my emitter, I have a tint color.
So, if I come in and turn this to blue,
you'll see that nothing changes straight away
but that's because our tint strength in the emitter
is set to zero.
If I turn that up,
the more I turn up, the more everything tints
towards my tint color.
So we can get some quite interesting looks
by not having everything at 100%,
maybe taking that to 50
and maybe changing that color to green or
to different blue there.
But that just changed the tint on the emitter
so that just tints the particles are already there.
If I want to change the color of the particles
as they're being created, I have to go somewhere else
and if we look down at the bottom of our emitter,
we see we have this other group called dots
and this dots group controls the particles themselves
and some emitters can have multiple particles within them
but my basic dots only has dots inside.
So, if I open this up, we get another properties
which I can open up and it's here where I can control
what my particle looks like.
So, I can change my shape from this nice dot
to something like a ring or even a star.
And we have lots of sprites within our library
and you can see all of the libraries that we have here
correspond to the preset libraries
that we have created or installed.
Oh, spooky faces.
Let's cancel that 'cause I quite like the dots
and we're really focused on the colors.
So if I open up my colors now,
you can see gradient that's being used to create my colors.
If I click on that, we go into the color gradient editor.
So, if I wanted these to be blue instead of the red,
I can just click on my color swatch,
come in to maybe that blue there.
I can also double click on the swatches
and choose a darker blue here.
Maybe take the saturation down on that just a little bit.
I can even change where the stops are
to change the distribution of colors among the particles.
Now, as you can tell, we have a huge amount of parameters
that we can be looking at.
I'm going to ignore most of these
because they're gonna be covered in later tutorials
but one of the things I'm often asked
is how we change the speed of some of these presets.
You see the bubbles themselves or the dots themselves
are changing quite fast.
Now, there are a lot of places where we can do the deep dive
and really sort of fine-tune these
but if we just wanted those to move slower,
with most of the emitters, the easiest way to do that
is just to increase its lifespan.
Because a lot of the animation within these emitters
is actually controlled by the life of the particle,
that's how long the particle stays on screen for.
So, you can see just by expanding the life out,
making these particles live longer,
it takes a longer time for them to move
through their animation between birth and death.
So, with a very short life,
they're bubbling around really quickly
and with a much longer life,
they've got time to sort of sit back and relax,
you know take in the site a little bit more.
Of course, we do that, then we might have to
come into our colors one more time
and just change up how we wait
those colors there.
So, let's take these same principles and quickly create
an animated transition.
And I want go back to my default layout
so I can see my presets one more time.
And I'm gonna use a preset called fast dots
and I really love this preset.
It's got a lot of energy to it,
a lot of vibrance, really like it.
Okay, I'm just can double click to add this onto the stage.
It's come in a little bit through the animations
if we can see where it is and I'm gonna just zoom this up
so we have something that fills the screen
a little bit more.
And I'm going to quickly edit this from the left
to the right.
So, I'm gonna drag my emitter directly over here
and I can start animating this,
either by turning on animation mode
with the key down the bottom
or I can come up to my parameters
and turn the animation on here to either linear or Bezier.
And we come back 25 frames in
and I'm just gonna move my dots over from the left
to the right.
And take that quite a bit off the screen.
And when I'm finished with my animation,
I'm just gonna remember to turn off
the static animation mode.
So, turn off the key framing mode
so that I don't get myself into trouble.
Let's play that through
and I can see that's not quite going off enough for me
so I'm just going to come to frame 25 again
and just drag that off the stage.
Let's play that through.
Okay and we can see that we've you know more or less,
we've gotten rid of all of our dots.
There are a couple of little stragglers here and there
but you know that's fine.
And I can change how I play back my timeline
by clicking and dragging my play out
to the frame that I want to.
In this case, it's frame 67.
So, if I play that through now it's just gonna loop
between those two, no matter how long my project
was set up for.
Cool, so this is this is looking pretty good
as a transition.
There's just a couple of things we need to change up.
At the midpoint, obviously I need all of these to be
a lot bigger so they fill the screen
so I can cover a cut between two clips.
So, if we look in the top right hand of the viewer,
we can see the my midpoint is frame 20
and I come back a few frames,
about five frames I think, frame 15
and I'm gonna manually set a keyframe on the sides.
So, come up, take that linear,
come to frame 20 again
and if I click and drag these up,
maybe to about 625 and then five frames later,
I'm gonna frame 25 and take these back down to 100.
And if we look down the bottom in the graph,
I can see a representation of my keyframes here as well.
So, keyframes are visible on the timeline,
in the graph and you can see and move between them
in the parameter editor.
If I've got my timings wrong, I can select all my keyframes
and I can just move them along
so I can then take this and expand this up
and maybe shorten how long it takes to get back and forth.
I can even change the timings back and forth
so I'm just gonna probably only need that to go
and so I can get that there and then if play that back,
we can see we've got just a couple of frames
where we've got everything completely hidden
and that's going to obviously cover my cut for me.
So I'm happy with this.
If I come up to my preview background
and go composite on checkerboard,
we can see we've got transparency associated with this
so it's gonna be absolutely perfect for doing a transition.
Let's composite that back on black again
and I'm gonna render this out.
So, click on render and this will bring up
our render settings.
Now, we have a full tutorial breaking down
this render window so I'm not gonna spend
too much time on it.
So first, I'm gonna choose where my file
is going to be saved to and what it's going to be called.
I'm gonna call this 01 dots transition
and I'll set up my render type and export range
and I'll just start my render.
And this will give me a nice preview
as we render this through.
And what a pretty little ditty I get when it's rendered.
And I've imported this into premiere
but this works at the same way in any editing app
and I can drag that down on top of my two clips.
And then if I play that back,
we get our nice animated transition.
Now, not every codec that we export out
from Particle Illusion can support an alpha Channel
so it's important to choose your codec correctly
and definitely watch that dedicated rendering out
of Particle Illusion tutorial.
And it's been a quick start into Particle Illusion.
We've navigated and found presets.
I also learned how to customize size, color and speed,
how to animate them up using keyframes
and finally, how we can render them out into a file
that we can use in other applications.
Now, obviously this is just a tip of what we can start to do
in Particle Illusion so join me and John Dickinson
as we take you through an overview
of how to use Particle Illusion,
throughout the rest of this course.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX
and I'll see you again soon.
Download Particle Illusion standalone for free
at borisfx.com, including thousands of free emitter presets.
Continue watching this getting started tutorial series
to learn more about what you can do with Particle Illusion
and find out more about the plug-in version
of Particle Illusion with extra features
including built in Mocha motion tracking at borisfx.com.