Hey guys, this is Parker from Animoplex.com and I'm here to show you a new freebie
called Kinetic Flame for After Effects CS5 or later.
Now, this was designed to be an easy-to-use rig for animating abstract
flame and fire effects and, as you can see, it resembles some sort of magical
fire wisp that's very energetic.
The only requirements for using this template is: 1) You must work in 32-bit
color mode for the flame to render, and 2) you must have Trapcode Particular 2.0
or later installed on After Effects CS5. I'm going to give you a quick overview
and then let you go experiment to your heart's content.
Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is open up the After Effects template
with After Effects, I have CC14 here.
Now, once it's open, you'll notice there's a single composition and two solids,
so it's pretty simple.
Now, there's a controller layer at the top of the composition.
This is the backbone of the rig and it controls all the settings for how the
flame interacts with your scene. Below that, you have two other important elements.
One is the "Flame Source", which is a light object and it needs to have
the first word "Flame"
You'll notice if you change it to something else the flame disappears.
That's because the controller is looking for a light object with the first word, "Flame"
The other important element is the two Particular layers, and this contains all
the Particular effects for the flame.
You can have more than one light object in the scene, but just know that any
changes made to the original "Light Source" layer in terms of velocity
will affect the second layer. So if this light stops, (this was the original) this one
will stop emitting particles because of it, even if it's still moving.
Now the way to fix this is to set all four of these "Speed Affects..." properties to 0.
Basically, this changes these lights to constant emission and now they can be
moved independently with different velocities and it doesn't matter.
On the "Controller" layer, the first slider here "Speed Display" is to display the current
velocity of your light object. You can keyframe the light object position directly
or parent it to another layer like I've done here.
Other settings on the Controller layer reference this value and it's not
meant to be keyframed, hence the title, "Display"
Now the four "Speed Affects..." properties here allow you to choose if you want the
number of particles emitted to be based on the light object's velocity,
or constant emission, or a mixture in between. So here, I've set all of them to
50% and it's blending halfway between velocity-driven and constant emission.
You can play with these and see what effect you like. Now, "Particle Density" is
just the number of particles emitted per second, so by default it's 150. I'm going
to change it to 300, and you'll see twice as many particles here.
"Flame Size" also dictates the size of each of these particles.
Now you'll notice they just got much larger, you can also change the "Ember Size"
and the "Dust Size" as well. But that's kinda crazy, so I'm going to undo that.
The four "Color" settings here are pretty self-explanatory, so you can choose
any color you'd like here.
Now, keep in mind, on top of these "Color" selections,
it's going to randomize them by another 30% to make the particles seem
a little bit more alive.
You get a little bit more variance in there. Now the "Brightness" setting is
meant to just boost the brightness value.
This is going to be really useful on lighter backgrounds. And finally, the four
"Turbulence" effects here control how turbulent the flames, smoke and embers
appear after emission.
You can increase or decrease this rig size simply by changing the solid layer
size from 1920 x 1080 to any size you'd like. The rig will scale and contract to
any size although you may need to manually scale the "Size" settings and
probably the "Particle Density" accordingly to avoid extremely small or large flame sizes.
Now, one last note, if the "Controller" layer is removed or renamed, in this case
I'm just going to delete it out of the composition, each property will revert to
a default setting until the layer is restored. This is to avoid expression errors
in your composition and can easily be fixed with an undo.
Inspiration for this flame effect comes from a project called
"Particular Nebula" by Mattrunks (www.mattrunks.com)
and it's a really interesting effect. I've spent a lot of time working with it
and creating this template.
I've attempted to streamline the process based on my own uses and make it a
really fast render as well. I hope this template is exactly what you're looking
for and it inspires you to build something beautiful and unique.
If you've created something with it or have any questions at all please leave
me a comment or email me: support@animoplex.com
and I'd love to take a look.
If you're interested in a pre-built logo animation using this effect,
I've got a template available for purchase and you can find the links below.
It has pre-rendered effects, no need for plugins, but an optional project file
with plugins is available if you want to customize it.
As always, thanks for watching!