From the course: Trapcode Form: Making UI Elements

Trapcode Form vs. Trapcode Particular - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Trapcode Form: Making UI Elements

Start my 1-month free trial

Trapcode Form vs. Trapcode Particular

- [Narrator] In this tutorial we're going to look a little bit more at Trapcode Form as a whole. Now, Trapcode Form is a particle system but it's a little bit weird and unusual, and let me explain that a little bit. Now, one of the things that we hear a lot about in the motion graphics and visual effects world is Form's older brother, Trapcode Particular, which is a basic particle system that spits out particles. Now the magic of a particle system is that it creates a lot of something. And so I don't have to animate all of these little circles coming out, I animate the system. I control the system and then the system controls all those different particles. So I can go in here and change like the size of the particles, I could take this down to like one and then all of them reduce in size. So particle systems are immensely helpful. And most particle systems work in the exact same way. So, let's say CC particle systems too, same thing. There's particles, they spit out, and most particle systems with particular particle systems, CC particle systems too or whatever, work in a similar way in that particles are born, as the language typically use, they are born, they come on screen, they emitted from an area or a point. They are emitted as they are born and then over time they will die out. So if you see these particles kind of going eventually they just disappear. So we think of them as having like a life span. So they are born, they live, and then they die. That is very common for particle systems. We say that here with particular, we say that here with CC particle systems too, a side core effect that comes with after effects, kind of shoots out and they fade out, these sparks. Even foam in after effects does the same thing, it shoots out little bubbles, they jiggle, and they're born, have a life span, and then die. And even really advanced programs like in Maya or Houdini even, it's the same type thing with particles. They are born, they have a life, and die. But Form is a really unusual particle system because it creates all these particles but they don't have the cycle where they are born and then die, they just exist. And that allows us to do all kinds of really weird things. So we can open up like the spherical field for example and we have this spherical distortion field. So we could increase this, let me increase the radius here, and so we could distort these particles in a really unusual way that we can't with other particle systems. And we'll talk a little bit about animating this automatically with the fractal field, but I can displace these and do all kinds of really interesting things and now they're automatically animated and I press play, and they just move. So the particles here, they're being distorted but they're not born and then live and then die, they just never die. And that allows you to do some really interesting things and that makes them great for the kind of user interface elements that we're going to be making throughout this course whereas something like Trapcode Particular would be horrible at because those particles would die. You know, unless we changed the settings or whatever, but by default the Form particles live forever and so they have a lot of really interesting and unusual options like being able to control these particles with audio files and a bunch of other weird things that you typically don't see in particle systems. So Form is a unique beast and it's really worth digging into.

Contents