In your video productions, if you wanted to create something as diversely apart as a rainstorm or forest fire, to a bubbles from a snorkeler to a dust cloud, or even a large pod of dolphins, you could use a single tool, a particle generator.
And one of the best in my opinion is from Red Giant who are also the developers of Cinema 4D, which as regular readers will know is my 3D program of choice and has been for 20 years plus.
Originally developed by a Swedish genius, Peder Norrby, Trapcode Particular is a collection of plugins for Adobe After Effects– and in some cases other hosts too. In case you are not familiar, a plugin is like a mini program that adds itself to a host program’s feature set, but offers either enhancements to the existing program’s abilities, or introduces brand new ones.
Adobe After Effects and other hosts such as DaVinci Resolve are of course fully featured in their own right, but there are many cases where developers have discovered a niche area to create a plugin and extend that functionality, Other examples include Mir, PluralEyes, Cosmo and Colorista, and these are all components of the Red Giant Suite.
Possibilities
The possibilities of Trapcode Particular – without even touching on the other tools in the suite – are extensive to say the least. In effect, you are working in 3D space with full access to multiple lights and cameras, and aiding you in the control of the particles, no matter form they may take, you have complete control of aspects such as gravity, air resistance, turbulence and bounce.
So, you can see why the reference to smoke and water and water effects phenomena is used as these are also affected by these forces in the real world.
But of course, with a little imagination and simply “playing around” with the tools at your disposal, Trapcode Particular also fits nicely into a workflow that creates such things as logo reveals, titles and moving backgrounds. If anyone saw the live speech from Kuala Lumpur this morning of the Australian Prime Minister talking about trade, for example, his backdrop was a moving image I suspect was possibly created with Trapcode Particular, and consisted of a series constantly moving and evolving coloured concentric waves.
These would have used the facilities of volumetric light rays and perhaps 3D extruded shapes and fractals for their creation.
If you are not blessed with a vivid imagination on where to start with a project, Trapcode Particular comes with an extensive set of presets to get you going too, and these can be manipulated and tweaked to get the results you want.
Trial Version
You can get a trial version of the Red Giant suite which includes Trapcode Particular along with 15 other plugins at https://www.maxon.net/en/try, and it is available for both Mac and PC.
To assist in the learning curve, Maxon has a whole bunch of tutorials on its site too at Cineversity, a specialist website designed specifically for Maxon and Red Giant application and plugins.
This video will also give you am insight into Trapcode Particular.