Vine Grow Effect in After Effects Using Particular

Joey Korenman : What's up Joey here at school of motion and welcome today, 25 of 30 days of after effects. Today, we are going to talk about particles and specifically trap code particular, which is one of those plugins that every single after effects artists out there kind of has to know it doesn't come with after effects, but frankly it probably should. At this point, we're going to use particles in a way that you don't often see them used. Most people think of particles as making explosions or magic effects or things like that. I'm going to use them because particles allow you to trigger animation, which opens up a world of possibilities. That would be very hard to achieve. If you had to hand animate everything, don't forget, sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site.
Joey Korenman : Now let's hop into after effects and get started. The point of this video is to try and get you guys to understand some of the cool things you can do with particles. Uh, when, when I say particles, I'm sure a lot of you think about, you know, magic effects and, and things that look like particles, but actually particles are really just a, another technique that you can use in motion graphics, and specifically the way I'm using them here is to generate the leaves automatically for me along these vines. Um, you know, whenever you have a lot of repeating elements, but they need to sort of be born at a certain time and you need an animation to be triggered at a certain time. Particles are one of the best ways to do that. So we're gonna use particles in kind of a unique way. And hopefully it'll just give you guys some more ideas about, uh, you know, things you can do with them.
Joey Korenman : So let's jump in and get started. So I'm gonna make a new pre-camp here and we're going to call this vine oh one. And I apologize, cause I have the sniffles a little bit today. So you might hear me sniffling, so you can, uh, you can create the vine any way you want. You can, you know, you can do it very simply with the shape layer and, you know, make it whatever shape you want and then go in and, and adjust it. I actually used, uh, the 3d stroke pro plugin from trap code because as I pointed out in a different tutorial, it has this nice feature of letting you taper, uh, your strokes and, and for a vine that's really, really cool. So I'm actually gonna use that, but if you don't have that plugin and you're following along, you can do the exact same thing just by drawing a shape like this.
Joey Korenman : So I'm going to make a new solid, and I'm going to call this vine and I'm going to draw a shape on it. So let's make it simple. Uh, maybe the vine starts down here and kind of curls up like this, and I'm just going to kind of adjust this as I go, and I want it to kind of curl around in, on itself and make one of these nice little kind of curly Q shapes. All right. And maybe we'll pull this in a little bit. Okay, cool. So there's our, there's our vine shape. All right. And then maybe, you know, maybe, maybe it should be pushed over a little bit this way. Alright, perfect. So now with that mask on there, with that shape, I can add the trap code, 3d stroke effect. All right. And if you drew a shape layer with the shape, it would look exactly like this, the advantage of 3d stroke.
Joey Korenman : And if you haven't watched a, the tutorial, I think it's part three of the kinetic type series where I use 3d stroke to create this crack, but it's got this taper option in there. And if you enable it, you can see that it lets you taper the beginning and the end of your shape. And so I just want to taper the end. So I'm gonna turn my tape or start to zero. And so now I've got this nice vine. Um, and so let's not worry about picking a color for the vine yet right now, we just want to animate it. So what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna, I'm going to animate the end parameter here. So let's bring it to zero. Let's put a key frame here and let's make that take two seconds and it animates on. And, uh, I am going to easy ease these just so there's a little bit of, you know, a little bit of a speed change to it.