Particle system to dust off the cobwebs after a long vacation.
Tag Archive: Particular
Sometimes you start doing a sketch or an animation test, and you don’t know where it’s going but you start seeing how it could make sense for a particular brand, idea, project, or in this case, a band. I was playing around with Trapcode Particular and the Auxiliary System settings and came out with these eel-looking shapes. All of the blueish eel-things are made with Trapcode Particular, while the actual title that spells the band name is modeled/animated in Cinema4D Using the Spline Wrap Deformer and shaded using a lot of Subsurface Scattering.
The end result was a mix of creepy, psychedelic, and a little on the birth/womb nature. I was happy with where this was going, and wanted to develop it a bit further – so I thought to make this work around the band The Flaming Lips.
The Flaming Lips are an amazing band to see live – when I saw them at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Monticello, NY a few years ago, they entered the stage through an LED screen/curtain that was projecting a woman with her legs spread. Naturally, they emerged from behind said screen from what appeared to be her whispering eye.
For context: Here’s a picture of basically the same thing I saw, but at another show. Photo by Kevin Harber.
In that sense maybe that’s why anything womb-like I instantly relate to The Flaming Lips, and why I thought this odd animation/stlye would fit right with them.
As I near the end of my tenure at ID8 Creative and Favorite Color, I’ve had less and less time to update with personal projects. But between renders and client reviews, and not wanting to do anything processing-heavy, I’ve been playing with Particular again.
Paths were generated using the the Formula Spline Object, lights aligned to said splines, and camera moves generated using CS Tools EasyCam and DocuCam. Then all that fun stuff was imported into After Effects and made the lights particle emitters. Add some carefully placed Depth of Field, and you’ve got yourself a minimalist piece worthy of Max Richter, who coincidentally composed the song Fragment, used in this video.
