Yeah! Week 2! I’ve got some fun stuff for you this week that hopefully you get something from.

It’s been a great and productive week. I’m still wrapping up some UI/UX stuff for a video game that’s releasing next year as well as a few Christmas projects. A team and me spent all day Wednesday and Thursday shooting a ton of character stuff on a green screen that we’ll be turning into a Christmas opener for 12Stone Church here in Atlanta.

I also got to spend some time on Friday learning something new which is what this week’s “think about it” is all about. I’m not sure if anyone here is into ZBrush by Maxon, but it’s been something in the background that I’ve wanted to dip my toes into, but I’ve been too busy and too scared to try. It’s one of the clunkiest UI’s I’ve ever seen. And if you’re not someone who’s been in the application a while, it’s an absolute terror to behold. Hahaha. But I dug in, and I love it!

Grab yourself a coffee or a beer and let’s dig in!

Think about it:

Do you have time set aside each week to learn something new or to refine and build up a skill you already have? If not, you should.

It’s when I’m learning new tools, or diving deeper into something I’ve already got knowledge in that I find myself reinvigorated for creating.

As creatives our livelihood is all about one thing, output. Empty the creative take. Make something. Do this task, do that task. Create, create, create. At a certain point you feel drained and empty. You’re burnt out. And if you’re anything like I am when I get close to burnout I start making very similar things. This project will look like that project which is a play on the project I did before that one. A big reason for that is because I’m constantly draining my creative tank without giving myself any time to refill it with new ideas, concepts, tools, and inspiration.

Simply looking at inspiring work on social could be enough for some creatives to get all they need and fill their tank. For me, it’s an inspiring thing to see rad work but without engaging with what it inspires me to do I’m not really filling my tank up. I’m just an observer.

What I really need to do is see something that stands out and let my inspiration motivate me to action. It’s why I love seeing truly creative commercial work. It inadvertently forces me to ask the question, “how did they do that”? Then that question usually drives me to YouTube to search for tutorials that are related to what I think was a process an agency used to create a given effect.

That’s how I got into motion design and VFX in the first place. I was in college and I remember seeing the Apple iPod Nano commercial by Royale. It was the one where the performers were dancing with the different colored nanos and from those devices and the performers movement we got these beautiful sweeping light strokes. I remember thinking it was one of the most eye-catching and beautiful commercials I’d seen, and it demanded that I figure out what this is and how the team was pulling it off.

At that time, the commercial had gotten so big that a lot of creatives that were putting tutorial content out there had already jumped onto YouTube and started answering the question in the way they felt like they’d do it if it were their task to do. I remember watching something like 6 different tutorials that addressed the question.

With what I knew how to do at the time and the influence of all the tutorials I watched I was able to hop into After Effects and create a pretty close replica of what Royale had done. And it fueled me! Made me want to learn more. Made me want to watch other commercials that had inspired me and tear them apart and see how they worked.

It felt good to be able to say to myself, “Yeah. I know how they did that.” And maybe I didn’t know exactly how they did it, but I knew how I’d do it. And it felt good. Then that good feeling pushed me and refilled my tank. Because I took the time to stop working, stop outputting, and give myself some time to learn and dream. I still do that to this day.

I’ll usually set aside my entire Friday after lunch to see what new tutorials people are putting out and learning new techniques from them. Or starting/finishing an online course in some creative discipline or application. It fills me up and shows me what is possible with what I already know and what there is out there that I can learn.

In fact, before writing this I just got done watching a few hours of ZBrush tutorials. Maxon (Cinema 4d / Red Giant) recently purchased ZBrush and made it a part of the Maxon ONE subscription platform. To this point the install has just been sitting in my Maxon app uninstalled. Maxon has this great training channel on YouTube and I happened to click one that I thought was a C4D tutorial but it ended up being a ZBrush tutorial. That inspired me to finally download it and dig in. I’m far from a ZBrush beginner, but I know that what little I learned today I’m motivated to learn tomorrow. At some point I’ll be able to take all I’ve learned and apply it to my work and offer more to my clients then I ever have before.

So go learn something new, or build up on a skillset you’ve already got. All you need is out there, and it’s all mostly on YouTube for free if you know what you’re looking for.

Creatives to follow:

@meister_hq : Meister is a fantastic Portland based motion agency. They’re not only sharing their incredible work, they often retweet work being done in the space from all sorts of sources. Great place to find inspiration in all sorts of different kinds of motion design. The team there is wildly proficient in 3D and 2D motion work.

@jayclouse : Jay is a creator on X that shares all sorts of wisdom on how to use X to your advantage and build as a creator on the platform. His feed is full of great insight and ideas of how to take the way you put X to use for you and your brand to the next level. Check out his pinned tweet, and that alone is worth the cost of admission.

https://x.com/jayclouse/status/1614770790796517377?s=20

Problem Solved:

Looping particles in After Effects using Trapcode Particular.

When talking about looping particles I’m not talking about starting on frame 1 with nothing simulated. I’m approaching this as if we’re talking about stars / snow / rain / etc.

When I have shots or assets that are an extended period of time I’ll usually build the simulation and render it out so that I can bring it into my comp and let it loop already rendered down. I do this because I as build up a comp with layers and layers that have a ton of effects the render time obviously takes a hit. So if I’m doing that AND I’ve got after effects working on a simulation the render and preview times are more then I’d like. So, I build the simulation over something like 10 or more seconds and render that out.

That being said, particles don’t normally loop from frame 999 back to frame 1. You’ve got to build it up to do that manually.

I’m not going to go over the in’s and out’s of how to fine tune your particles to do what you’d want them to do for your specific purpose, but I’m going to help you set up an easy static stars sim that’ll loop great for you. Here’s my quick written order of events to get a rough loop built.

1. Drop in a new layer.

2. Put particular onto that new layer.

3. If we’re talking twinkling stars make sure to change the emitter type from point to box.

4. Remove all motion from the simulation. Velocity, velocity random, and velocity distribution.

5. Adjust the box to fit the size of your comp.

6. Go into the particle settings and adjust the particle size over time to something with noise. This will give you the twinkle effect.

7. While you’re in there, go ahead and adjust the particle life as you see fit. You’ve just got to make sure that all the particles are present for the entire length of your comp.

8. Jump back into the emitter settings and on frame 1 set the number of stars you want and make a keyframe. Go ahead one frame and set the particles per second to 0 to stop the sim from making more stars.

9. Move the layer’s starting point back in time something like -3 or more seconds (that way when you’re on frame 1 there are already particles in the scene and the sim isn’t making anymore stars.

10. Now on frame 1 you should have a screen full of little dots that are just there in space.

11. Move your play-head to half of your comp length (so second 5 if your comp is 10 seconds). You shouldn’t do this step until you’re happy with what your stars look like because you’ll effectively be duplicating the simulation layer and if you change something on one layer, you’ll have to change it exactly on the other. So it’s doable, but easier if you’re happy with your sim before trying to loop it.

12. Select the layer and split the layer via the edit menu.

13. Take the top layer, which should be the layer with it’s beginning at your play-head, and move it to frame 1.

14. Take the bottom layer and move it’s endpoint to the last frame. There will now be some overlap somewhere in the middle where your top layer is over your bottom layer. But if you jump from frame 1 to your last frame, the particles should be the same.

15. Last thing is in the space where there’s an overlap just keyframe the transparency of the bottom layer (the one that goes all the way to the end of your comp’s timeline) from 0 to 100 over an amount of time that looks good for your sim, then take the transparency of the top layer that starts your comp from 100 to 0. I’d suggest bringing in your new stars before removing the old so that there isn’t any weird fading issues. You’ll have to finesse this to your liking. You could also use an animated mask to make sure it’s not the whole screen changing all at once. But we won’t get too into that here.

And that’s it. Render that down with the alpha turned on and you can now drop that clip into your shot and loop it as many times as you’d need and after effects won’t have to worry about also doing your sim while rendering all your additional layers. Easy.

That’ll do it for this week. Heck of a week 2. I’m thankful y’all are here.

Do you have some stuff to share with our community here, reach out and share it with me. Either on X, or email me directly ([email protected]).

If you’re in the US or abroad and celebrate US holidays, I hope you have a fantastic Thanksgiving this week. Until next week.

I want to:

• Celebrate your wins.

• Be inspired by what is inspiring you.

• Help you with any issue you might have, if I can or if the community can.

• What’d you think of this week’s newsletter?

Go make something! I’ll see y’all next week!