How to achieve the fairy dust effect in after fx

[TimC]

Try using effect > simulation > CC Particle System II

cheers
TimC

[Metro-Digital]

hey, I just made fairy dust the other day. Its quite simple. Firstly you have to make your dust particle. This can be just a star type shape with an outer glow, made in photoshop. Obviously you will save the file as a psd, and keep the star seperated from the background. You could even make a short 3 sec animation of a star twinkling.

1) Open afterfx, create new comp, and a new solid any colour, and apply the foam plugin, which is found in the simulation section. (It is only available in production bundle I think)
2) Import your star.psd, or short twinkling animation. Drag this into the timeline, underneath your solid which has foam applied to it. (We are placing it underneath the solid, cos you are going to hide this layer later anyway, and you don't want it getting in your way)
3) If you scrub in your timeline youll see lots of wireframe bubbles getting emitted from the producer point. These bubbles will be your fairy dust.
4) In effects controls of foam, change where it says view from draft, to rendered. This allows you to see what the final effect will look like.
5) When you look at the bubbles, they wobble like real bubbles, and they bounce off each other. Fairy dust most likely doesnt do this, so we have to kill the wobble and repulsion. You can do this under the physics dropdown menu of the foam plugin. Drop the wobble amount, turbulence, and repulsion to zero. You can choose your own settings here if you wish, it all depends on the look you are after.
6) Under the rendering dropdown menu, choose user defined in the bubble texture section. Then just under that, in the bubble texture slot, click the dropdown list, and choose your star.psd or video. Now srub the timeline and you should have Fairy dusty stuff being produced. Now all you have to do is animate the producer point, and it will look like tinkerbell flying across the screen. You can play with all the other settings too, but I dont know too much about them. Remember to hide your star layer, or you will see it in the background

Hope this helps, I've just started learning after effects myself, and am really enjoying it so far. It can do some really nice effects, but I'd like to try combustion someday.

[Grys]

Another easy way to create simple dust clouds:
Use the "fractal noise"-effect (with animated evolution) on a solid and blur it. You can bring the whole thing to life by creating an animated mask for the solid and also animate the opacity, position and blur-filter of the layer.

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