And it's awesome stuff! Well worth the $ (especially considering all of the free tutorials that everyone benefits from!! Thanks Andrew - I'll be buying some more of your stuff soon!)
Anyway, I'm trying to use one of the fog animations (Fog_01) in a roughly 25 second comp.. The fog isn't naturally looping (and isn't 25 seconds..), so I was trying various ways to loop it.. Cross fading bewteen a couple layers isn't working out so well because of the way the layers kind of multiply - ie, it gets brighter and then darker instead of just fading.. I've played around with the opacity settings over the fade and it was getting better but.... Still not good enough
So I thought I could make my own fog.. (But have it look as good and realistic as Andrew's.. - or at least close!)
Here's what I've done so far:
3 Comps which are a bit larger than my final comp's dimensions:
- Fractal noise, evolution animated over time (looping)
- Dynamic Twist effect, evolution animated over time (also looping)
- Top layer is a basic ramp effect - I want the bottom half(ish) of the frame to be devoid of fog..
- Animated the ?? offset of the fractal over time (30 seconds in my case - this is going to kill my loopability I think which is why I'm doing it for 30 seconds..)
The 3 comps represent 3 different z space layers for my final comp.. The farther one evolves slower - and has smaller ... uh, swirls I guess I could call them. The 'closest' layer has larger swirls - puff's really, and moves much quicker (though not TOO quick)
I've tweaked the fractal settings as well as the Dynamic Twist effect settings and even the ramp's Y position to make sure each layer has a bit different characteristics..
Finally, I put all three comps in my "final" comp, made the layers 3-d and spaced them out in z space.. I altered the opacity a bit for each level - closest being 60%, middle being 75 and the furthest back is 100..
It looks ok. But not as good as Andrew's.. I'll post a smaller render of it soon - but I'd like any help that can be offered with getting this to look as realistic as possible (I'm quite happy with Andrew's - especially since I can slow it down a little, so if someone has advice on how to loop that over 25 seconds that would work for me too!)
The sample is here:
http:://countercultureyouth.org/temp/fog.mov
Note that what I put up there is still wider than my final comp so you'll see the edges of the layers where I animated the position...
Oh, BTW, this is going to be used in an earthquake scene... So I want to have two versions - one somewhat calm, and another a bit disturbed for the aftermath..
Thanks in advance for any help
--KTFA
