Nightcrawler Vanish Effect?
by Liam El Terrible
on
Jun 15, 2006 at 7:06:49 am
hi
Just wondering if anyone knew of a plugin or effect that was used in X2 to make Nightcrawler disappear with a sort of colored smokey haze. I just saw the same effect in a TV ad, cheers
Liam
Re: Nightcrawler Vanish Effect? by Mylenium on Jun 15, 2006 at 7:40:17 am
Most likely in the movie it is a 3D particle system, but you could create something similar using either Particle Playgrounds Layer Exploder or Trapcode Particular's Layer grid mode. Another alternative may be using displacement maps in combination with mattes for varying opacity.
Re: Nightcrawler Vanish Effect? by Ken Latman on Jun 15, 2006 at 12:22:55 pm
There was a long article in Cinefex Magazine when X2 came out on how they did it. I don't remember all the details but I seem to recall that either Flame or Inferno was used in the process and several shots were taken of the actor doing the routine which were then composited against a tracked plate with no action.
Mylenium is correct, they did use a particle system. I remember the article reading that custom plug-ins had to be written to get the volumetric effect of the smoke or something.
See if you can find a back issue or purchase one.
Re: Nightcrawler Vanish Effect? by Steve Roberts on Jun 15, 2006 at 2:09:46 pm
indeed. Cinefex 94 is the issue. According to the article, they only had a few frames to make the effect read. To disappear, Nightcrawler's body had to collapse (not necessarily all at once), turn to smoke and emit a puff of smoke as well. Then to reappear, they reversed the process, but adding "smoke shooting out in the form of streamers, which then coalesce[d] to form the shape of his body".
He was a 3D model, but they didn't have time to make it dead accurate. They filled it with smoke, but then used 2D compositing techniques to distort it. Also according to the article, the smoke was proprietary, based on a water simulation, then "ported into Houdini and used as a turbulence field to displace particles".
So ... probably the closest home-grown method might be to create a rough model of the character in a 3D app and have it explode into metaball smoke or something and use AE to distort it.
Alternately, maybe you could attempt something with Trapcode's particular? If the camera's not moving ...
But as you've guessed, you can't match the effect in AE. :)
