Creating text from smoke in CS3
by Christo Leone
on
Oct 29, 2008 at 8:44:06 pm
Hi all.
I need to be able to generate a smoke screen and make text appear out of the smoke as well for the title sequence of our movie.
I recently had a look at the tutorial "Making Titles or Objects Turn to Smoke and Disappear" by Tobias Lind. (It's on the cow server) It looks exactly like what im trying to do. Its pretty old but all of the plug-ins he used has been standardized. It all works great until the blur part. I don't think I have the right kind of blur because it doesn't look the same as the video. I've tried all the blur's that comes with CS3 and the look that I could get was the Vector blur and that doesn't look too great.
Any idea's on how I can get this working? I have particle playground 1.5 as well and am playing around with that to try and figure out how to make a smoke screen.
thanx allot for you're input.
My rig is AMD Athlon 64 Dual core, 2ghz ram, Adobe After Effects CS3 with the trapcode plug-ins.
Re: Creating text from smoke in CS3 by david bogie on Oct 29, 2008 at 9:55:57 pm
The old Turbulent Displacement is very cool but it's just a Fractal Noise-style generator that feeds a displacement function. Youc an do the same with Fractal Noise and, erm, Displacement Map. But you can also use the Fractal Noise to feed Compound Blur.
TubDisplace requires additional blurring to turn it into convincing or stylized smoke.
Vector Blur is interesting but it helps if you have an interesting source image. Try adding CC Force Motion Blur, too.
Knowing how to use the CC Time Blend FX is also key to using this ancient method.
You coudl also use any of the particle systems to create some smokey simulation that is moving in the direction you think you want your letters to go and then us that as the grayscale source for your displacement fucntions.
I don's think Dean Velez still has his wonderful freebies available but he did incredible fire and smoke effects using even simpler techniques.
System Setup (for a more detailed list, see my profile)
HARDWARE
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9GB Memory
Two 16x SuperDrives
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Apple Cinema HD Display (23" flat panel)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT Graphics Card
AJA Kona LHe SD/HD capture card
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SOFTWARE
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Final Cut Pro Studio 2
After Effects CS3
Photoshop CS3
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Boris Continuum 5
Sapphire Plug Ins
Roxio Toast
Digital Anarchy Anarchist Suite
ParticleIllusion 3.0
Trapcode
Zaxwerks
Re: Creating text from smoke in CS3 by Christo Leone on Nov 4, 2008 at 9:51:48 am
Cool thanx for the input. I'll be looking into all of those shortly. That video he has in his tutorial is exactly what I need but to get it like that on the MUCH newer CS3 is proving to be a big problem.
thanx again.
does anybody know of any free plug-ins that can be used to create a similar effect?
