Lloyd Alvarez Teaches You Particle Ballet
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Lloyd Alvarez Teaches Particle Ballet – AE Premium

on Oct 7th 2009 with 67 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: After Effects
  • Difficulty: Intermediate

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

To celebrate the launch of our Ae Premium program, we’ve asked Lloyd Alvarez to hit it out of the park with a stunning tutorial. Over the course of two jam-packed video lessons you’ll learn how to create a breathtaking ‘Particle Ballet’ effect using After Effects. There’s no better time to Join Premium.

Once you’ve joined, log-in to the Tuts+ Dashboard with your username and password to immediately access your Premium Content. Navigate to Ae Premium via ‘Premium Categories’ in the sidebar. You’ll be able to grab the tutorial videos, project files and assets in the members’ area.

Here’s the links to the scripts used during the tutorial:

Zorro-The Layer Tagger

Ease and Wizz

Throttle 1.2
Add Parented Null to Selected Layers

The plugins used were Particular 2 (Although this tutorial can totally be done with Particular 1.5) and Form.

The audio used is this from Audio Jungle:
Simplicity – Piano Duet

Tags: Premium
 
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I run AESCRIPTS.com which provides useful scripts for Adobe After Effects. You can follow me on Twitter @aescripts  

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  • gtaylor86

    Nice! Congratulations!

  • baggy_pants

    Awesome, just paid, luv ya work Lloyd.

  • http://d-os.org harry

    yes baby! a Lloyd Alvarez tutorial ! gladly paying for this!

  • aalex0r

    very nice ?
    made with particular 2 ?

  • http://www.betterencoding.com Iris

    Love the fact that you moved to Plus, I’ve been waiting for this :)

    • Alberto L.

      you love the fact for what reason exactly?
      you like to pay for things that used to be free?

      masochism ?

      • WM

        I’m sorry Alberto L. but that is a incredibly childish response. His point is he has been looking for more robust in depth tutorials that’re generally only covered in the “plus” tutorials where the authors are at least making some money on the time they’ve invested. They are new tutorials not something that were previously free. The fact that you think people should give their time away for free just to keep you happy is wrong.

  • Matt

    Celebrating AE Plus? Yeah, lets celebrate paying for things which used to be free!

    • http://www.iretiredat25.com Leo

      cry me a river… if it’s free why are the tutorials for beginners, if it’s paid why are they paid… people are never happy with anything

      • Matt

        Not all of the previous tutorials that are free were for beginners. I just don’t think that this is one that we should be advertising as the “reason why we should pay for a membership now” when others have simply stated they can achieve similar results by experimenting.

        Please read my other post below. I do love Lloyd’s work. However this isn’t making me want to switch right away. It seems wasteful when I can get the same information elsewhere for free.

      • http://www.visualfxtuts.com Topher Welsh

        You do realize that not all of the tuts are going to be Plus tutorials right?

        There is still going to be a lot of free content.

  • Ben Carroll

    Hmmm I think I am better than what I think I am. Cause I know how to do this effect easy. Its really simple.

    • Billy

      Ben…please enlighten us as to how to do this! Lloyd Alvarez’s AE work is generally amazing….but it is rarely if ever “easy.” If Lloyd is breaking this tutorial into 2 parts….it ain’t easy. I can guarantee you. I’m not saying this is worth $9 a month….but for a Lloyd Alvarez tutorial….it just might be.

      Adam. You guys are stepping out. I like it….but I would also say that there had better be some kick ass tutorials to justify the cost. Having a great Lloyd tutorial for the kick off of aetutsplus is great….but if you think the backlash has been bad around here from some of the free tutorials….wait until you fail to meet the tutsplus members expectations!

      Good luck!

      • Ben Carroll

        Well… I looked easy for “me”. I am seeing extensive use of trapcode form, possibly particular but it looks all form. And in fact I was working on a very similar project the other day. My point was just that I may be better than what I really am I just don’t know it.

    • matar

      please tell us how to do this effect please

  • Kevin

    I now really hate Ae Plus (its an awesome outcome). Sad I can’t watch this.

  • trimix

    ben caroll how did you do this ?

    • Ben Carroll

      Trapcode form and soundkeys, and through in some imagination, and experimentation and tada.

  • BILL

    COOL

  • Chris

    Sorry, if this was meant to entice me to join plus, I think I’ll pass for now.

  • Alberto L.

    It’s almost a year i come here to learn

    knowledge should be kept free… now the pay thingy. ok no problem

    i’ll look around for next tutorials

    good luck

  • http://bestflashwebsites.blogspot.com Flashy

    If you pretend to charge for tuts you should get the heck out of BLIPTV. It’s buggy, slow and it sucks.

    • Manuel F. Rugeles

      totally agree, those BLIPTV previews are terrible. It is slow and can´t replay without reloading the clip.

      • http://fxresource.webs.com Kai

        no, you can just click “Play again”.

        I would prefer for high quality blip.tv videos than poorly compressed, grainy youtube videos.

  • Chapell

    Just looking at the picture made me go wooooooowwwww :) Particle ballet is very exciting to see and must be more exciting to actually create… going to go through this tutorial for sure.

  • http://giracomunicacion.com Khaq Satellite

    Cool. Finally the first AE plus tutorial, keep them coming and please only intermediate to advanced stuff in the plus content.

  • Matt

    I will restate my previous post and echo the same sentiments as Chris, I am not anywhere enticed to join AE Plus from this tutorial. That is not without saying I think what Lloyd created was breathtakingly beautiful.

    Billy, what I believe Ben was saying is that it appears to be just a couple layers with different emitters and motion paths.

    Lloyd, it looks fabulous and you did a beautiful job. However, I do not see what the practical benefit would be to the masses. I see it as more of an individual work that you would put in your reel than a two-part tutorial called “Particle Ballet Effect.” Maybe if Adam put up screenshots from the tutorial video like what is done over a PSD Tuts or Vector Tuts so we can see what is involved.

    If I’m missing what the “effect” is, can someone please point it out to me?

  • LGFN

    Ahem… So I see I gotta be a Plus member to see what plug-ins are required…

    Am I right?

  • http://noisejunkies.net Rafael Guerra

    Pretty cool outcome

  • trent

    yeah, i don’t know about this being an enticement. It looks kinda cool, but seriously anyone can achieve this affect with a couple hours of experimentation. You would learn much more doing it that way as well. Someone mentioned particular 2. It may very well be, but you can achieve this effect with the previous version of particular. Keyframing the emitter point along a motion path or any means that suit your liking…altering the gravity and wind directions/camera focal length per layer or comp, as well as using multiple layers and mixing them in a final comp while messing with scale and opacity per layer. The size of each particle you see kind of snapping to different scale rather quickly can be achieve in particular, or even by using simple expressions on the properties of that layer etc… I think most would find spending a couple hours experimenting with the plugin would yield even better results while giving you a better understanding of how the parameters within it work together. cheers

  • Paul

    Hey does anyone know the name of the song playing in the Preview?
    -Thanks

  • danny

    this is easy, i will make one and post it for free.

  • Rev65

    Can’t say I’m thrilled at the $9 a month for a plus subscription, but it is for ALL of the TUTS+ sites, not just AETUTS+. That said, it is a very nice looking effect, Lloyd, and I will be laying out my $ for a look see. :)

  • http://www.behance.net/Modisana Modisana

    Ah man.. i wish i could afford a plus subscription :-( but hopefully soon.

    Great outcome… Awesome work

  • xsid

    blip sucks, and when its gona be cg plus?
    feeling like monkey in a cage, depends on others to for food and
    when ask for fruit, they said “i have paid to see u, now its time u give my money back”.

  • Abojung

    waited for all the comments to be posted. its good that aetuts has switched to plus. but for many this is sad. maybe this might help the tutorials posted in aetuts maintain its quality. but looking back, i have seen many tuts posted in PSD PLUS, where people have criticized many tuts. some of which said that those tuts didnt even required a membership.
    And also i think since there is aetuts+ now, i assume most of the high end tuts will be for members only. have the aetuts+ been implemented earlier, then i guess out of 100 tuts, 80 would be in members section and the rest for free.
    just like loyd has posted tuts earlier, promoting aetuts, but gradually the quality has worsened. but if the promoters can post tuts which can boost the site for longer period of time, then i think its a good change, rather posting tuts only for promotion and then lost.

    but overall, its a good move. i hope in the future tuts network dont turn into payed site.we all loved the older.

  • http://www.vimeo.com/burningchariottv Ben Morgan

    I’d love to join the AEplus community, but as of yet, i simply can’t justify the $9 per month charge. I usually knock people for slating tuts, but when it comes to paying for learning, It needs to be of a certain constant standard to make it worth while, and latley it simply hasn’t been. There are far to many sites out there which offer far more advanced tuts for free.

    To be honest my heart sank a bit when I saw that you’d turned to a Plus site. gutted

  • http://www.blackbluebrown.com geoff brown

    I’m confused. Are there going to be any more free tutorials on this site? I’m a big fan of AEtuts.com and videocopilot.net because they’re free learning tools. It would be a crying shame if either of these great community sites discontinued their services. Please continue to post free tutorials for all of us cheap designers trying to get a head start.

    -thanks.

  • http://www.youtube.com/fabiomcunha Fabio

    Its beauty, but “breathtaking” ?
    come’on…

  • Billy

    It should be interesting to see how this thing develops. To keep aetuts.com alive there are a certain number of good tutorials (intermediate-advanced) that are necessary. To keep the aetutsplus crowd happy there will need to be a certain number of good tutorials (intermediate-advanced) available. Can’t put too many in either the free or the pay area. However….from what I have seen over the past 4 months there haven’t been enough good tutorials (intermediate-advanced) to keep very many people happy for very long. Interesting conundrum.

    This could be the beginnings of the end for this site. Hope the tutorials materialize out of thin air and I’m proven wrong…

    • Alberto L.

      whos gopnna pay 119 euros for 1 year?
      and for what? get what u can get in other free sites?

      videocopilot, creativecow, projuice, maalton etc etc…

      i would have thought to subscribe if there was a really cool tutorial … like the last one of andrew kramer “submerged”.. but this particle ballet is a shame (not saying its not cool ..but it cant be a tutorial for a pay version of the site..)

    • Paul

      id rather pay to look at REAL designers/animators/vfx/motiongraphics etc etc blogs e.g MotionWorks

  • Lawrence

    Whats the name of the song or the orignal unedited one you use ?

  • http://www.pc-connexion.be/timodesign/ TimoDesign

    very cool :)

  • Dan

    You might want to revisit your business model. Sites like lynda.com, totaltraining.com, cineversity.com etc which I subscribe to offer hundreds of video tutorials for a small fee of $25.00 per month. The value proposition is much more in line with what the public is willing to pay. Until you reach that critical mass of learning materials you might consider using a “donation” type of model like c4dcafe.com uses or offer custom plugins for sale to generate income. When I see tutorials from Red Giant Software using there products it compells me to purchase those to achieve the results they get as does videocopilot.com. I think you have managed to attract a great many eyeballs and a loyal fanbase and would hate for you to lose that though an ill conceived business plan. There are many other opportunites for you to generate income…….but charging for limited content isn’t the one of them.

    • http://www.blackbluebrown.com geoff brown

      i concur.

    • http://www.vimeo.com/burningchariottv Ben Morgan

      I have to agree here to. A great point

  • Abojung

    well by looking at all the comments here, i guess this is not a day for celebration rather, its a mourning day.

  • Disgruntled

    All the money Envato gets from the Marketplace, and now you’re charging a subscription fee to see tutorials?

    Poor show.

    Up the base commission on sold items on the marketplace from 40% to 50% and maybe I’ll be more willing to drop $9 a month on your ‘Plus’ tutorials…

  • Rami

    checkout something similar I made a while back with soundkeyes & particular 1.5

    http://www.vimeo.com/6214892

  • http://www.visualfxtuts.com Topher Welsh

    Okay this is ridiculous. This is a business, I don’t see you all jumping down the throats of John Dickinson, Andrew Kramer, Harry Frank, Toolfarm, Jerzy Drozda, or anyone else for the matter that charges for their material… whether it be plugins, custom effects, or training.

    This is absolutely ridiculous that you all can’t see that this has been the business model for years now on the tutsplus network. PSDtuts+, Vectortuts+, NetTuts+… they all have plus content, and all the sites are flourishing. Also you have to remember, to pay creators, you have to make money. AEtuts+ doesn’t have too many ads on the site, and just introduced Plus content. For Christ’s sake it’s 9 bucks a month, not to mention that you get a ton of project files and access to all the plus content on the other sites as well… PLUS those project files.

    I am appalled at the fact that ANY of you can talk down about a site, and a NETWORK of sites that aim to teach, but **if you want** you can pay 9 meezly USD a month to get some extra content.

    I think its a terrific idea, and ever since AETuts+ launched I have been waiting for Plus Content. It is well worth the $9 a month.

    • Zach

      This is mostly true.

      Like lynda.com and other subscription-based sites, the value of the money you put in is determined by the amount of content that you personally find relevant.

      Look, if I was only into AE posts, then paying for lynda’s service (or tuts+ for that matter) would not make a whole lot of sense. But since I do work in AE, Flash, Photoshop, Fireworks, and Illustrator AND write in javascript, PHP, MySQL, and Ruby, $9 becomes a damn good bargain for the type of content I’m getting. If you can’t afford $9 every 30 days, then you need to re-evaluate your budget or quit your job at Fry’s.

      And to the suggestion about a ‘donation-run’ system, do you really think donations are gonna keep a massive network like Envato afloat. This is not c4dcafe, my friend. Also, if you have a problem with the quality of ‘plus’ content now, then you’re really gonna see things decline under a donation system. They certainly won’t be able to afford their current pay rates to regular contributors.

      Even with all that said, I understand where people are coming from in not wanting to pay for the service. If the content does not meet your standards, then don’t pay for it. Simple as that. And if you’re finding more advanced tutorials elsewhere for a better deal, then kudos to you. This is not college people. You have options.

    • thesadwolf

      I’m with Topher. I joined Plus out of respect for the efforts already put forward. Unfortunately the first project file I tried downloading is AE9 and I have 8. Sad days.

  • Van Yang

    I’m with you Topher.

    It’s a network-wide subscription for 29cents a day. Why are there so many doom-sayers? If you pirated your AE CS4 / Particular and didn’t pay the THOUSANDS of dollars that should have been paid to people who make a living from creating those products, I can understand why you’re getting your panties in a bunch for $78/year. And they’re going to keep sharing free content, just ADDING additional content: nothing is being taken away.

    It’s funny to think that we paid tens of thousands of dollars to go to university (in the United States)… and then when we’re in the real world, a few people suddenly think “learning should be free.” Maybe some of you haven’t entered the professional corp yet, but a single gig can pay for a year’s subscription many many times over.

    If you’re not getting paid yet, just don’t join ‘Plus.’ You don’t have a realistic understanding of the value here.

  • http://www.glasgoweb.co.uk will

    I think its a terrific idea, and ever since AETuts+ launched I have been waiting for Plus Content. It is well worth the $9 a month.

    same here mate

    9 dollors is nothing compared to what , i have forked out on books , ebooks , university ect ect

    people just because its on the web it should be free

    get a grip ,

    it takes time , effort , commitment , and skills to write a good article , if learning via the internet whats to overtake , books , universitys ect you should exspect to pay

    • http://www.visualfxtuts.com Topher Welsh

      EXACTLY! Sadly, I learned the hard way… I paid $12,000 for my schooling at a community college and hardly learned ANYTHING.

      If I can afford $9 a month, I’m doing it. I mean, yeah there is a ton of free content on the net, and that’s what my site deals in, but if you can afford to teach yourself by spending a minimal amount of money… go that route.

      Don’t throw someone to the wolves just because they start charging for tuts… like I said, you aren’t going to go and harp on Motionworks or VideoCopilot because they charge for their training series’ like Making It Look Great, or Serious FX and Compositing, or The Bullet, are you?

      • Abojung

        no need to be so hyper dude chill…. i dont think the only reason here is about to be able to pay for the membership or not. what i mean is that, since now it has converted to plus, many are aware that many high end tuts are gonna be for members. just like in PSD tuts, we see most of the good works are available to members. maybe it feels abit insecure. i dont mind whether you have to pay $9 a month or whether the tuts are free, but the only thing i would rather focus upon is the quality. yeah i know its not me who judges the tuts traffic, but if there is gonna be tutorials, then i hope it will be for the better for the better future. as per for other speeches, please see my above comments.

  • Pete

    Mesmerizing!! The preview encouraged me to go through the tutorial, and why not? It is very impressive indeed.

  • Thomas

    Do pay, or do not pay. That’s the simple answer for you personally.

    Do you feel discriminated by the way that someone took FREE content away from you.

    But, what do you consider FREE?

    If i spend thousands of dollards on software but only 9 dollars a month for getting teached visually instead of reading in-depth manuals, nights of trials and erros and huge books on how to impress my clients and earn money for my work, where should we start talking?

    Please shut up and start from scratch if you know better.

    sigh

  • Andrew

    Seriously people, it’s $9/month. That’s nothing. That’s two trips to a fast food joint, a couple of coffees from Starbucks, 2 packs of cigarettes, a few beers, you get the picture. If you’re too cheap to shell out $9 for extra content as well as all the source files then you need to find a new profession. I’m sure, like someone stated earlier, that all of you complaining about this are the same people that haven’t purchased a single seat of any of the software you use. Oh, that should be free too, right?

    And to those who said they can figure this tutorial out from experimenting, well, guess what, you can figure out anything from experimenting. How do you think all the people before you figured it out, they just got in there and did it. If you’re so high and mighty about experimenting anyways, why are you coming to a tutorial site in the first place? Go be an auteur and hole up in your bedroom and figure it out, don’t come here and flame about $9/month.

    I joined the Plus network about a month ago. I rarely read any tutorials and when I do I just breeze through them to learn new techniques and methods of doing things. I barely utilize any of the Plus benefits, but it’s still worth it to me. It’s also a tax write off, so who cares? Well, I guess people who aren’t professionals do…

  • Håvard Fandrem

    Where is the breathtaking part?

  • Cate

    Kudos! Was looking for some encouraging stuff and this looks like what I really want to do in my own project.

  • NOPAY

    What? im going to video copilot where the best AE tuts are free

  • Gon

    The video looks great, I wish I could access the tutorial.

    Many people here said that $ 9 is little compared to the large number of tutorials that gives Tuts +.
    But in some countries, like mine, $ 9 are 50 of the local currency, which makes it a high price to access Tuts +.
    I do not complain that the tutorials have a cost. They involve work hours, professional staff and is completely understandable. But I think at least some of the tutorials should be freely accessible (the tutorial itself, access to projects and footages, etc.) and others (perhaps the most complex) should be paid.
    I insist that not all tutorials should be free, but Tuts + sites are well known and visited by people from around the world with very different realities, and this should not be ignored by the staff of Tuts +

    Greetings from Argentina.

  • Nadeem IJaz

    I love after Effect

  • Smacky

    Bleh, reminds me of Windows 98 screen-savers.

    Oh and all you people discussing whether you are in favor of paying or not… it’s simple… either pay for the content or go elsewhere. That’s it… it’s black and white… no fine print. Take responsibility for your own life and make a choice to stay or go, stop whining in favor or against it.

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