QuickTip – Creating Circular And Spiral Motion Paths
Tutorial Details
- Requirements: After Effects, Trapcode Particular (optional)
- Difficulty: Intermediate
Here’s a simple expression, using a little bit of mathematics, that will let you create circular and spiral motion paths. The expression can be applied to anything in After Effects with a ‘position’ property to create a variety of effects. Here it’s used with a light and Trapcode Particular.
Tutorial
Download Tutorial .flv
File size 32MB
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By Ewan Smith
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Great short tip. Math may be scary but it’s our friend. This could be great for doing any kind of spirals around people with a simple mask, or great for any kind of motion graphics. Again, great.
Great tip! Love it
Good work mate.
Thank you. Reduced to the max
Nice Expression! Good job!
I’m new to AE and this wasn’t over my head or anything.
I learned about expressions, and BEING ABLE TO CODE EFFECTS (omfg) without it dragging on for hours and hours.
Thanks a lot for this and I hope to see more tips just like this in the future! Really appreciate the quality.
I love the quality and the simplicity of all your tutorials, unlike that guy Kumar. I am so glad that they took his tutorial off before someone else gets more confused. What is the actual mathematical formula for this circular motion path? Thanks!
tvandang
thanks for the short tip.
Really cool little tutorial, and it worked perfect on CC Particle World too (i’m too poor at the mo to get Particular) which was nice. Thanks
Hi! coult you tell me how to make it work with the CC Particle World? (I’m poor too, so I’m interested on this, lol)
Thank you!
Cool tip. Thanks
if you create a solid, make a circular mask with the pen too and then copy it over the position property of the light object the effect is the same, works in 3D and all
It is 2 steps move. Great job on this one too, maybe it is more flexible.
How do you do that? What are property are you copying from the circle mask to apply to the camera?
select the position property of the solid that has the circular mask. Copy it. Select the position propery of a null (parented to a camera) and paste. You see two new keyframes appear at null’s position propery. The length is by default 2 seconds. You can drag the 2nd keyframe further in time to make the null take much more longer to go a complete 360 spin..Yet completely editable and in 3D. Really smooth trick
what I wrote above applies for creating circles only. again – great job on the tut mate!
Thanks for the great expression Ewan
Ewan-if possible i would like to see your set up to creating the galaxy FX…very nice script.
ALX
NJ
In this clip, awesome dust from the particles. EWAN, please advise how to achieve such realistic result?
thnx.
Hi Ewan,
Nice tutorial.
I have a question, if i have two Particulars and two light sources, how do i tell AE which particular will follow which light source?
Thanx
Extremely helpful tutorial, Ewan! The math confounds me, though. How would you reverse the expression so that emitter spirals out?
Im a noob at expressions as well. Quick question. How would I control the starting point of the expression? If I move the layers down in the timeline the animation has almost already played out, since its “using the time” of the comp to run. I want this effect to start later in the comp. I tried some things and they havent worked..
Can anyone advise?
Nice tutorial and script.
Cheers!
randombob
Very neat tricky! Love this tutorial! Keep ‘em coming!
i was looking for this!! thank you =)
Hey,
Really cool tut for creating spirals and using Particular. Been wandering though, how can you adjust the maths/expression in this to form an even corkscrew type spiral (with z depth) that does not decrease in size?
Ive tried adjusting the expression values, but my maths is crap and I cant get there!
Thanks in advance,
Eugene