Using After Effects I tried to achieve a smoke type of effect.
After some research, I found out that it could be achieved without using any special plugin, just radio waves and an expression to control the amount of waves.
That’s it.

All I had to do was animate masks in the timeline, frequency and the slider control value.
When I say animate, I mean keyframe it.

Create a background of your choice and a solid layer. Onto the solid layer apply radio waves from Effect->Generate->Radio Waves.
You can adjust all properties according to mine, or play with it. Add a slider control (Expression Controls -> Slider Control) to be used in a minute.

The way it works is:

1. Create different masks and apply them to the same solid layer!This is important. Radio waves can use masks instead of polygon, but only one at a time.
To make it easier, bring it from Illustrator or another solid layer in AE, just copy and paste it, or, copy and paste a keyframe from that auxiliary solid layer.
Of course copy in different places in time, otherwise it will be overwritten.
The keyframe holds all information about the mask.

Just be careful, I am using “Mask 2″ because I changed the first one I tried, but the number doesn’t matter.

Don’t worry about everything else for now.
(Keyframe “Mask Path”, place keyframe for each mask)
Masks on timeline:

2. On the Effects panel link Radio Waves to your solid layer, or better yet, to your mask on that solid layer.

How it looks on the Effects panel:

How it looks on the timeline:

3. Now we need an expression to control or affect Radio Waves generation. That’s when the silder control plays its part.
To the Radio Waves producer point, add the following expression:

x=effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)
wiggle(1,x*200);

To add an expression according to Adobe:

“To add an expression to a property, select the property in the Timeline panel and choose Animation > Add Expression or press Alt+Shift+= (Windows) or Option+Shift+= (Mac OS); or Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the stopwatch button next to the property name in the Timeline panel or Effect Controls panel.”

Now, you can keyframe Frequency and Slider values to get the results you want.

You can download my .aep file below and check out how I did it, but my suggestion is play with it!The only problem is processing, each time you change a value, it
takes a while to re-render all effects. So be patient!The results are worth it!

Source .aep

Final result:

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 8:27 PM and is filed under Art, Design, Xperiments / Tuts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.