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A lot of cool effects can be achieved by finding a way to combine two effects that seem to have little or nothing to do with each other. In this tutorial, we'll be joining together two plug-ins that are already amazing all by themselves. The two plug-ins are Red Giant Software's Knoll Light Factory and Trapcode's Particular. Using Particular's custom particle feature, we'll create custom particles based on lens flares.You must have both of these plug-ins installed in your After Effects in order for this to work. You can get free demo versions of the plugins from RED GIANT SOFTWARE. If you didn't know, Red Giant Software and Trapcode have partnered up - so that Red Giant Software will not only offer the sale of the popular After Effects plugin, but will offer support as well. You can check out Ko Maruyama's article about the two by clicking here:
http://aftereffects.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=78265.
1. Begin by creating a new comp with height and width of 200 by 200 pixels. We'll make the duration 5 seconds. I'm going to name it "Custom Particle"
2. Create a new black solid with the same dimensions as the comp.
3. Go to Effect > Knoll Light Factory > Light Factory. This will give you the first lens flare preset that Light Factory offers.
4. Next we're going to want to customize this flare and make it our own. Make sure the Black Solid we created is selected and press F3 to bring up our effects window. If you twirl down the little arrow you'll see some parameters that we can control and animate. Click on the yellow "Options..." text next to the effect and that will bring up the lens editor.
5. Now we get to the fun stuff. Here You can create your own lens flares by adding elements to the "Elements" window from the drop down menu at the bottom of the box. Go ahead and create something that might look interesting as a particle. Some interesting effects can result from making irregular shaped flares but for the purposes of this tutorial lets keep it simple and use round or spherical shaped flares. You can access the parameters of each element by clicking on them in the "Elements" window. heres what I came up with:
I used a random fan and two discs for this flare
6.If you hit "OK" you'll notice that the flare ended up in the top left side of our Comp. This is because Light Factory is set up to default your flare in this position. This works great for standard lens flare effects but for our purposes let's put it in the dead center. Since the dimensions of our Comp is 200 by 200, enter 100 for the x position of our Light Source Location field and 100 for the y.
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Source:Ko Maruyama.
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