My Heart goes Mmmmmm by Ashish Rastogi, India




Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and if you haven’t thought about what to get your special someone, the clock is ticking.

Jewelry is, of course, a popular Valentine’s Day gift and retailers like Pugh’s Diamond Jewelers are well stocked for those who decide jewelry is the best way to say “I love you.” But if jewelry isn’t your style and you are an animator and dont have time to buy one then create some lovely effect and show to your love. Hope she doesnt mind !!! :-)

In this tutorial we will use the Adobe After Effects and Trapcode Particular plug-in to create this heart.

1) Create New Composition, size = 640 x 480, Frame Rate = 25fps or 30fps, Duration = 5 sec.


2) Create New Solid layer (Ctrl + Y) Layer > New > Solid. Choose any color and press button Make Comp Size.


3) Apply Trapcode Particular Plug-in on the solid layer. Effect > Trapcode > Particular.

4) Set the key frame on 0sec for Emitter – Particles/sec and leave the value to 100.


5) Go to 1 sec and change the value to 400, set another key frame on 4sec with same value, set value 300 on 4:10 sec, set value 0 on 4:20sec

6) We also need to change the Position XY settings but we talk about that later.

7) Set Direction to Directional, velocity to 10.0, Velocity Random to 100.0 and Velocity from motion to 5.0

8) Particle Life[sec] to 5.0, Particle Type to Smokelet, Size over life and Opacity over life as in the following image, Opacity of Particles to 40 and set the color of particles of your choice, if you want a random colors in the heart then also change the setting of Color Random[%]


9) Now, talk about the Position XY settings. There are three ways to do this…

a) Move the position anchor point at different places according to the shape desire at regular intervals but required lot of tweaking.
b) Create a mask in the AE or Illustrator and copy the vertices then paste those vertices in the Position XY.
c) Or create any shape in Photoshop and save with alpha channel. And use Layer> Auto Trace feature, this will also create a mask then once again copy and paste the vertices in the Position XY. If the image don’t have alpha channel then still you can use Auto Trace and select the channel in the dialog box as desire like R-G-B channel or Luminance channel. That's it.


This tutorial first published in the CGArena Magazine February 06 Issue.