After Effects Essentials: Trapcode Form

There are some plugins for After Effects that you just can’t live without. For me Trapcode Form is one of these.

Trapcode make some of the most popular plugins for After Effects. The brainchild of Swedish developer, Peder Norrby, Trapcode has become synonymous with being the industry standard in particle systems for After Effects, namely Form and Particular.

What is Form?

Form is a grid based 3D particle system. Unlike its sibling, Particular, the particles generated by Form have no controllable lifespan and remain constant over time. The particles properties can be influenced by a number of tools built into the plugin that will warp, displace, animate, loop, color and mask the particles in the grid. The sheer amount of effects that can be generated by Form is pretty much infinite due to the fact that the grid can also take the shape of any 3D object by importing an .obj file.

The Base Form

Adding Form to a solid in After Effects will produce a basic grid (or Box) 200 x 200 x 200px with 70 particles in X and Y.

Adding a camera and rotating around the scene you will see that Form is in fact 3D. The default amount of Particles in Z space is three.

You can make the grid denser by adding more particles in Z space like so.

There are three more base Form options. Box String which produces a grid of horizontal lines.

A Layered Sphere with the amount of layers controlled by the particles in Z space.

The last one is the OBJ model which we’ll look at later. The grid can be resized, rotated and positioned to taste. The amount of particles can be chosen for all the axis.

The Particles

There are a number of options for actual particles. Here I have a Box grid 400px square with 6 particles on each axis.

The particle is set to Sphere with no feathering at 8px in diameter.

There are a range of particle types from spheres, stars, streaklets, cloudlets (seen below) to two choices of custom particles, Sprites and Textured Polygons. These allow you to make the particle anything you wish by choosing a Pre-Comp with one or multiple shapes or images for the particle. 

Here’s the Cloudlet that has been feathered and colored with some random sizing. 

Lighting Form

Form also responds to After Effects lighting when you enable Shading. Here you can see the particles closer to the light (shown using Trapcode’s volumetric lighting effect Lux) are lit more than the more distant particles.

You also have the option to shadow (with Shadowlet) your particles to give the effect of natural shading or ambient occlusion. here you can see a split image for before and after shading.

You’ll find this option in the Shading parameters.

Quick Maps

Quick Maps allow you to easily manipulate the properties of your particles over a chosen axis. Here you can see the effect of the Opacity and Color Quick Maps along the Z axis.

There are three additional Quick Maps that are user definable, namely that you can map them to any of the main features in Form. Each map along with the opacity map has a user definable slope that can be drawn in and ‘offset’ which allows you to animate the map across Form over time. Here you can see Map #2 is assigned to size along the Z axis.

Quick Maps are very handy for quick transitions and animations in Form but pale in comparison to Layer Maps.

Layer Maps

Layer Maps are a more advanced version of Quick Maps and work by using luminance values to effect the particles. This means you can create your own maps like this gradient below which is a simple Ramp effect on a Solid. These maps need to be Pre-Comped for Form to see them.

Here you can see the Gradient comp mapped to size along the XZ axis.

Here is a radial gradient.

Here it is mapped to size over the XY axis. The effect is more complex. The sky is the limit with this and it’s possible to create very complex luminance maps. 

One thing to remember is that your maps are conformed to the dimensions of the base form. So if you use a widescreen comp in a square grid the map will be squashed to fit. Hence why my radial map is square.

There is a dedicated Layer Map slot for all the main features in Form. In the case of Color and Alpha I can load in a color map like this radial gradient...

and map it to Color over XY. Notice my size map is still applied.

This feature is so powerful as it can be used to control the strength of Forms displacement effects like Disperse which randomly moves the particles. Here is the Disperse effect applied to my grid. Doing this does not effect any map applied like my Color Map.

Now here is the Disperse effect being applied by my via my radial black and white gradient using the Disperse Layer Map.

Notice only the particles in the center are effected. cool!

Fractal And Spherical Fields

One of the most powerful ways to control Form is with the Fractal Field. This produces 3 dimensional noise that can be used to great effect when displacing your particles. Here I have a regular Box Grid.

Applying the Fractal Field to size gives me this...

You can see the randomness of the noise working in 3D. I could also effect Opacity.

Here’s the same settings applied to the Cloudlet.

The Fractal noise can also be animated to produce constantly evolving distortions using something called Flow. 

The Spherical Field pushes the particles based on a sphere. Here I have a Box of Strings.

When I apply the Spherical Field I get this.

It becomes very easy to build some nice looks with this.

You’ll find Form also reacts very well to Depth Of Field too.

Audio React

Another powerful feature of Form is its ability to animate its particles to sound via the Audio React section. There are 5 of these each being able to target different parameters. This is very similar to what Sound Keys also by Trapcode produces.

If I take a flat plane of Cloudlets and apply a bit of Fractal Field to size I get this.

If I import a WAV and select it in the Audio Layer selector and map the amplitude of the sound file to Size and Displace Y outwards along the X axis I get a rippling effect through my particles in time to the music.

Here it is in action.

Very cool indeed!!

Object Mode

Version 2 of Form saw the ability to import .obj files as the basis for your grid. An .obj file contains all the positional data of a 3D object made in a 3D program like Cinema 4D or 3DS Max. In Form's case, it puts a particle on each vertex (the points where the corners of the polygons meet) to create the shape of the object in particles. 

So if I take this Torus shape in Cinema 4D and export as a .obj (I use Riptide Pro for this).

Import it into my project..

Select OBJ Model as my Base Form and select the ‘torus.obj’ I get the shape from Form.

I can then start to style this how I want.

Or use Form's modifiers to distort the shape.

You can use Quick or Layer maps to take things further. Very powerful indeed!!

Try Form!

Form is one of those goto plugins if you're looking for dynamic, interesting particle effects. It can do so much!! From fire....

to weird cell things...

to abstract shapes and many things in between!!

This image below was made for a music artist's website I did and was done in After Effects using Form. Took no more than 5 minutes and would be considerably harder and take a lot longer to do in Photoshop!! 

If you don’t have Form you can download a free 30 day trial to check it out from Red Giant Software. Once you do this you’ll wonder how you got along without it!