Create Text To Smoke Effect In After Effects    Hello and welcome back, today we are going to learn how to create a smoke to text reveal effect in Adobe After Effects application. In this tutorial we are not going to use any of the external 3rd party plug-ins and rather use ‘Particle Playground’ effect which is already available in After Effects. We are also going to use ‘Fractal Noise’ effect and then use it as the properties map for the text so that the particles are generated in an unique way. I have posted the finished rendered animated image below for your reference, so let us go ahead and start doing the tutorial.
Final Result.
Step One
Let us start by creating a new ‘Composition’ and name it ‘Smoke-Text’ by going to “Composition >> New Composition” or you can simply key in ‘Ctrl + N’ as shown below.
Figure 1.
Step Two
Now let us create a new ‘Text’ layer by going to “Layer >> New >> Text” and then type ‘CGONLINE’ as shown below.
Figure 2. Step Three Now let us create one more new comp and name it ‘Smoke’ and then drag drop the ‘Smoke-Text’ into it as shown below.   Figure 3.   Step Four The basis for the smoke is 'Layer Exploder' effect which is part of 'Particle Playground'. In order to apply this effect we need to create a new 'Solid' and enable 'Particle Playground' for this 'Solid'. So let us go to “Layer >> New >> Solid” and create a new solid layer and then let us name it ‘Smoke-Effects’ and then let us add ‘Particle Playground’ effect by going to “Effect >> Simulation >> Particle Playground” as shown below.   Figure 4.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Five Now let us go to ‘Effect Controls’ panel and then let us make sure that the property value of ‘Particles Per Second’ under ‘Cannon’ is set to ‘0.00’ and then let us change the property value of ‘Force’ under ‘Gravity’ to ‘0.00’ and now in ‘Explode Layer’ under ‘Layer Exploder’ select ‘Smoke-Text’ as the layer that will generate particles as shown below.   Figure 5. Step Six The important thing here is that particles will be generated on every frame, so if you don’t disable generation after a few frames you will get tons of particles. So let us set a keyframe for both ‘Radius of New Particles’ and ‘Velocity Dispersion’ by clicking on the stop watch beside only after moving the CTI to the beginning of the timeline and then let us change the property values to ‘0.45’ and ‘100.00’ respectively. Now let us move CTI to frame 3 and then let us change the property values to ‘0.30’ and ‘50.00’ respectively and final let us move CTI to frame 4 and then change the property value of ‘Radius of New Particles’ to ‘0.00’ as shown below. We use three frames to generate particles and at fourth frame we set the ‘Radius of New Particles’ to zero which means disabling generation of particles.   Figure 6.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Seven Now let’s smoothly hide ‘Text’ layer so that after second frame only particles will by visible. Go to ‘Smoke-Text’ layer and then let enable the stop watch for ‘Opacity’ after moving CTI to beginning of the timeline and then let us change let us enable the stop watch and then let us move CTI to frame 3 and then let us change the property value to ‘0.00’ as shown below.   Figure 7.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Eight So far we have finished creating the particles, but what we need is not just particles effect but smoke effect, to achieve that we need to add ‘Fast Blur’ effect which would help us to make particles give us a smooth transition effect just like smoke. So let us go to “Effect >> Blur & Sharpen >> Fast Blur” and then let us change the property value of ‘Blurriness’ to ’10.0’ as shown below.   Figure 8.  Click here to view larger image. Step Nine Now let us try to bring some life to these particles which could be done using ‘Property Mapper’ for this smoke transition effect. In order to use ‘Property Mapper’ we need to create a new ‘Layer’ that contains a map for properties. So let us go ahead and create a new composition and name it ‘Properties-Map’ and then let us create a new ‘Solid’ layer and then apply ‘Fractal Noise’ effect to it by going to “Effects >> Noise & Grain >> Fractal Noise” and then let us play with the parameters of the property values to animate the map. Let us start with ‘Fractal Type’ property and change it to ‘Dynamic’ and then let us enable ‘Invert’ property ‘On’ and then let us change the property value of ‘Contrast’ to ‘200.0’ and then let us change ‘Overflow’ to ‘Clip’ as shown below.   Figure 9.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Ten Now let us start animating the solid by changing the property values, let us go to ‘Rotation’ property and then enable the stop watch after making sure that CTI is at the beginning of the timeline and then let us move CTI to end of the timeline and then change the value to ‘0x +15’ and then let us change ‘Scale’ property value to ’35.0’ and then let us set a key frame for ‘Offset Turbulence’ by enabling the stop watch after making sure that CTI is at the beginning of the time line and then let us change the values to ‘640.0, 360.0’ and then let us move CTI to the end of the timeline and change the property value to ‘1000.0, 700.0’ as shown below.   Figure 10.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Eleven Now let us change the value of ‘Sub Scaling’ under ‘Sub Settings’ to ’50.0’ and then let us set keyframe for ‘Sub Rotation’ by enabling the stop watch at the beginning of the timeline and then let us move CTI to end of the timeline and then let us change the value to ‘-10.0’ and then let us enable the stop watch for ‘Evolution’ at the beginning of the timeline and then let us move CTI to the end of the timeline and then let us change the value to ‘2x’ as shown below.   Figure 11.  Click here to view larger image. Step Twelve Now let us add ‘Properties-Map’ into ‘Smoke’ comp and then hide it. Now let us go to ‘Particle Ground’ effect and then expand ‘Persistent Property Mapper’ and then change ‘Use Layer as Map’ to ‘Properties-Map’ as shown below.   Figure 12.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Thirteen Now let us change ‘Map Red to’ under ‘Affects’ property to ‘Mass’ {Copies the particle mass, which interacts with all properties that adjust force, such as Gravity, Static Friction, Kinetic Friction, Torque, and Angular Velocity. It takes greater force to move particles with a larger mass.} and then let us change ‘Min’ value to ‘0.05’ {When you map red to ‘Mass’ and set property values of ‘0.05’ and ‘1.00’ for both ‘Max’ and ‘Min’ and respectively then mass of any particle that passes over the darkest pixels in the ‘properties map’ will have 0.05 of some arbitrary units of mass, and mass of any particle that passes the brightest pixels will have 1 arbitrary unit of mass} and then let us change ‘Map Green to’ to ‘X Force’ {Copies the coercion along the x axis of motion. Negative values push a particle to the right.}and then let us change property values of ‘Min’ to ‘-200.00’ and ‘Max’ to ‘-50.00’ and place the CTI at frame 3 and enable the stop watch and then let us move CTI to frame 2 of the timeline and then let us change the property values of both ‘Max’ and ‘Min’ to ‘0.00’ and then let us change ‘Map Blue to’ to ‘X Scale’ {This property copies the scale value of a particle along the x axis and then use these properties to stretch a particle horizontally.} and then change ‘Max’ and ‘Min’ property values to ‘0.50’ and ‘5.00’ respectively as shown below.   Figure 13.  Click here to view larger image.   Step Fourteen Now let us start playing with ‘Ephemeral Property Mapper’, first let us change ‘Use Layer As Map’ map channel to ‘Properties-Map’ and then let us change ‘Map Red to’ to ‘Opacity’ and then let us change ‘Operator’ to ‘DifferenceM/i>’ and then let us ‘Map Green to’ to ‘Y Speed’ and then let us change the property values of ‘Max’ and ‘Min’ to ‘0.50’ and ‘3.00’ respectively as shown below.   Figure 14. Step Fifteen Lets return to our ‘Fast Blur’ effect and then let us animate it to make particles less blurred when they are close to text and more blurred when they are far away. Bring the CTI at the beginning of the timeline and the enable stop watch and then set the ‘Blurriness’ value to ‘2.0’ and then move CTI to frame 3, 15, 30 and 60 and then simultaneously change the value of ‘Blurriness’ to ‘3.0’, ‘9.0’, ’11.0’ and ’12.0’ as shown below. Finally I am going to change the color of the font into white as pink is look quite odd. That is it we have finished completing the ‘Text to Smoke’ effect animation in After Effects.   Figure 15.  Click here to view larger image.

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