Form
The top of the Form interface contains a conspicuous button. This button launches the Designer, a separate interface window that offers an alternate way of building effects within Form.
The Designer provides a simplified, interactive, and more visual Form experience. The Designer is based on the concept of building blocks. By applying a block, you apply an attribute to your particles. Each block exists within a category that corresponds to Form’s groups and contains a subset of the plug-in’s controls. You can combine these blocks to create a result viewable as an effects chain and saved as a new preset.
Designer Interface:
Designer UI areas: 1) Presets pane, 2) Preview pane, 3) Blocks pane, and 4) Effects Chain.
Workflow
Open the Designer by clicking on the Designer button in the Form effect within After Effects’ Effect Controls Panel (ECP). Select an Effect Preset as your starting point or just start exploring and creating using Blocks to build custom effects.
Blocks
To simplify the process of creating a particle system, Form components are represented as “blocks,” which are like building blocks of the final result. You can access block presets by putting your mouse over the word BLOCKS in the Designer’s upper-right corner.
Similar to AE’s ECP controls for Form, blocks are organized into categories: Base Form, Particle, Shading, Disperse and Twist, Fractal Field, Spherical Field, Kaleidospace, and World Transform. Each block provides controls to customize the effect. See the Blocks in the Designer section to learn more about working with the blocks.
Preview
The Preview Pane shows what you are creating. The effect will only be fully rendered in your After Effects timeline after you hit the Apply button and return to After Effects. For more information, see this guide’s Preview Pane section.
Apply
If you like what you’ve created in the Designer, click the Apply button at the Designer’s bottom-right corner. This will take you back to After Effects, where you can further adjust the controls in Form and render it in the After Effects timeline. If you'd rather not apply the effect, hit the Cancel button to return to After Effects with no changes applied to Form.
After applying the effects in the Designer, you will see your settings in the main Form plug-in. You can make additional changes in the plug-in or go back to the Designer UI. Changes you make in the main plug-in will be reserved as you go back and forth between the plug-in and the Designer.