Form
Words dissolve into sand, a logo catches on fire, and 3D sequences explode into particles. Form is useful for creating a wide range of effects, such as organic flowing patterns, complex geometric 3D structures, audio-driven animations, fire-like animations, and 3D grid structures.
Give your base form endless 3D possibilities by importing 3D models and sequences, or start with our professionally designed presets. Form has tools for the high-end motion designer, the professional VFX compositor, and every artist in between. With its reorganized interface and better integration into After Effects, Form has grown alongside your creative needs.
Quickstart for Form
Form is a grid-based 3D particle system wherein particles have eternal life. The particles do not get born, live, and die like in a regular particle system. Instead, they exist and can be affected by different maps and fields that make them move around and animate with certain properties.
It's easy to get started with Form. Choose a preset in the Designer to start playing with settings and move your new form in 3D space.
Alternatively, if you’d like to start making something beautiful from scratch, try this brief tutorial:
1. Launch After Effects.
2. Create a new composition (Ctrl/Cmd+N).
3. Create new comp-sized solid layer (Ctrl/Cmd+Y). This solid should never be shifted away from center to move the form around. Instead, use the controls inside the effect.
4. Apply Effects > RG Trapcode > Form to the solid.
5. Go to the Base Form section at the top of the Form interface in the Effect Controls panel. The Base Form is the structure that arranges the particles. Let’s make it a bit smaller. Take the Size XYZ value down to 300. This preserves the particles' size but reduces overall structure size.
6. Close the Base Form section and open the Particle section. This area controls how particles look. In the Particle group, find the Color property. Click the color swatch next to Color to open the color picker, then choose a color for your particles. Here, we chose a bluish color with RGB values of 50, 150, 250.
7. Next, let’s make this look interesting. Close the Particle group and open the Fractal Field group. This allows us to use a fractal noise pattern to distort our form’s shape. That probably sounds technical, but this essentially moves some particles one way and other particles in a different way, creating beautiful patterns. In the Fractal Field group, try taking the Displace value to 100. Now we’re getting somewhere!
8. Finally, let’s polish this up a little. Assume you don’t want to see the little particles so much and instead want this to feel more like a solid mesh. You can fix this by adding more particles. Close the Fractal Field group and reopen the Base Form group, which is where you control the form structure’s number of particles. Increase both the Particles in X and Particles in Y values to 200.
Because the Fractal Field evolves over time by default, click your keyboard’s Spacebar to preview the animation. Looks pretty cool, right? And it only took a few steps. What would it look like if you adjusted the particles with settings from the Particle group? What if the particles were larger? What if you experimented with the Opacity or Opacity Randomness? Keep playing with Form to see what kind of magic you can create.