Confetti: Making it with Cult Effects Paint or AE5's Vector Paint

by Kathlyn Lindeboom
ronlindeboom.com, Cambria, California USA

©2001 by Kathlyn Lindeboom. All rights are reserved. Used at CreativeCow.net by kind permission of the author.

ARTICLE FOCUS:
Kathlyn Lindeboom gives users a look at some of the tools in Cult Effects 1.5. This third tutorial in a series uses Cult Effects CE Paint along with 1.5's new 'Wiggle' Controls. In this tutorial, we'll make confetti. Cult Effects Paint is the new Vector Paint in Adobe After Effects 5.

With Cult Effects Paint, you can paint directly in After Effects. It is a vector based, nondestructive tool that is useful for all kinds of painting from matte touch-ups to animating signatures. And now with the new "wiggle controls" feature, it's just for having fun.

Cult Effect Paint supports Wacom and Creation Station tablets pressure stylus and erase functions and better results are obtained by using a graphics tablet. But if you don't have a tablet, don't let that stop you. You can still go through the tutorial using your mouse. All the paint settings can still be modified interactively through the contextural menu within the Composition Window.

In this tutorial, we'll change paint colors and change some of the wiggle settings to create confetti.

So let's get started...

Launch Adobe After Effects. Create a new comp. Mine is 768 x 576, 25 fps, 8 sec.

Add a new solid, 768 x 576 or the size of your comp. Black.

Make sure that the current time indicator is at 00:00.

Apply Effect>Cult Effects>CE Paint.

Change your Brush Settings as follows:

Radius: 5.0

Brush Type: Solid

Color: Any bright color. For my first color I chose red.

For now, turn off wiggle control and change Draw Strokes... to All Strokes.

With CE Paint highlighted in the Effect controls Window, control-click in the comp window. Go to options>shift-paint Inserts>continuous. Check also the Stylus: Radius and the Stylus: Opacity options.

If your pointer has not changed to a little circle, click on the icon in the comp window that looks like a stylus, and paint two horizontal red lines as shown below.

Change the color of the paint by clicking on the color palette. I chose a bright blue for my second color.

Click on the stylus icon, and paint two more horizontal lines.

Change the color again. This time I chose a a gold color.

Click on the stylus icon, and paint two more horizontal lines.

Change the color again. This time I chose a purple color.

Paint one more horizontal line.

Now change the Draw Strokes... to Animate Strokes.

Twirl down the Wiggle Control Arrow.

Check the Enable Wiggling box.

Change the following parameters:

Wiggles/second: 0.50
Displacement Variation: 524.54
Displacement Detail: 34.10
Pressure variation: 100
Pressure Detail: 83.4
Check the Individual Stroke Seeds box.
Composite Paint: Only

Add Effect>Perspective>Bevel Alpha

Edge Thickness: 2.00
Light Angle: -60.00
Light Color: Default
Light Intensity: 1.00

Make your movie and watch the confetti take on a life of its own.

See also part one or part two of this series.

Thanks to Jens Enqvist, Nils Schneider and the rest of the Cult Effects team for writing Cult Effects and sharing their files so that we could have these tutorials.

--Kathlyn Lindeboom

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