Using Blender for Motion Graphics
I was recently tasked with creating an animation for Chameleon Colors, a color powder company that specializes in turning everyday events into colorful celebrations. They wanted a short video hook that they could use for their online advertising.
Chameleon Colors requested a video where “color explosions in different colors [appear]. One by one, the explosions reveal the Chameleon Colors swirl in the negative of the blasts that colors leave.”
It Costs How Much?!
I was excited to dive into After Effects and try out one of the plugin suites I’d been hearing about all over the place: Trapcode Particular.
When I went to the plugin website to download the powerful tool, I discovered something that no one online had mentioned: the price.
You can no longer purchase Trapcode Particular as a standalone plugin. Instead, it requires an annual subscription to Red Giant, which comes to approximately $640 before tax and service fees, and that’s the discounted rate. If you were to go the monthly route, and pay approximately $85, then you’d be spending over $1,000 per year.
You’ve got to love the subscription scam model that so many companies embrace, and so many customers seem to dislike.
This wasn’t a hurdle I expected to encounter so early in the project. As a professional who is still relatively new to the field, I wasn’t in a position to make that kind of purchase.
That left me in a difficult position: how could I meet my client’s expectations without purchasing an expensive plugin?
To answer that question, I turned to the internet and searched for tutorials covering similar effects. Unfortunately, most of the tutorials either required Trapcode Particular or were so outdated that the effects they relied on no longer existed.
My Old Enemy…
Out of ideas, I turned to our old frenemy: ChatGPT.
The prompt I entered looked something like this:
“I have been tasked to create motion graphics for chameleon colors. They want a color explosion that looks like the colored powder that they sell. I am trying to find a way to achieve this in After Effects, in a way that looks like the powder. However, I don’t have money for any major plugins that would make this more effective. I have tried manually searching for any tutorials that can achieve this desired effect, but haven’t found any that aren’t outdated or that align to what I want. Can you do a search and see if there are tutorials out there that I can follow.”
It suggested several helpful tutorials that I hadn’t previously found. But then it made a suggestion I hadn’t considered.
“If you’re open to using free Blender alongside After Effects, there are some excellent Blender tutorials for powder, dust, and smoke simulations that can be rendered with transparent backgrounds and composited in AE. Blender’s fluid simulation is dramatically more capable than After Effects’ native tools and doesn’t require paid plugins.”
Learning Blender
I decided to take ChatGPT’s advice and download Blender.
I had heard of and experimented with Blender a few times, but I’d never considered using it for motion graphics. After all, who couldn’t benefit from learning something new?
I dove in headfirst and immediately realized that this was going to be challenging.
A tutorial video by BlenderGuru helped me learn the basics of Blender’s interface. I completed the first hour of the tutorial and plan to revisit the remaining sections when I have more time.
Once I mastered the basics, I found another tutorial to help me learn Mantaflow, Blender’s native smoke and fluid simulator. The tutorial I followed was created by Blender Made Easy and gave me an understanding of how Mantaflow performs.
Colored Explosions
Once I was comfortable, I searched for a tutorial that could help me get the colored powder explosions that my client was looking for.
I found a tutorial from GarageFarm Academy that matched what I needed.
The concepts covered in the tutorial were still effective, regardless of the video’s age. I followed the tutorial step by step until I achieved a result I was happy with.
Once I understood the process, I began experimenting until I found an effect that I was happy with.
I baked the simulation and exported it as a video with a transparent background. Then I exported a second simulation to create a lingering dust effect that helped the powder feel lighter.
Moving to After Effects
I imported the rendered videos into After Effects and layered them on top of one another, creating depth.
I removed the colors I had added in Blender and increased the contrast to enhance the highlights and shadows.
Once I was satisfied with the overall appearance, I added simple opacity animations to the powder simulations to create the illusion of the particles dispersing into the air. I adjusted the keyframes and timing until I achieved the look I wanted.
After completing the animation, I created a precomposition of the powder explosion and applied either a Tint effect or a Four-Color Gradient that matched the powder options offered by Chameleon Colors and the colors used in the company’s logo.
Once every color variation was complete, I assembled all of the elements into a final composition and created the series of colorful explosions the client had originally requested.