Tutorial: Alphabet Soup (Fake Text Particles)

In this After Effects tutorial I will show you how to create a cool underwater opening title sequence. Rather than using Trapcode Particular (which many of you may not have installed) or CC Particle World (which really could use an update to its coordinate system) the project fakes particle simulation through use of text animators.

This quite lengthy tutorial is derived from another Video Bits project I created a while ago. The original Alphabet Soup used Particular and wasn’t much more than an eye-candy. The new-and-improved one I present to you today can actually be used for something else than ambient displays :)

Let me also give the credit where it is due: The preview video uses an audio clip from Lech Janerka’s song entitled Absolulu. I have been listening to it all day long and I can still take more.

Running time: 66min
Difficulty: Medium (as long as you’re patient)
Required tools: After Effects

Preview video:

Tutorial:

Download the files associated with this tutorial below:

• Project File
  http://downloads.qubahq.com/tutorials/QubaHQ_AlphabetSoup.zip
• Tutorial (182MB MP4)
  http://video.qubahq.com/tutorials/QubaHQ_AlphabetSoup.mp4

You may also download the tutorial from its Vimeo page. The preview video can also be watched at YouTube.

If you happen to use this tutorial in your projects, let me know. I am curious about what the community comes up with!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.