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Recreating the blossom transition from Ghost of Tsushima
🕑 Added 2020-08-04 11:07:55 +0000 UTCHi!
So I've been playing a bit of Ghost of Tsushima lately, and I noticed this really lovely visual effect: whenever a title card (like a level name) disappears off screen, it breaks into a pile of cherry blossom that is swept off the screen by a strong wind.
Wow! I thought it was really neat and wanted to figure out if I could make something similar in After Effects. Not for anything in particular - I don't have a Tsushima video planned! - but just for fun and practice.
After some Googling and messing around, I found the perfect effect in After Effects: shatter. You basically put a force on your image and it shatters into a million tiny particle effects. Looks great! Thanos would be proud. Problem is...
The shapes you can pick from for the particles are not what I'm looking for. Even if I scale the glass effect down really far, it still looks too sharp and pointy. It needs to be round to look like blossom.
Eggs isn't bad, but there's a lot of problems. One: it looks like eggs. Two: the bits in between the eggs are treated as star-shaped particles. Three: the edges of the letters cut through the eggs, making them half-eggs. This is no good, I'm going to have to use a custom shape.
Okay, I'll fast forward the two hours I spent figuring out how the shatter effect reads source images for custom shatter maps. Basically, black spots are ignored entirely, and individually coloured segments are treated as particle effects. So I made a whole bunch of blossom particles and laid them out in the shape of the GMTK logo. And saved another version where it's all white.
Back in After Effects... hey! Looking pretty good! The only problem is that while the shatter effect can really accurately break apart a source image (as you can see with the glass above), that will cut up any organic shapes (as seen with the eggs). So what I'm going to need to do is only render out the particles, and then do some jiggery pokery to transition between the original logo and the new particles.
First, though: physics! The particle effects are actually tiny physics objects which can be affected by invisible "force balls" that push them about. So I can roll a couple of these "force balls" across the letters, left to right, to push the particles away. By setting the gravity point to be to the right of the screen, the blossom particles will naturally float away in a nice, windy way. After a bunch of messing around, I exported the particles as a transparent video.
I put the particles on top of the original white logo, and then used a mask with a little feathering to quickly hide the logo at the exact point that the particles fly off. While it's not as perfect as using the proper shatter effect, if you watch the GIF up top closely you'll notice that Ghost of Tsushima actually does the exact same thing! So, I'm happy with the compromise.
And here's the final result. You can watch the video above if you want to see it in higher quality and with sound. It's not perfect, but I'm very happy with the result, especially as this is my first try at particle effects!
Anyway. It's always good to practice new techniques and improve my skills. This won't be for any videos I'm working on now but now I have this knowledge, I might find a use for it in the future!
Thanks. You're the best
Mark
Comments
Guillaume Cassuto
Well done Mark! If I may though, I think the only issue here is that we can tell the text itself doesn't get blown off, it's getting masked as blossom shaped particles are being emitted from the same area. Not exactly the same as the effect in the game, but a nice shortcut. To achieve the actual effect from GOT, you need to use a particle system, use your text layer as an emitter with no forces applies so the petals don't move as they get generated, and then apply a force once they've spawned. I'd need to try but I think Particle World (which is the stock particle simulator shipped with AE) can't do instanced particles (where you feed it a certain shape rather than use spheres, or stars etc.). The obvious choice would be the fairly pricey Trapcode Particular, that's been mentioned above. At least, short of using a 3D package, that's what we would use in the industry to generate this effect. Still impressed with your dedication and for taking the time to tackle these sort of challenges!
Tom Hauville
If you don't mind shelling out for 3rd party plugins, you might find Trapcode Form useful for an effect like this. That would be the first thing I tried. What would be even better is to use a proper particle effect like Particular which allows for better control of the particle behaviour, although it's not so great for using a mask to birth particles. (Another one I haven't tried is Stardust for After Effects, which probably has the required controls) As such, I might be more inclined to use a more robust package -- tyFlow with 3dsmax would eat an effect like this for breakfast. I'm pretty sure Unreal Engine would have a reasonably simple setup for this too. No doubt Sucker Punch are using their own propreitary software and have finely crafted this effect. If you need any advice on AE, feel free to hit me up. At any rate, well done for persevering with the shatter effect. The result is pretty good!
Tydup00
Thank you for sharing!!! Hope all is well.
Austin Bridges
I think there's potentially an interesting discussion that Tsushima sparks about how players "discover" a map and side activities in open-world games
Moon Spirit
This is great! I'll keep this in mind if I ever need to make a petals transition
Virak
Looks good!
André Barreto
this is also a great insight for making cool transition/effects in any game engine with particle systems! And it's lovely!
This looks awesome! I've never done anything in after effects before, but I think I'll try now!
John Fehlner
Awesome! I guess now we need a Ghost of Tsushima episode
OSW Review
sweet effect! Cool to see behind the curtain. and then cry as PowerDirector is not half as fancy.
Serhiy Todosan
Love it ♥️
Eleanor Watson
Wow that is neat
