Tutorial 207: Particulates

Joe Clay | Apr 24, 2020

While Trapcode Particular and Stardust are both amazing particle systems in their own right, sometimes you need just a little bit of floaty bits to add to a scene. You could try to bend After Effects' aging built-in particle systems to your will, or you can do what we do—hack your own solution with text animators.

Over time we've come to find, through working with Mikey Borup and through Kyle Hamrick's wonderful Textperiments, that text animators are one of AE's most amazing secret powers. For example, AE's beta only recently got tapered strokes, but they've been hacked in text animators for years. Text animators are the closest thing AE has to Cinema 4D's Mograph system. And so we're going to continue our exploration of text animators to make some floaty particles. Check it out!

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