Hey guys. I’m back at you with another really fast, quick and cool motion tutorial. This is not going to be really in depth or involved, this is just quick little things that help you get some ideas.

First thing we’re going to do is type some text. Select your text tool and type in whatever text you want. I’ll just type my name and you hit the escape key to get out there. Now with your text in there, I’m going to hit the D key to bring out the dashboard and I’m going to make my text to—and I’m going to make it regular. I want o set the alignment to sinner and I want to set the text size to 225. Now I want to set the tracking to about 10. Now I’m going to position my text to the center of the canvass. Now what you have should look something like this. Now, I’m going to open up my layers tab and I’m going to toggle the visibility check box to my text and that hides it. So now, we’re going to draw a shape. We’re going to draw a circle so select your circle, hold your shift key, click and drag and it will make a perfect circle like so and you hit the escape key to exit out of your shape drawing mode. And now with the shape selected, let’s go to our dashboard and set the feather to -20 like so. Now, we’re ready to create our replicator. So we’ll select the circle shape and click on the replicate button in the tool bar. Now we have this replicator. If you see it, it gives this cool little pattern. Now with the replicator selected, go to the inspector and view the replicator tab. Now change the shape from rectangle to image. Now with the replicator still selected, grab the text that you wrote and drop it in the Source Image Well; boom. Now we are going to set the arrangement to random fill, it’s on pile fill now and then we are going to up the number of points by a whole lot; almost 800. Okay, there that’s about it, 800. Now I’m going to set the cell controllers in the replicator tab with the scale to 80% like so and now, I’m going to set the scale random to 20. Now, what we got is this text here, just let me grab my group and pull it back down so you can see it. Now this is what your text should look like. Select the replicator and go back to the replicator tab and set the Emission Alpha Cut Off to 1%. Emission Alpha Cut Off is right here under your Image Source Well; set it to 1%.

Now we are going to add some color. So, with the replicator selected, like so, we’re going to view the replicator tab and I’m already there. Now under the color mode, I’m going to select pick from range. Now what you want to do is I’m no going to sit here and finesse these colors; you want to go in and make it look however you want it to look. I’m going to make it look like blood and I have saved the preset so I’m going to go in here and pick my bloody preset and as you can see now, it’s just red and different shades of red to make it look like blood. Now, we’ll select the parent layer of the replicator which is the main group. Now from the add filter toolbar, you need to go the library, select the stylized extrude filter and we are going to apply it to that group and boom this is what we get here.

Now go to the inspector and view the filters tab now we have our extrude parameters. Let’s set the distance to 14; that brings back our distance a little bit. And now it’s time to apply the indent filter. So we’ll select the parent layer of the replicator and let’s go to the toolbar up here, add filter, stylize, and indent. And this gives us this bloody plastic-y type of look. Now, let’s go to inspector and view the filters tab and set the brightness to 0.4. And let’s set the ambient to 0.3.

So now, so far, this is the look we got. Now let’s apply simulation to this. Just go up to behavior, simulation, random motion. Now, let’s turn our amount up, let’s take our random motion and apply it to the circle. Now, as you can see when I play this, we have our text slowly coming apart. Now, all I have to do is go to file, export. Let’s export this to the desktop and just let this export here because I wanted to show you a way to do this. As you can see, there’s a little preview here and it just shows these bloody little blobs rather than just kind of spreading apart and when this gets done, I’ll show this to you again. Okay, there as you can see our movie is done and it’s just our blobs coming apart from my name. So now what we’re going to do is let’s go to our file browser and let’s find this untitled. So let’s uncheck this to make it disappear. Let’s bring in the movie we just rendered and there it is. As you can see when we go through, it’s just our name spreading apart. What I want to do is; I’m going up and say add behavior, retiming, reverse. Now when we play it, it looks like a bunch of particles scattered coming in to spell my names Kind of like what we did in Houdini. There it goes. Just kind of go through the clash once so I’m going to let it take it’s time and step through this so you guys can see it, we can lay on it this way or I can render it like this and we can weight on it this way. So what we’ll do is we’ll just set here and I’ll let this render and I’ll be right back.

Okay, now we are back and let me play our project as you can see it starts scattered out and they come in and it’s going to spell my name. Not too bad, huh? So that my friends is how you kind of do the Houdini particle effect inside of Motion. If you liked the Houdini tutorial where the dust kind of came into my name or a specific shape, this is the same thing and this is how you do it in Motion. Play around with your colors, play around with your looks and send me your results. I’d love to see what you guys can come up with because you all never seize to amaze me. I hope you’ve learned something you could apply to your own daily work and we’ll see you next time.