Hash Recipes: Making of “Catwalk” in Adobe After Effects

Serving: 1 NFT; Time: 6 hours; Difficulty: Medium

Ingredients:

• Cinema 4D
• After Effects
• Trapcode Particular

Directions:

See (and bid on) the final product here!

1. Shape Layers (Vector Lines in After Effects) with Trim Paths and expressions like “wiggle(x,y)” can be used to add randomness to your shapes. (More info here.) Apply this technique to a circle to produce random mouths and whiskers, and get more variation.

2. Add Fractal Noise as an Alpha Matte in order to get the water color texture.

3. Apply “Roughen Edges”, with randomized evolution to make each cat shape change with each frame of the timeline.

4. Create an infinite amount of cats

5. Use an animated 3D cat walking loop in Cinema 4D to get the cycle and angle the way you want.

6. Render out the walk and bring it into After Effects. Then convert it to an animated black and white matte.

6. Render out the walk and bring it into After Effects. Then convert it to an animated black and white matte.

7. Using this matte, launch Trapcode Particular to create particles based on the area of the cat in each frame.

8. Use Particular to apply each randomized cat head you made earlier as a particle, changing as the cat moves with each frame.

9. Fine-tune the frenetic animation that randomizes and lives within the boundaries of the cat.

Best served on a 4K digital display.

Enjoy!