Recreating the blossom transition from Ghost of Tsushima (Patreon)
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Hi!
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