It's been a while since you animated some dust. Way back in lesson 0203 you were thrown into the deep end with some rather complex impact dust. Just because we may now consider your skills more advanced, doesn't mean dust is suddenly simple. In this lesson however, we'll do a scene of falling dust that combines some simple animation with complex stuff.
Have you ever seen falling dust? It's highly likely you've seen the effect in TV and movies. More than a few movies come to mind where characters look up at the ceiling to see dust falling, as tremors rattle the building or cave.
In this scene, you'll make several separate falling dust columns, then place them into a scene and fully treat them.
Let's first check the layout to see what the scene requires of you.
video 33_dust
video 33_dust2
video 33_dust3
With what you've already learned about dust animation, you're equipped to go ahead and treat this scene fully. This is not a requirement however. I would love to see some finished work on the forum, or in your next project, but as always, we're mostly interested in the animation side of things.
As you know, one of the best ways to add depth to your cloud FX is with layering. Falling dust is no different, and if you decide to fully treat this scene, I suggest adding at least one extra layer to each column, to give it a "core" of thicker dust.
This is illustrated in Figure 1 where the inner core of dust is treated separately to the fuzzy outer "wrapping" of less densely packed, drifting particles.
After the previous difficult scene assignments, I think this one may come as a welcome relief to you. Once you have two or three of these falling dust columns, you may even like to save them to your library and reuse them in other projects.
Having said that, falling dust animation is just like any other task in life; the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. Having a library of a few really good dust columns is handy, but not much help when it comes time to customise the effect for a particular scene or camera angle. For example, looking up at the ceiling with dust falling into the camera lens is quite an animation challenge and one in which you can't use a simple straight-shot dust column.
The video handouts demonstrated how this scene should be composed and paced. There is no FX layout included with the downloads, so watch the videos, then position and time your falling dust how you think it works best.
