I’m still plugging away at a use for Trapcode Particular, and seeing as how we’re sliding into winter weather like a front-wheel drive sedan with bald tires, I figured that making snow wasn’t just for ski resorts.

This is the motif I’d been working towards, with a snowy particle zooming in to reveal the text of the alert. It’s not perfect; I’m not having trouble conceptualizing what I want, but I am having trouble making it a reality.

In the end, this would be what I hope to export using Bodymovin’ and test out as an alert using Lottie. The VIEWERNAME would obviously be what gets replaced by the dynamic text from Streamlabs.

Relevant Resources

Obviously, Trapcode Particular for the breeze-in. I downloaded the font Kari Display Pro from the Adobe font repo. The snow on top of the letters was a PITA done by hand in Photoshop, so I can’t rely on just changing the text and having the snow to match. I should see if there’s some kind of plugin somewhere that will replicate this effect, maybe with better results.

Relevant Websites

I pulled the gift box image from PxHere.com.

Technical Details

I started in Photoshop, looking to add some snow to the top of the letters. For this I used the Pen tool and drew blob masks on a white layer on top of the letters. This allowed the “snow” to show through. I like the results, but wish I had something more dynamic. I suspect I might be able to find a decent snow-covered font on 1001FreeFonts or DaFont.

The letters, snow, and gift boxes were imported into AE as a Composition – Retain Layer Styles with editable layer styles. This provided me with each layer as a working AE layer, and clipped each layer’s bounds to the height and width of the contents. This was important for working with the text, as I’d need to deal with a mask later on.

Text and snow layers got precomp’d because I needed them “together”. Then came the “fun” part: building the snow…eh…zip? in Trapcode Particular. I’m not going to cover all of the settings, but the emitter is a light spitting out 5000 particles per second. The velocity from motion is set to 20% because I wanted the movement of the light from left to right to play a part in how the particles were generated. I got the cone shape by changing the Emitter Size from XYZ Linked to XYZ Individual and setting X to 250, Y to 50, and Z to 0 (since we’re not using custom cameras). Along with some of the other settings, this produced the “jet” of “snow” that the light emitter leaves in its wake. I duplicated the entire emitter and settings as System 2, and colored the particles a slight blue…it looks more like a “mint” color, and I’m not entirely happy with it. I was looking for something a little more sparkly, but didn’t really spend time with the secondary system.

With the snow, the text, and the particles in a new comp, I put a mask over the “New Follower” text which I animated right behind the moving light to reveal the text. In an ideal world, the text would be built from the particles of the snow blitz, but this is not an ideal world, and I couldn’t figure out how to really do that.

As the light emitter moves out of frame, the gifts scale up from 0 to 120 and quickly back to 100% to give it a little “bounce”. The anchor point is at the bottom of the image to provide that “growing in from the baseline” look. VIEWERNAME (using the wrong font, of course) has it’s own mask which is animated to move in time with the gift reveal; this is what we’ll use Lottie to replace, gawd willing.