Snow globes are cool – especially when it’s a globe within a globe with a special alien visit. I found the images of the snow globe, earth and alien on Goggle images and brought them into Photoshop for tweaking.
Alien Visits Earth
Once the images were ready, I imported them into Aftereffects. Next, a snow composition was created and the Particle Playground effect was applied. Some of the properties of the Particle Playground were altered to give a full snowy effect. I made changes to the Barrel Radius, Particles per Second, Direction, Velocity and Colour.
Because the snow particles still appeared a bit square in shape, I applied the Fast Blur effect to smooth them out and appear more natural.
Once the snow composition was completed, I dropped it on the snow globe composition. Thing were starting to look pretty snowy/good but a mask still needed to be applied so that the snow would only be seen falling inside the globe.
Creating Snow
Once the mask was applied a few finishing touches where made to the snow. I played around with the Persistent Property Mapper, which makes the snow appear sticky and accumulate on the surface of the globe.
Though a globe in a globe is cool, I thought that an alien visit was necessary to finish things off. The alien appears out of thin air (as aliens often do) and then he orbits the earth until he decides to zoom in and check things out. This was all accomplished with transform property and changes made on the timeline to the opacity, scale and position. I’d love to play with the 3D camera a bit in the future and zoom in with the alien to see where he is going…
Finished Globe
