Make it snow with BCC in your Autodesk Flame

Download a Free BCC Snow Spark >>

BCC v3 Sparks is a package of over 130 plug-ins (Sparks) for Autodesk compositing and finishing systems. A free 60 day trial is available for download at www.borisfx.com/downloads. For details regarding the BCC Sparks, please visit the BCC Sparks web pages by pointing your browser to: www.borisfx.com/product/continuum/sparks.

In this step-by-step tutorial, we will use the BCC Snow generator spark within Autodesk Flame to create the effect of snow falling in the background image plate and accumulating along the horizontal edges of a text element, which is then composited over the background image plate.

• Start by entering flame's batch mode - we're going to create an SD comp 100 frames long.
• From within the batch UI, add an image node for the background plate and select the background clip from your library. We are going to composite the text and snow on top of this background image.

• Add a text node and enter the text node interface.
• Set the text "the alps" - I used Utopia-BoldItalic as font face at 110 points with the kerning set to 11. The color of the text should be set to white.

• Exit the text generator interface and return to the batch interface.
• Add a spark node and select the BCC Snow spark from the list.
• Pipe the text through all inputs of the BCC Snow spark and enter the spark UI.

• Set the snow amount to 50, which will generate a dense storm of snowflakes.

• Go to control panel 2 in the BCC Snow spark UI.
• Enable the "stick to comp layer" function by clicking the button with that name.
• Set the interaction channel to Luma from the pop-up list under the stick to comp layer button.

• Observe that the snow now appears to accumulate along the horizontal edge of the text element. Other snowflakes fall through gaps in the letters and words to generate a more photorealistic result.

• Go back to control panel 1 in the BCC Snow spark.

To control the snowfall animation, we're going to keyframe and animate the life of the snow particles.

• Go to the animation pane in the BCC Snow spark interface.
• Set a keyframe at frame 0 for the Particle Life Span parameter and set the value of this parameter to 0.

• Move to frame 70 and add another keyframe, setting the new value for the particle life span parameter to 550.

• Exit animation mode and return to the viewer mode.

Snow should now fall from an empty sky and accumulate along the horizontal edge of the text over time.

• Exit the sparks UI and return to the batch schematic interface.
• Add a quick comp node.
• Pipe the BCC Snow spark node to the front and matte inputs of the quick comp node.
• Pipe the background image plate into the background input of the quick comp node.
• Select the quick comp node and set the apply mode to "additive".
• Add an export node and connect the quick comp node to the export node.

• Switch the view from batch schematic to result and step through the timeline to see the final result.

There you have it in a few short minutes we took a simple background image, added a text element and then added an animated snowfall to complete the scene. The BCC Snow Spark is one of the many natural media generators included in the BCC Sparks package.