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Got a request for this and I finally got around to writing it down.
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Shortly after The Matrix came out, there have been quite a few requests on how to achieve the affect of bullet trails. For the first time since the first movie, I'm going public with how I go about it. Fairly easy technique with lots of versatility.
I'm going to be running through this rather quickly. I'm leaving it up to you to fill in the blanks and put it all together. Sorry, but I'm not going to show a final result.
The first thing is squishing for a bit of perspective. You know, taller than wider or whatever you want to call it. Lay some guides with the Line tool, expand a bit, make some circles, and then squish it back down.
See? That wasn't so bad.
Next comes the actual circles. Gradient tool set to Radial and some Blending Mode is great. I just dragged a whole bunch out real quick, so pardon the sloppiness.
Along the top is set to Screen. In the middle is set to Lighten. Along the bottom is a Custom Gradient - not that hard to do if you know your way around the Custom Gradient dialog. Something like Black - White - Black with the White dragged way off to the side. Pretty spiffy. Too bad I didn't bother squishing them back down.
(Personally, I prefer the "shock wave" radial gradients. There is just something about them that I like over the others.)
If you want to jazz it up even more, try Curves: Intro to Curves by Steve
I can't stress enough the power of Curves, especially when used on gradients.
Plenty of room to play with the base circles. Don't be afraid to mix it up and try different things. You know, space them out or make them real tight. Whatever.
Oh yeah. The above was done entirely in the Layers palette. That's kind of important. If you do it in the Alpha palette, you will be in for some cut-n-paste. Besides, we'll be using Emboss, and Emboss leaves behind a lot of lovely gray, so Layers palette is just what the guru ordered.
Time for the "Double Emboss". This is done in the seperate R and G channels. Go to the Red channel and run Emboss. Use whatever values. In mine, I took it easy on the values. Then go to the Green channel and run Emboss again using basically the same values (the only value I changed is the Angle, which I prefer to do at a 90 from what I did in the Red channel). As a matter of preference, I went to the Blue channel and filled with 50% Gray. Then I topped it off with a small about of Gauss.
Tada.
Save that bad boy as a PSD to be used as a D-Map and get busy with Displace.
One of the cool things about this is the amount of control over the motion. If you are familiar with The Cubes and how Emboss works, you can do trails that twist a certain way or expand/contract. Or you can just mess around and leave it to chance. In the Emboss step, there is as much control or leway as you want.
Or you could leave Emboss behind and use Lighting Effects as mentioned in More Fakery. This means tossing the base circles into an Alpha channel. Or maybe you did the base circles in an Alpha channel instead of the Layers palette. Ummm... yeah.
There are a few ways to do the back-facing of the trails, but I'll leave that to you. Not exactly necessary, but it is good exercise. Another good exercise is adding a touch of highlights by using the D-Map. Again, not necessary, but it is good exercise and might add a bit of pop.
Now, if you want something really snazzy, toss in some of the ideas from Heat Waves and make that bad boy move!
I'm pretty sure I got the major bases covered. However, I've been known to leave people's brains in the dust.
I just finished explaining this same effect over at the CG Talk Photoshop board Stroker. B7
And i passed out your addy to the folks too. Thought you could use the business.
My explanation though was a little more compact, and my Dmap looked a little different.
Take a donut, dip it in some fresh coffee,.. oh... wait a minute... wrong subject. DOH! [doh]
Ok so... create a gradient sphere, then sqeeze it in width. Should look like a gradient pill shape now, standing vertically. Make this first one a decent size too.
Then dupe that 4x.
Move all of the layers left and right so the shapes are sitting right beside each other, and slightly overlapping.
Leave the original center shape alone, but scale down the other shapes in size. And make the outermost 2 shapes the smallest. Think of the Michillan (sp?) Man. That big tire ballon character.
Crop this image tightly, and Save this as your Dmap.
I got the idea for the look of this Dmap from watching the actual bullet scene at the Website. You can clearly see that this is the shape the shockwave produces mostly.
Does this follow your thinking at all Stroker?
I've actually tried this and the results are pretty good. But i didn't bother creating an example image either. To complete my method, there's a tad more work involved. [confused] [excited]
:::EDIT:::
Hey man! hahaa i just went over there and saw YOUR post in the thread. OOPS! Too bad i didn't go over there first. ;\
Yeah, I inter-forum posted it. Maybe tomorrow I'll post it over at the Asylum and someone will nab it for the FAQWiki.
Some of the pictures that I looked at had two distinct trails. In some, there were "patches" of donuts. In a few other pictures, they were all connected like one long gloppy glass tube.
Your pattern is certainly acceptable. Definitely a less work once you have the pattern made. Both methods have pros and cons and all that. Personal preference and stuff.
I did a little more messing around. Came up with a custom brush or two. Kind of like combining both of our approaches. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll get around to showing something.
edit:
Actually, there is a much easier and quicker way of doing this. Just use a really soft Airbrush to paint the trails in, save as PSD, then use Filter > Distort > Glass. Glass doesn't work directly from the brightness values of the map, but rather from the direction of a gradient. Kind of weird, but neat. Heh. Try it.
Ya actually, i thought of just using a brush too. But it seemed less controlable in a way. Now that you've tried it, i think i'll give it another go... see what strikes me.
I tried the Glass filter too, and actually it's much simpler than good ol' Displace.
Matrix Bullet Trails with Displace 
Linear Mode
