Coronavirus made with After Effects

I’ve been working on a Google Web Story about the corona virus for USA Today. It’s an interesting opportunity to made something in 3d with Stardust.

Stardust is a powerful particle generator plugin for After Effects made by Superluminal. It’s super powerful. It has a bit of a learning curve but the results are striking.

For the USAT story I’m working on I went for a more realistic and less dramatic look. But since I’ve got all the assets I thought I’d make a version with some volumetric lighting.

I used Stardust to place obj models of the blood cell, virus and vein. I added an emitter behind the obj elements to emit small particles at a slow speed to simulate the blood stream. Red Giant’s Lux was used to add the volumetric lighting. I added some wave wiggle to nulls controlling the virus obj models.

The last step was to add a camera with some depth of field and set some keyframes.