John Einselen has a quick tip for using Trapcode Particular in After Effects for creating realistic dust hits showing some advanced compositing techniques while going over the process in the tutorial. Check out the tutorial for Creating Realistic Dust Hits in After Effects Using Trapcode Particular here.
John creates a 3D scene in a 3D application (in his case Lightwave) to build a wall that gets destroyed section by section that will be rendered and brought into After Effects, and also brings in the camera animation into After Effects so that the After Effects camera will be doing the same thing as the original 3D camera for the rendered scene.
John then uses a rendered Depth Buffer or Depth Pass to describing where the particles will end up in the composite, giving some control over where the particle will show up in the scene in front or behind some objects.
