A few days ago I published a post entitled Volumetric Clouds? Yes We Can! featuring the screenshot of the After Effects timeline containing over 550 layers used in creating (among other things) fake volumetric fog/clouds.

The project is now complete, but since it is still not cleared for air, I have another teaser for you all – a video of the entire animation in wireframe mode.

The final composition clocks at 933 layers (excluding a whole bunch of pre-composed material).

In case you wonder – no, I did not manage to find a way to render After Effects wireframe mode. I simply programmed a simple macro on my keyboard that advances the frame by one, takes, saves the screenshot and then loops to repeat the steps again.

Music by Kult (Nie żyję ponad stan from the album Poligono Industrial).

I have been messing around with creating “painterly” look for a still image and came up with this one.

It is created through a combination of Photoshop’s Artistic Brush tool, After Effect’s Twixtor and a whole bunch of loops and nested comps to get the whole thing as smooth as possible.

As an unexpected side effect I also figured out how to make pretty convincing fake hand-drawn text in AE.

Music by Otograph “Dive into PixelJunk Monsters”
On the picture: Honda Jazz (a.k.a. Fit)

I’ve always had a soft spot for the 3D metaballs. It may come from the fact that as a teenager I watched way too many Amiga demos, where the metaball rendering was nearly always present.

The setup for this piece is fairly simple: a ball, bunch of array repeaters driven by a random movement – everything enveloped with metaball and smoothing modifiers. The pearl shader and HDRI lighting give the whole render a nice, shiny look (don’t we just love these specular reflections?)

Edited to the hip breakbeat tune “Pulsar” by Little Bitchard.

The tutorial for Image Enhancement (Hollywood Style) is ready. As announced last week, this video will teach you how to create your own HolOS (Hollywood Operating System) image enhancement effect using After Effects.

Go and watch it now at:
http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ae-plus/enhance-your-images-with-holos-ae-plus/

Enhance Your Images With HolOS is a “plus” tutorial and requires a $9 membership fee to be viewed. It is well worth it, though, as you will gain access to the source files, samples and many other “plus” tutorials… as well as support yours truly.

Here is the preview again, if you missed it the last time:

Image Enhancement (Hollywood Style)

Enhance Your Images With HolOS:
http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ae-plus/enhance-your-images-with-holos-ae-plus/

I have been messing around with Cinema 4D again. This time I built a setup with a number of semi-translucent curtains and a projector rig casting a video on them. The video was pre-processed in After Effects in order to produce a low-res RBG grid typical in the low grade projectors.

I did not really have a good concept for a piece when working on this effect, so after producing this short sample I saved it in my presets depository. Hopefully I will have a chance to use it when a suitable project comes along.

Here is a sample video and some stills from this test:

It seems that computers running HolOS (Hollywood Operating System) always have the capability to almost infinitely zoom in and enhance bad photographs to reveal crucial details (faces, car plate numbers, tattoos, etc.). I have decided to build my own image enhancement tool in After Effects.

The “tool” of course is nothing else than a composition that first pixelates the image and then animates the “miraculous” enhancement. Check the video below to see a demo of the effect.

Image Enhancement (Hollywood Style)

I am currently working on a tutorial explaining how to build this effect. Watch Quba HQ in the following week for its release.

Messing about with cloth simulation in version 11 of Cinema 4D, while waiting for my copy of R11.5. So far I learned that C4D cloth likes to intersect with itself much more than the nCloth in Maya.

Three short sequences I did during a pitch for a TV commercial. While we got the job, the project went in a different direction creatively, and these three little demo pieces were left orphaned.

Done in AE with little help from C4D. The style was inspired by video game interfaces, mainly Metal Gear Solid 4, Assassin’s Creed and Wipeout HD.

This effect uses particle system traveling along a 3D path to create a stream of energy. It can be used for magic vfx and is easily controlled by adjusting the guide path.

For this example I simply randomized the paths and camera movement to create more energetic and chaotic composition.

This abstract background is a combination of swimming pool caustics and elevation lines used in topographical maps. It was created using “vanilla” After Effects, without any 3rd party plugins.