Here comes another improvised collaboration between me and Bora. I had some more shots from the previous set and decided to put together this little cheerful St. Valentine’s day piece for all of you.
Most of the work was done in After Effects, with the exception of the 3D heart, created in Cinema 4D. With love,
In this long-delayed tutorial I will show you an efficient method for disintegrating/dispersing a 3D layer into particles. The method shown here has been optimized to produce maximum amount of particles at lowest computing cost (more stuff flying around, faster renders).
Originally planned to be released in June 2010, this tutorial concludes the four-part series including: 100% Accurate Reflections, Automated Light Rig and Light Wall.
Running time: 70min
Difficulty: Medium
Required tools: After Effects, Trapcode Particular
Optional plug-ins: VC Optical Flares (or similar)
This project was definitely one for the books. We were asked to create a 23 second ad for Şölen – a Turkish candy and chocolate company. We were given three weeks to produce a set of three videos (each for different product line) and the general guidelines regarding the current style used by the client’s ads this season.
With the storyboards approved, we contacted Onur Senturk, whom you might know from his independent pieces such as Nokta or TRI▲NGLE. Onur took care of animating the ribbons, while I did the colors, particles, light fx and all that extra shiny-sparkly stuff. Leo Burnett – agency for this project – provided us with the 3D renders of the products and the audio track.
The project I am working on at the moment kept me out of the studio for most of the time recently. While I was away though, I did not want the computers to stay idle, so I set up some calculation-intensive experiments to render during my absence. Here’s one of them.
I have come across a fantastic Cinema 4D plugin called Xbreaker created by pariah Studios. It allows you to shatter pretty much any geometry into tiny pieces with just a few clicks. Add some physics, shaders, a bit of post in After Effects – and you got yourself a nice little visual experiment.
Hello everyone! Yes, it is here – a long-delayed new tutorial from the June series. It’s been around 6 weeks since the previous tutorial, but I have been incredibly busy building a new kick-ass hi-tech intro for the tutorials… No. Not really. The truth is I have been working on multiple commercial projects and could not find any time off for neither leisure nor tutorials. As for the intro – I knocked it together in a few minutes at 4:00AM last night.
This tutorial is a hybrid between the Automated Light Rig and Scrolling LED Text. We will be building an animated image map driven light array that can be used for for either cool light effects or easily controlled particle emission.
While the entire project can be completed within After Effects, I will also jump into Cinema 4D every now and then and show you a very easy way for creating quite complex light arrays and importing them back into AE.
Music used in the trailer comes from Beck’s Cellphone’s Dead from the album The Information. Music in the intro comes from… here.
Running time: 73min
Difficulty: Easy-Advanced (depending how much you want to learn :)
Required tools: After Effects
Optional software and plug-ins: Cinema 4D, Trapcode Particular, VC Optical Flares (or similar)
I am currently working on the new reel for imago and while digging in the project archives I came across this this test render for One Man Show – a piece I made back in 2008. Using Trapcode Particular and three Photoshop layers I created a large scale meadow that, honestly speaking, didn’t get enough exposure in the finished piece.
Most of the time it is the best practice to manually control the lights in your After Effects scenes. There are situations however, when you may want to automate the dynamic changes in light color and intensity while maintaining high level of control over the look of your composition. That’s what the Automated Light Rig is all about.
In this tutorial I will show you how to link your lights with automated samplers on an image map, creating an ever-changing, yet unified, light rig. While the tutorial explains the expressions in depth, I am also providing you with presets simplifying the entire process into just few clicks.
As a little extra, I will also show you how to create a 3D light-aware smoke using Trapcode Particular (my method is a bit more involved than the standard Particular setup, but produces results that are much more true to life).
Music used in the trailer comes from Mr. Oizo’s Fiat 55 from the album Analog Worms Attack.
Running time: 45min
Difficulty: Easy-Medium
Required tools: After Effects
Optional plug-ins: Trapcode Particular
In this After Effects tutorial I will demonstrate to you how to build a two-camera rig in order to create perfect 3D reflections. Using this technique, you will be able to reflect not only 3D layers, but also lights, particles, as well as any plug-in that obeys the movement of AE’s 3D camera.
The setup is trivially easy when using hand-animated cameras, but in the second half of the video I also show you how to create a more complex rig for use with Video Copilot’s Sure Target 2 camera controls.
The music used in the preview is a fragment of an Instrumental Mix of Perfect Exceeder by MASON vs Princess Superstar.
Running time: 51 min
Difficulty: Easy (you will be surprised how easy)
Required tools: After Effects (CS3 and above)
Optional plug-ins: VC Optical Flares, Knoll Light Factory, Trapcode Lux, Trapcode 3D Stroke, Trapcode Particular
In this After Effects tutorial I will show you how to create a cool underwater opening title sequence. Rather than using Trapcode Particular (which many of you may not have installed) or CC Particle World (which really could use an update to its coordinate system) the project fakes particle simulation through use of text animators.
This quite lengthy tutorial is derived from another Video Bits project I created a while ago. The original Alphabet Soup used Particular and wasn’t much more than an eye-candy. The new-and-improved one I present to you today can actually be used for something else than ambient displays :)
Let me also give the credit where it is due: The preview video uses an audio clip from Lech Janerka’s song entitled Absolulu. I have been listening to it all day long and I can still take more.
Running time: 66min
Difficulty: Medium (as long as you’re patient)
Required tools: After Effects
Revealing handwritten text is one of these unpleasant tasks every motion designer has to deal with at least once. In this tutorial I present possibly the quickest and most efficient way of producing this effect.
Since the reveal effect itself is quite simple to produce and would result in a very short tutorial, I added some bulk to the video by presenting a smart way of guiding a null along the reveal, using it to drive different effects, such as a lens flare or particles.
Running time: 35min
Difficulty: Medium
Required tools: After Effects, Illustrator, Trapcode 3D Stroke and Particular.
Optional tools: Video Copilot Optical Flares
Here’s a long-delayed new imago studios reel for 2012. It includes commercial and independent pieces completed both in-house and as a collaboration with various production companies.
AE64 is a tribute to the demoscene and to the legacy of world’s most popular microcomputer: Commodore 64.
While this video was created using the typical contemporary arsenal of tools (mainly After Effects and Cinema 4D), it conforms to most of the basic graphical limitations of the C64 such as a limited 16-color palette, low resolution, use of the overscan area etc. To maintain the spirit of the demo, I also created most of the effects using various scripts and code snippets, procedurally automating many of the tasks typically animated using keyframes.
In this tutorial I will teach you how to create your own UFO troll video using After Effects and Mocha – a process that should take you no longer than 30 minutes from the moment you grab a camera, to the time you are ready for upload.
I am the creative free agent, and I want you to work with me.
In this tutorial I will demonstrate the use of a new free preset from QubaHQ.com – Floaties. Floaties is a text animator based fake particle simulator allowing you to create floating specs of dust, glitters, bokeh-style out of focus abstract backgrounds and other visual elements.
In this tutorial I will show you how to quickly simulate stop motion aesthetic using my After Effects Stop Motion Kit. This collection of presets will allow you to easily add subtle imperfections to the movement of objects in your scene, emulating animator errors that are a staple of stop motion animation. Using 6 different expression sets, you will be able to apply and control glitches in movement, rotation and timing of your objects as well as simulate changes in camera position and exposure.
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