design

As my focus shifted away from flat media and towards 360° and Virtual Reality content, the updates to QubaHQ became more and more sparse. Today it is my pleasure to introduce to you my brand new website: QubaVR.com. It will be a home to all my newest projects, my VR-focussed portfolio and a host of articles, reviews and editorials on the subject of immersive media.

Come join me on Thursday, February 18at 7PM – 9PM at Adobe Systems Inc in Seattle for a talk about some cool toys I’ve been building inside After Effects. Organized by After Effects Seattle, in this three-part presentation I will demonstrate how to push After Effects to do things it was not designed to do – building your own unique rigs and effects.

Topographix is a cool new tech I have been developing for the past few days. It will most likely eventually make its way to the QubaHQ tutorials, but not before we make something new using it with my team. The tool is still in early alpha, but already kicks some major ass and se should start doing some testing early next week.

I would not go as far as calling it Concept ART, but as I was working to develop a number of idle animations for the player sprite, I realized how little I understood about what I am drawing.
I use pixel art is an abstraction, a simplification of an actual form - but I never really stopped to think about what this actual form may be. Needles to say, abstracting something that does not exist was quite tough.

In this massive, 3-chapter tutorial you will learn how to create an After Effects scene with a realistic rain dripping down a window. In chapter 1 I explain the creation of the background plate - from a single photograph to an illusion of an alive city at night. In chapter 2 I walk you though the creation of rain simulation using Trapcode Particular. The final, 3rd chapter focuses on compositing these elements together to create the final look.

In this episode I will share with you a simple After Effects preset I designed to help me stick 2D layers to a variety of sources without the need for parenting. While the technique itself is trivially simple, I will explain in-depth the mechanism behind the script and walk you through a number of examples of how it can be used.

In episode 2 of the QubaHQ Tutorials Season 2, I will show you how to use Photoshop's batch processing to create a cool glitch effect based off the GIF compression algorithm.

In this tutorial I will discuss the optics of chromatic aberration and common ways of reproducing it in vfx. I will also introduce the brand new Chromatic Aberration Rig in form of an After Effects script that automates the creation of this effect into a simple 2-click procedure.