In the second part (which did not get recorded) we’ve created a Christmas tree using Trapcode Particular and 3D Serpentine. Also – I gave away a copy of Zaxwerks Serpentine, Toolfarms AE Camera Training, and my very own Youveelizer plugin.

It was much fun. See you next year.

Want to waste some time? Get to know how to embed hidden images into existing footage and learn few cool tricks on the way.

Click here to watch the video tutorial

This tutorial is completely useless. I can’t stress that enough. Who would ever want to put a hidden message in a video, right? Well… maybe James Bond would, but he told me he’s not much into After Effect. Encoding a hidden message in a video is pointless especially because it message might get distorted after compressing the video. There are hundreds of different reasons why you shouldn’t do it.

However, you can still learn few cool tips and tricks while watching this short tutorial, so if you have a few spare minutes to waste make sure to watch it anyway. I kind of like showing cool techniques with such extreme examples like this one. Let me know if you like the idea, I might make more totally useless experiments in the future.

Happy AfterEffecting.

There comes a time in visual effects artists life when he’s bound to create firing guns and muzzle flashes. Learn how to build your own muzzles… in 3D.

Click here to watch the video tutorial

If you haven’t build muzzle flashes yet I’m sure the day will come. Why not be ready for it? Creating muzzle flashes is a never dying subject of VFX, especially for low budget action movies. There are loads of tutorials and products on this subject and I’ve been through all of them, but I never found anything that I liked… until I came across FXhome website. They have a few applications design to do one job – visual effects.

They always had this great engine for creating muzzle flashes in 3D. Over six months ago when I saw it for the first time I was so inspired that I’ve build my own 3D muzzle flash generator for AE that I will now share with you.

But wait… theres more. FXhome has just released their ground braking 3D muzzle technology as a AE plugin called MuzzlePlug. They’ve been kind enough to give me a license to test it out and make a review.

In this video you will get to know my opinion on FXhome MuzzlePlug, but that’s not all. You will also learn how to create your own 3D muzzle flashes using just AE and some 3rd party plugins. But have no fear… most of the plugins used in my tutorial you probably already own. If you don’t than you really should consider buying them. I’m referring of course to the great Trapcode plugins, in this case 3D Stroke and Shine.

With this tutorial I’m providing two project files. First one is the tutorial itself, and the second one if the 3D Muzzle Flash Generator along with the presets used in the tutorial.

To use the 3D Muzzle Flash Generator simply import it into your existing project, duplicate the MuzzleBasic comp, modify the position of the camera and put this new comp into your shot. There’s an example of using it in the tutorial as well. 3D Muzzle Flash Generator is hard to build, but very easy to use, and I was crazy enough to provide it for you so you can instantly start shooting some freaky aliens.

If you like FXhome MuzzlePlug better I still recommend using my MuzzleController and MuzzleEnviroment presets to alter the behavior and look of the MuzzlePlug generated muzzle flash. See the tutorial for more information.

Enjoy.

Download: Tutorial project file (After Effects CS3)

Download: 3D Muzzle Flash Generator (After Effects CS3)

This is going to be very interesting if you have any programming experience. Any programming language will do: C++, PHP, Ruby, Visual Basic, Java, or even ActionScript. AE Expressions are based on JavaScript, so they are not only object oriented. You can also use any JavaScritp syntax and build-in functions that are not listed anywhere in AE itself. Unfortunately some things will not work as expected, and sometimes you might even get an error message, when everything is ok. When that happens simply turn off the expression and turn it back on again, or select all, cut it out, press Enter, and then paste it again making sure that you don’t have any white spaces in the beginning or end of the expression. That helps sometimes.

For example:

var currentTime = new Date();

In Javascript this creates a new variable that holds the Date object, that if no attributes are used in the constructor points to the current local time represented in milliseconds. If you’d try that in expressions you’d get an error. AE will force you to pass some attributes to the constructor. But that doesn’t mean we’ll not gonna have any fun.

Create a new text layer, and in the text source property try this code:

this;

Aaaahhh…. Ok. We’re getting somewhere. But what is this (object Layer) thing? Lets find out. Next piece of code will enumerate all properties of the object Layer.

Replace the above code with this one:

myPropList = []; //declare new array
currentFrame = timeToFrames(time, 1 / thisComp.frameDuration, false);
targetObj = this;
for (var itm in targetObj) {
myPropList.push(itm);
}
myPropList[currentFrame];

Now use PageUp and PageDown to go through frames of your composition. On each frame you should see different properties of the layer. It’s interesting, but lets move to something more useful.

Lets say you’re doing a text based animation. For example a counter that should go from 0000 to 9999. Notice that it’s 0000 to 9999, not 0 to 9999. So to do that you’d have to write a bunch of code to add additional 0 at the beginning, right? But what if you could design a function to do that for you? Since you can have functions in Javascript, it’s worth to try it in expressions as well. So lets try it.

function formatNumber (val, basestr) {
return basestr.substr (0, (basestr.length - val.toString().length)) +  val.toString();
}

formatNumber(132, "0000");

This little piece of code takes two parameters. First one is the numeric value, and the second one is the output format for that value. So for example, if you have a number 132, and an output format 0000 as the result you’ll get 0132. Also, if your number is 132 and output format is ABCDEF the result will be ABC132. As you see this is a pretty useful function. The only downside is that each time you want to use it you have to write it from scratch. Not very optimal solution.

So how do you make your own functions reusable in expressions?

As said before – expressions are Javascript based pieces of code, and that means you can basically use any Javascript syntax. There fore why not try using #include statement? Let’s try it out. Copy the formatNumber function to your clipboard and save it as a file on your hard drive. Let’s assume that the path to the file is "c:myUtils.java". Having that file setup everything left to do is to import it like that:

#include 'file:///c:myUtils.java'
formatNumber(132, "0000");

If you’re on Windows you might want to save your file in the Support Files directory that you can find inside of After Effects installation directory. The default path for that is C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe After Effects CS3Support Files. I’m guessing that on a Mac this should be similar, but you will probably have to option-click on your AE directory and choose “Show package content”. After that you can navigate to /Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/Adobe After Effects CS3.ap/Contents/Resources/ and put the file there. Than you’ll be able to simply use #import 'file:///myUtils.java' instead of providing the whole path to your file.

You can also use this technique to drive variable values from an external file. For example:

myText = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nam ultricies sapien et justo. Vestibulum et erat id ante imperdiet sollicitudin. Ut sed ligula ac mauris tempus egestas. Donec vel risus."

Please keep in mind that this is a hack and it’s not officially supported, although I think it will work with any expression-enabled AE version. Try to keep your code libraries as small as possible. Group your functions to separate files to help organize your code. Remember that each time you import a file all it’s content is being processed my AE expression engine and this may slow things down quite a bit.

I hope you found this article useful. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading.

This subject is as old as the Earth itself. How to create 3D planets? Simple. Just apply CC Sphere onto a texture, right? Wrong! If you want to make it cool you need to do a couple other things as well, which I’m going to show you in this upcoming tutorial.

By the way – speaking of planets and the universe… I’ve been having this idea for a long time and I’m closer to realizing it than ever before. I want to create a in-scale solar system in 3D, that you could fly through with the camera, maybe even set up a date and see the alignment of all planets. This upcoming 3D Earth tutorial is just a small piece of a bigger project. I know I’m crazy, but I just want to see if I’m capable of doing something like this, and is AE capable of doing it as well.

If I’m going to do this, than it’s going to use my upcoming product to achieve the effect. The product is a CustomEffect designed to easily set things in motion. Stay tuned. It’s coming. Soon.

Some time ago I was experimenting with doing more 3D stuff inside of AE and I ended up with two very cool techniques that will allow you to import any 3D object into AE. But thats not all. You will also be able to create very simple objects directly inside of AE. This techniques still need some work and will probably not be very practical in most cases, but still I think they are interesting as an experiment. The techniques involve some 3rd-party plugins, but not the ones you’d be expecting and probably the ones you already have. And the most exciting thing is that unlike my ShapeExtruder this will work also in AE CS2.

One way of doing a 3D object in AE is my ShapeExtruder. If you’re not familiar with it than you must check it out. Also make sure to watch Studying ShapeExtruder tutorial and a mini follow-up tutorial on youtube. They will answer all your questions about extruding vector shapes in AE.

In a few words I’ve discovered a new way of creating 3D Text and logos, and even more. What I will show you will allow you to import any 3D object of any complexity from any 3d package directly into AE. 3D Studio Max, Cinema4D, Maya, XSI… you name it. Everything goes. Unfortunately for it to work efficiently the plugins need to be modified a bit to increase performance. Right now objects other than text and logos take to much time to render and the quality is poor, but like I said… I still think it is pretty interesting to know. Hopefully it will spark some new ideas. Good news is that I’ve already contacted the developer of there plugins and theres a slight chance that the next version will include my suggestions. Keep your fingers crossed.

Good news is that I found a solution to this problem. Not very elegant so you don’t want to overuse it, but it works. As always it involves cheating, faking, tricking AE into doing something that it’s not designed to do, and of course some nasty expressions, but finally you end up with what you’ve always wanted – your own Photoshop brush in AE. If you’re even going to use it once I think it’s still worth the effort.

The solution has so many aspects that I could probably do a 2 hour video and still not cover everything in it. But don’t worry. I’ll do my best to keep it as short and simple as possible, and while following my rule that “if something is worth doing once than it is also worth building a tool to do it for you”, maybe I’ll even create some CustomEffect to simulate Photoshop brush engine. Wouldn’t that be cool?

I still need to work on this solution, figure out what to cover in the tutorial and what I can skip, what to include in the CE BrushEngine and what not to include. It is impossible and very unpractical to cover all the possibilities this technique gives, mostly because it would create a lot of confusion and simply because of the way AE works.

Anyway I hope I’ll figure this out soon so I could provide you with a brand new tutorial and a brand new CustomEffect as well that you will hopefully find useful.

Ever missed the High Pass filter in After Effects? Watch this tutorial to learn how to build your own and get a few ideas on how to use it.

Click here to watch the video tutorial

If you’ve worked with High Pass filter before than you already know how amazing this tool is for sharpening, color grading, masking and many many others. I’ve seen many threads on many forums where people where asking how to move this wonderful Photoshop filter into After Effects, because it doesn’t come with one. Since I was also in need to use it several times in my video productions I decided to look into how it works and build one myself.

So here we are. After watching this tutorial you will learn two easy ways of building your own High Pass filter in After Effects. Above that you will learn a few tricks on how to use it.

This tutorials uses growing elements from Evolution design elements collection. Go to videocopilot.net to get your own copy.

Photos used in this tutorial come from sxc.hu. By the time they were downloaded, they were licensed as royalty free, and were free to use in any way you like (standard restrictions). Just to make sure, go to sxc.hu right now, or just click here to read the Standard restriction agreement.

Download: Tutorial project file (After Effects CS3)