If you ever struggled with your After Effects 3D camera than this tutorial is for you. Learn to rig your camera in seconds or buy a my script that will do it for you.

Click here to watch the video tutorial

Get Simple Camera Rig Script 1.0 (CS3) for only 14.90 USD

I don’t know about you my friends, but each time I’m thinking about using After Effects camera I get the shivers. It’s good for panning and zooming, but once you start to make a more classy and smooth motion, or you want to sex it up a bit with some curves you get into trouble. You need to keep track of zoom, point of interest, position, orientation and rotation keyframes all at once. We should be very grateful for Separate Dimensions feature in After Effects CS4, but it does not solve all the problems.

In this tutorial I will show you a technique that is widely used in camera animation by many artists that work in 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, or any other 3d application. I hope it will open your eyes on the subject of camera animation, and that you’ll start making your own more complex rigs. Good luck. Enjoy the tutorial.

And for those of you who don’t have time to build the rig each time you need to use it here’s a handy script that will set up the camera and the rig for you. Enjoy!

Get Simple Camera Rig 1.0 (CS3) for only 14.90 USD

Ever worked with Adobe Kuler? Ever wanted to use it’s color schemes in After Effects? Now you can. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s free!

Click here to watch the video tutorial

Adobe Kuler is a great website where designers from all over the world create and exchange color schemes. Kuler has several algorithms to help you create your very own color scheme, plus it allows rating and commenting on existing schemes, that can be downloaded in Adobe Swatch Exchange format.

Kuler Desktop is also available for download. It’s a small AIR application that connects with Kuler service and allows you to browse through the schemes directly from your desktop. It’s great.

However it is very hard to get the color schemes into After Effects. The simplest solution is to create a screen-grab and putting it in you project. Unfortunately that takes some time to do, especially when you are just starting your project and want to test out several different color palettes.

Jeff Almasol from redefinery.com has published a great set of useful scripts for After Effects that are available on Adobe Exchange. I just love his work. This package includes great script “Swatch You Want”, however I personally find it a little bit difficult to use.

That’s where this tutorial comes in. I found a very fast and efficient way of grabbing color palettes from Kuler Desktop and placing them directly in After Effects. Download the provided project file to check it out on your own. I hope you’ll like it.

Update!

I said that it is possible to sample colors directly from Kuler Desktop using the EyeDropper tool. Thats turns out not to be true (at least on Windows XP x64).

If you want to have my KulerSwatches project imported automatically when you open up your After Effects please check out Lloyd Alvarez script.

Happy AfterEffecting!

Download: Tutorial project file (After Effects CS3)

Check out this amazing CustomEffect for hassle free, custom color, text transform following gradients. You asked for it so here you have it!

Click here to watch the video tutorial

If you ever had to apply a Ramp effect to a Text Layer to make it look hip you know that it can be a nightmare. Not to mention when you have a couple of those Text Layers to handle. But have no fear – TextRamp is here! Check out the examples below.

Some time ago I posted a free solution to this problem, so make sure to check it out before you continue. The old TextRamp tutorial will show you how to create very simple preset that might help in some situations.

But this one… oooooooh… this is serious stuff. CE TextRamp is way more functional and robust than the old solution. You’ve asked me several times to create a CustomEffect that would not only allow to apply a gradient to a Text Layer, but also allow you to rotate and scale the layer with a gradient applied to it. So here you have it. This little baby also handles 3D Text Layers to some extend, so make sure to watch the tutorial and check it out.

Remember that this is not a bulletproof solution. There’s only so much that can be done with expressions and presets, but hey… it works in most situations but there may be times when you need to precompose so be sure to check out the tutorial.

Anyway I’m sure you will find CE TextRamp useful and affortable. Enjoy!

Get CE TextRamp (CS3) for only 14.90 USD

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.

In the end those articles would create a huge manual for expressions that beginners and advanced users could refer to when experiencing problems. It would of course contain the obvious stuff, but also some tricks, tips and techniques that are not documented.

Articles would consist of the official technical part, more user-friendly approach in plain English and probably some short video tutorial and a project file demonstrating what was discussed in the article.

I’d start from the beginning. Syntax, keywords, data types and such. Boring but very important stuff. If one would go through it all it would not only show how to write expressions, but it would also help to understand and improve other people’s code, which I think is the best way to learn it if you’re having troubles.

Let me know what you think guys. If you find this idea interesting I’ll start just after finishing the MILG5 dvd, which is going pretty well by the way.

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)

I already wrote a post about an experiment that I did that involved some new ways of creating 3d objects, even importing them from any 3d package. I haven’t done a tutorial on that yet, but I assure you it’s coming. Aside that I believe I have found a new interesting way of importing 3d textured objects to AE, but I know it is a bit out of my league in terms of programming it and creating a tool for it, but I’m sure to give it a shot one day, unless of course someone will contact me to work on this.

Heres the big concept. Have you ever used vanishing point from Photoshop? If you have you probably know where this is going. One of Photoshop vanishing point features is creating a 3DS model for importing to 3d applications, or a VPE file for importing into AE. Here’s where the fun begins. What if we could reverse that process and create a VPE file from a 3DS or OBJ file?

VPE file is just a plain text file that looks a bit like XML, so it is very easy to understand it, and even create by hand. What you get after importing it to AE is a new composition with 3D layers and a camera. I use it from time to time to create panoramas, or buildings from a single photo so I could easily move the camera around.

Now just imagine that we have a tool for reading 3DS or OBJ or any other common 3d file format that creates a VPE file from it, extracting the textures and describing the geometry. Wouldn’t that be just cool? Of course there are some limitations, but still this have a chance to be far more useful than what I plan to show you in the next few weeks. The objects would have to be low-poly to keep AE running at reasonable speed. Also I think that the only objects that can be created from VPE in AE are rectangular solids, so to keep some parts of them transparent the PNG texture applied to them would have to be trimmed or modified in any other way to hide that the actual plane with the texture is a rectangle.

Above that there are already tools out there to export 3d data from 3d apps to frameworks like Papervision3D for flash. I haven’t looked into them yet, but if they can do this for flash, why not export it for AE in VPE format? This all sounds a bit crazy but I don’t think it’s that far in the “impossible” area.

Anyway… I just wanted to share that thought with you hoping that a maybe one of you my dear visitors is a programmer with to much free time that will be willing to give this idea a try. Don’t hesitate to contact me about this idea. Tell your friends about it. Maybe someone will come forward and together we can build a 3d objects importing tool that we’ve always wanted.

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.