AE Freemart

Ever needed to make some fabric move realistically in the wind? Zaxwerks 3D Flag is just the tool you need!

I’ll walk you through making a T-shirt Blowing on a Clothes Line in the wind in this Toolfarm exclusive tutorial. I use three still images, 3D Flag and a camera to create this clip that looks as if it was shot over the canals of Venice. This tutorial was done with Adobe After Effects 7.0, but you could also recreate this with Apple Motion 3.

Check out the tutorial now!. A free demo of Zaxwerks 3D Flag is available if you don’t own it. It’s a great little plug-in.

Here’s some nice little free vector designs courteousy of vecteezy.com. Nice stuff!!

Dennis Radeke’s Adobe blog, the Genesis Project, has an interesting tutorial on creating a plasma-like surreal fire. Download the zip file and movie file here.

Dennis Radeke’s blog, The Genesis Project has a tutorial on recreating the iPod commerical that was out a couple of years ago. Download the PDF tutorial here.

Here’s what it looks like:

I’m a big fan of the Adobe Exchange and they’ve launched the new beta of the site today. At the Adobe Exchange, you can "download hundreds of easy-to-install extensions, time-saving functions, code and more". It’s a great place for free stuff!

Via John Nack’s Blog

Jean Hauptman has some free shape presets for AE 8 at DMN. She also talks a bit about shape layers.

There’s an interesting video tutorial for Photoshop CS3 at Russell Brown’s (Adobe) Blog that shows a wacky scientist spraypainting a clone of himself. He uses the clone tool, a custom brush and the animation timeline. This looks very easy but it does make you question the future of Photoshop and After Effects. Well, not me. I’d NEVER question that.

Via Flowseeker

Steve Whatley of Adobe has started a blog called, Steve Whatley’s After Effects Cookbook that is for all levels of After Effects users. He’s focusing on the 3D site with 3D application integration and 3rd party plug-ins (a favorite topic of mine)…. and of course, workflow!

Ko Maruyama has posted a blog entry at Ninja Crayon about the training that is available for After Effects and happens to mention three of our Forum Experts, Harry J. Frank, John Dickinson and Dean Velez.

Harry’s training is available just this week and to say it’s selling well would be an understatement! After Effects Expressions hits a niche where there is really not a lot of training and Harry’s training is fun to watch and easy to absorb. It’s downloadable immediately and is affordable at just $29 for 60 minutes of Expressions training. It is designed for the designer, not the programmer, and it will take your Expressiophobia away.

• After Effects Expressions 01: Introduction to Expressions Duration: 20 Minutes
• After Effects Expressions 02: Introduction to Arrays and Variables Duration: 20 Minutes
• After Effects Expressions 03: 3D Text Duration: 20 Minutes
• After Effects Expression Series 1 Bundle Duration: 60 Minutes

John Dickinson’s Creative Background Design Series has also been very popular. John currently has six modules in his series and he uses some innovative techniques and explains several shortcuts that will help your workflow. John’s training is just $5 a pop and great for the beginner or seasoned veteran.

• Creative Background Design for After Effects 01: Basic Fractal Loop - Free Sample
• Creative Background Design for After Effects 02: Award Night
• Creative Background Design for After Effects 03: Venetian Blocks
• Creative Background Design for After Effects 04: Fractal Flower
• Creative Background Design for After Effects 05: Molten Cells
• Creative Background Design for After Effects 06: Rose Window

Dean Velez puts out training through his company, The Anvel. His training, The Anvel Industry Training for AE is incredible. I showed my class some of the training last semester and they were completely into it. People actually stuck around until the end of class instead of bagging class after an hour

Just yesterday, Dean posted the following to our Expert Forum:

Hello Video, Film and Web guys and gals,

The Anvel has just posted 29 new royalty free and fully customizable After Effects 7.0 Professional projects ready for download.

The Projects all deal with Text and adding effects to text. They cover the letters A-Z ( Aura, Balls, Cosmic, Destroy, Electric, Extrude, Fire, Glimmer, Hose, Ice, Join, Killer, Laser, Magnify, Nature, Odor, Paint, Quartz, Road, Strange, Tear, Universe, Vile, Web, Wind, X-Ray, Yank, Zoom )

Some are render intensive…so prerender when you can.

Hope you enjoy them! and drop me a line to let me know which one is your favorite…mine is Killer.

Dean is always posting awesome free stuff every month or two, so you’d be doing yourself a big service to go to our forum and hang out. Ask some questions while you’re there and guys like Harry and John will answer your questions.

Ko also mentions Aharon Rabinowitz’s quality training. Aharon runs After Effects NY user group, which met last night and Toolfarm gave away Harry’s new training at the meeting. I hear the meeting was great, with Curious Pictures showing their Disney Channel program, Little Einsteins ("Come on! Wave your arms to make our ship fly faster!" and so you can hear some Vivaldi… oh, I’m sure you’ve seen it!)

Lately, I’ve realized that I’ve never really posted the expressions that I use most often. Partially, this has been be trying to not create an overlap between freebies posted and, and not so free things posted elsewhere. But, know I’ve got a handle on that, so I’d like to start posting, what I consider, the most usable expressions.

By the way, I keep my expressions organized in a Widget called “Bit Memo”, this way my expressions are a button click away.

This expression here is a automatic auto fade in/out expression. Place it in opacity, and the layer will fade in the number of frames specified at the beginning. I use this a LOT. It’s very handy, especially considering the steps it takes to create a dissolve in AE.

AutoFade i/o Preset

Or if you prefer, here is the code:

transition = 30; // transition time in frames
tSecs = transition / ( 1 / thisComp.frameDuration);

For more info on expressions, check out the Toolfarm Expert Series: After Effects Expressions available at toolfarm.com/training