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Now that Video Copilot has released their new promo video for ‘Demon Cam’, they’re sharing the fruits of the project to you! One of the most used elements was the mystical smoke found inside of the Orb, and now it’s yours!
If you haven’t seen the Demon Cam video, check it out on our Inspirations page.
It seems the competition to bring 3D to After Effects is about to increase with the upcoming release of a new plugin from Video Copilot called Element 3D. It’s a particle system which uses 3D geometry. With it you can bring in any .obj file and convert it into particles with amazing material options. In Andrew Kramer‘s first demo he shows us how we can create clusters of… asteroids, molecules, … abstract thingys. But as Andrew said himself, he’s only just scratched the surface with this first look. It’s somewhat been proven with Optical Flares, that when VCP puts out a plugin, they put it out right. There’s likely to be a ton of as yet unseen applications for Element 3D. (My prediction: Imagine buying a plane model from Turbo Squid, popping it into After Effects and making a particle stream set to orient to path. You’ve got a fleet of aircraft ready to interact with AE’s camera and lights!) Watch the demo here.
Andrew Kramer‘s latest After Effects tutorial Blast Wave will show you how to blow things up and make ‘em look good. This tutorial relies heavily on explosive stock elements from the Action Essentials 2 stock library offered by Video Copilot. Don’t worry, you can use whatever you’ve got from Artbeats, Digital Juice or even Detonation Films (where you can pick up some stuff for free). Even if you’re not into explosions (eh?) you’ll still be able to peer into the world of visual effects compositing and see what it takes to sell a shot. Andrew’s explosion in this tutorial isn’t just one or two or even three elements slapped together—there’s a bunch, and a lot of care went into blending them together and with the shot. He built shockwaves from scratch. There’s also many tips on everything from masking and time stretch to color adjustment. What truly brings it all together is a long look at Mocha and how the explosion was made to fit with the shaky camera. You can download the project footage for free but you’ll have to get your own booms. Watch it here.
New to After Effects? Having trouble finding simpler tutorials which cover the basics? Adobe TV has a 7-part series titled Classroom: Basic Compositing and Animation in After Effects CS5. With this free tutorial course you’ll learn animation and compositing basics, keyframes, masking, parenting and more. And just in case a hole in the space/time continuum has somehow prevented you from being aware of Video Copilot, there’s a free ten-part series there called After Effects Basic Training.
This just in: Video Copilot‘s Optical Flares plugin for After Effects now supports native motion blur! If you already own Optical Flares you can get a FREE update to version 1.2.132 here. The update also has a few minor bug fixes.
This update fixes a problem with crash on quit problem in Mac OS 10.5.x in After Effects CS5.
Download the updates here:
Mac OS
32-Bit and 64-Bit for Mac
Windows
32-Bit and 64-Bit for Windows
Andrew says:
In an effort to bring more content and information to the Video Copilot world or wonders, I will be releasing a new series of free tutorials in addition to the free tutorials you are so generously accustomed to
These new tutorials will be shorter (1-5 minutes) and focus on cool techniques, follow-up advice on previous tutorials, workflow and even design tips. I’ve been collecting dozens of great ideas and I’ll be releasing these tutorials in between our featured tutorials you know so well.
This will also help us release new content on the site, even when we are busy working on big projects. (Like right now). It’s win win.
The first episode will be online May 02, 2008.
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