Ryan Connolly gives a quick walkthrough on how a few extra steps will help sell an evening aerial shot using stock photos and Trapcode Particular in After Effects.
http://www.toolfarm.com
The Happenin’ Hotspot for After Effects Artists
Posts Tagged ‘visual effects’
Use After Effects responsibly… make some fake UFO videos!
Quba Michalski says he can show you how to fake a UFO with After Effects and Mocha in just about 30 minutes. I want to believe.
Quick Harry Potter effects
Need Harry Potter effects but pressed for time? Maybe you’ve just picked up After Effects and you need something easy. The Film Riot crew has the answer!
Creating underwater explosions
Andrew Kramer‘s latest vfx tutorial Depth Charge! will show you how to composite underwater explosions using stock elements. You’ll also learn about simulating underwater volumetric lighting and shadows, bubbles and debris and a look at a typical 3D/AE workflow.
Compositing fog or mist the correct way
How many times have you added fog or mist footage to a comp and then reached for that Add or Screen blending mode? VFX blogger Daniel Broadway says don’t do it. After you read his After Effects tip you’ll know why. Daniel explains why real world fog doesn’t ‘add’ to the scene. Don’t worry, though. He’s got a great alternative and shows you how. I tried this in a mograph project and it worked brilliantly. Take a look at Daniel’s post VFX Tip #3 – Compositing Fog or Mist.
No fog footage?
Aetuts+ has a tutorial that shows how to create fog from scratch using Fractal Noise and CC Vector Blur. The tutorial is a bit of a chore to get through, but the end result is amazing. Watch Realistic Fog Without 3rd Party Plug-ins.
Creating Lightning: How RISE Visual Effects Brought Flash to Zeus’ Bolt
Studio Daily is providing a complimentary webinar on Thursday, August 5 from 12pm to 1pm ET. VFX supervisor Florian Gellinger will deconstruct a scene from Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.
Tools used are Nuke and Sapphire plugins. Nevermind a lot of AE folk don’t use Nuke, this is an opportunity to see technique which could easily be reproduced using After Effects. And if you use Sapphire plugins all the better.
Some of the tasks to be examined involve an actor interacting with a lightning bolt and include:
- show Zeus catching the CG lightning bolt
- integrate the bolt in his hand
- add chromatic aberration
- add a plasma core
- make its edges wobble
- add a lightning “back bone”
- add a huge variety of smaller and bigger, high-energy arcs on its surface
- add heat distortion
- add photographic glow and light interaction on Zeus
