Blog Archives
RGTV Live #9: Working with Fractal Fields
Trapcode Form and Particular have some complex controls over the fractal fields. In episode 9 of RGTV Live, we’ll demystify these controls and show you how to use them in your design.
Red Giant TV Episode 65: Warp Projection
In this multidimensional episode of Red Giant TV, designer I’ll walk you through creating a 3D environment from a 2D image, all in After Effects. This won’t be using traditional camera projection techniques – nor will it use vanishing point in photoshop. Instead, I figured out a technique for warping images to build 3D layers. You’ll also learn some great compositing and color correction techniques to finish the job off right.
Special thanks to hollywoodcamerawork.us/ for the use of their footage!
Creating a Rocket Ship Trail of Letters
In this QuickTip, I’ll guide you through the set-up and expressions required to emit a paragraph of letters from a moving After Effects layer.
Trapcode Form 2
If you’ve not heard, Red Giant and Trapcode have released Trapcode Form 2! I’m so very proud to have had a hand in this.
Many ask if I am involved in the programming of these projects. I’m certainly not a programmer, even though I’m big expressions nerd. My role is more about brainstorming new ideas, functions, tools, and how those are integrated, how they are functional. Plus, lots of testing, testing and more testing.
Once the plug-in begins to take shape, we start to focus on marketing it. That’s where I worked on two new tutorials and a commercial video.
What’s New in Form 2?
• Bring OBJ’s into After Effects with Form’s support for 3D models and 3D sequences
• Get the Particular 2 features you love, like Textured Polygon and Streaklet particle types
• Illuminate your particles with Shading for visual depth and tight integration to AE lights
• Full Layer Map support gives advanced animation control over particle size, rotation and color
• Expanded Spherical Field features let you distort a sphere into any elliptical shape
Red Giant TV Live #1: Using OBJs in Form 2
The first live episode of Red Giant TV live. In this episode, we explore Form 2′s OBJ Import Features.
Cosm
A quick experimental study using Trapcode Form 2 exploring some of the new features. All of the OBJs you see here are included with Form 2.
Music: Song of Mourning by Celestial Aeon Project
Creating a Motion Billboard Animation
In this episode, I’ll walk you through creating an awesome motion Graphics billboard project. You’ll learn about 2 kinds of particle systems, color correction, lighting, reflections, and just generally making stuff that looks really cool.
Newton Physics Engine Experiments
The folks at Motion Boutique were kind enough to send me a copy of I’ve been experimenting with mixing the Newton physics engine for After Effects with Trapcode Particular. Although it’s still not a substitute for something like Krakatoa or Fume, there’s some cool possibilities here.
Newton is incredibly easy to use. So far, I’ve not needed any additional reference or tutorials on it. Just pop it open, experiment and you shouldn’t have any problems. The short story is this: create your 2D layers in a comp, access Newton from the composition menu, and solve. Just like any dynamics system, you’ll have to define what objects are dynamic, static, etc.
In this example, I used about 20 null objects, and parented a light to each (this is begging for a script to speed along the process, and I hear Motion Boutique is working on it.) From here, I used these lights as emitter objects and created some basic Particular settings that mimic basic fire.
The biggest shortcoming I’ve found in the process is that Particular forces the user to choose between Bounce and Air Physics. The impact of this is that I can either have my particles affected by turbulence and wind, or I can have particles bounce off surfaces. You’d think the bounce would sell this more, but I opted for the Air physics and some turbulence.
This is just an early test. I plan to fine tune this and develop for a future tutorial.
You can get a demo of Newton at www.motionboutique.com
Creating Normal Maps with Trapcode Form
In this demonstration, Harry Frank shows how to add light and reflections to Trapcode Form by using a custom particle generated from a 3D Normal Pass in conjunction with Stefan Minning’s Normality plug-in.
Download the project here:
people.redgiantsoftware.com/Explore/PresetDetail.aspx?PresetId=1835
For more information on Normality, visit 3dcg.net/software/normality/
Promos, Products & Plot Device
Once it again, here is one of those “I know it’s been quiet around Graymachine” blog posts. But, again.. as these usually go, it’s been for good reason. A lot has been happening.
First, if you poke around the newly re-designed redgiant.com, you’ll see a LOT of new promo videos for Red Giant products, like this one for Magic Bullet Suite, or this one for Trapcode Suite, or this one for the Effects Suite, or this one for Magic Bullet Cosmo, or this one for Magic Bullet Looks 2. That’s me pumping that stuff out, trying to make the products look good.
There’s also a new preset pack I designed for wedding videographers, which contains 50 different compositional wedding themed elements.
Plus, I’ve been producing numerous QuickTip tutorials, some I still need to post here. AND, I am planning a regularly scheduled live broadcast to be launched soon. You can also find me on the Twitterz, answering questions, spreading industry news and offering my rapier wit and dapper charm.
Oh, and I had another baby, too. Jaxon Lewis Frank was born April 6 and is an awesome little bundle of baby.
And last but not least, I did a massive space galaxy logo animation that is the new opening for RGTV and a new short film co-produced by Red Giant called Plot Device. It’s awesome. Please take a moment to check it out.
That is all. More to come now that I have a chance to breath.