Category Archives: Tutorials
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.
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.
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/
Fairytale Lighting in After Effects
In this quick tutorial you’ll learn how to take video and turn into something straight out of a fairytale. You’ll learn how to set up a down-and-dirty 3D track, add volumetric light and dust to a live action shot, and then finish it with some simulated camera lens blur.
Environment Replacement in After Effects
Using The Foundry’s CameraTracker, a keyer and Trapcode Horizon, you can totally change the environment of a shot. Here’s a short demo.
Here is the clip used:
Music to Light Effect
In this episode of Red Giant TV, I’ll shows you how to re-create the Music-to-Light effect (seen last season on Heroes), using Trapcode Particular 2. This is a deep exploration of the extremely powerful Aux System in Particular.
Rendering with the Adobe Media Encoder
Render your After Effects compositions in the background using the Adobe Media Encoder