10 Comments

1. 

   Greg DiGenti | September 26, 2011

   Twice a month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from back in the archives of Aetuts+. Today we’ll look at a tutorial from Greg DiGenti that was first published in Feb 2009. You’ve probably seen other old TV effect tutorials, before but in this tutorial Greg pays attention to minute details like the RGB pixel separation and teaches us how to achieve this look using all built-in After Effects tools.

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   Tutorial

   Download Tutorial .mp4

   File size 361 MB

   
   

   

   
2. 

   Adam Everett Miller | September 26, 2011

   In this third Aetuts+ Quiz, we’re ask a few animation-related questions. Get crackin’ after the jump and let us know how you do!

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3. 

   Antonio Cerri | September 26, 2011

   This entry is part 17 of 16 in the series Hollywood Movie Titles

   Continuing our Aetuts+ Hollywood Movie Title Series, today’s tutorial will explain how to make the “Pirates of the Caribbean” logo animation. We’ll start in Cinema 4d to make our base text animation. We’ll then head over to After Effects where we’ll complete our project with animation of ornaments of the skull for the final composite. This tutorial is dedicated to the memory of my father. If you’re in trouble, remember that there is always the Parley.

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   Tutorial

   Download Tutorial .mp4

   File size: 55.9 MB

   
   

   

   
4. 

   Adam Everett Miller | September 26, 2011

   If you haven’t already heard, Aetuts+ has teamed up with Mettle (Creators of FreeForm Pro + ShapeShifter AE) to put together a contest to help build community, spark creativity, and hopefully give you a chance to show us what you can do. The deadline is approaching quickly!

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   Check out the details here.
   
   

   
   

   

   
5. 

   Dave Scotland | September 26, 2011

   In this tutorial, we will rig and create cycle animation to breathe life into a still image of a Kangaroo. Then we’ll take the cycle render and animate it across our master scene, using null animation. We will also create a hint of parallax using camera projection. The techniques you’ll learn in this simple tutorial will open up loads of opportunities for your own creativity. Enjoy…

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   Join Premium and Expand Your After Effects Knowledge!

   For those unfamiliar, the family of Tuts+ sites runs a premium membership service. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Aetuts+, Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Cgtuts+, Activetuts+, Phototuts+, Audiotuts+, and Vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business.

   Become a Premium member and download this tutorial today!

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   What Do You Want to See on Premium?

   Is there a specific technical aspect of After Effects that you really want to learn more about? How about a very advanced technique that you could never quite grasp fully?

   We really want to make our Premium content as relevant and useful to you as possible, so do send through your comments and requests to ae@tutsplus.com. Let us know what you want to see, and we’ll commission top-notch After Effects experts to teach you!

    

   
   

   

   
6. 

   Daniel Reinoso | September 26, 2011

   This is a brief introduction of some of the most unbelievable Visual Effects in Hollywood’s biggest movies. This “Part 1″ will describe the making of movies: 2012, Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings.

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   2012 (2009)

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   VFX Team

   • Marc Weigert
   • Volker Engel
   • Mike Vezina
   • Ryo Sacaguchi
   • David Stephens

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   Development of the Visual Effects

   New Technology

   The real stars in this movie are the Visual Effects, what 2012 has done has never been done before in terms of disaster films . This movie shows everything from the overthrow the Vatican and the White House being destroyed by a seaquake to a flood taking over the Himalaya.

   What we’ve done on 2012 wouldn’t have been possible about five years ago – Marc Weigert

   

   Blowing Up Models Out

   The development of computer hardware and software plays a huge role. The miniatures in this movie were so few that it only took about two days of shooting. The reason is because the CG models are cheaper than the miniatures, the second thing is the physical limitations. 2012 shows Los Angeles being destroyed by an 10.5 earthquake and there are a hundred houses in these shots. To do this with miniatures would be far more difficult and expensive.

   The only thing real in there is our actors inside the limousine – Volker Engel

   Challenges in this movie

   Many of the VFX scenes were left to their imagination. In the scene of the L.A. Earthquake, it was in the script as only four lines that said they drive through Los Angeles to Santa Monica’s Airport while the city is being destroyed. This entire scene was done on computer.. this means the entire residential neighborhood, a business district… In the computers you don’t have limitations for example when a parking structure starts to collapse and the limousine pass through it, that’s a great scene.

   Flood the Himalayas by a gigantic wave was a real challenge because isn’t simple like flood a street, they work with 600 computers everyone making a part of the scene and rendered frame by frame to then composite it into live action

   It’s not just, you know, ‘water rushes through the street’… we’re flooding the highest mountain ranges of the whole planet! – Marc Weigert

   

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   VFX Breakdown Video

   This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes and how they do some of the compositing.

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   Alice in Wonderland (2010)

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   VFX Team

   • David Schaub
   • Sean Phillips
   • Ken Ralston
   • Carey Villegas

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   Development of the Visual Effects

   Hybrid Characters

   Hybrid characters are digitally generated characters that incorporate photographic elements of the real actors as they were filmed on set. For Alice in Wonderland, this was not only a great technique for making the characters look realistic, but also imaginative and fantastic, as illustrated by the Tweedles and Stayne. The most interesting thing about this technique is that it is not merely a likeness, but the real face of the actor which retains their brilliant facial performance.

   

   Chroma Keying

   This is one of the most famous techniques used in films; it involves the removal of a color in order to add backgrounds that are entirely constructed using computer-generated imagery. Alice in Wonderland presents a fantastic world with imaginative characters. So when Alice is in this world, nothing is real—everything is filmed on a green screen. This includes not only the environment, but also the people—the technicians, the mechanical effects crew, and anyone else who was visible in frame were all in green too.

   The green-screen color is effective for compositing, but visually and psychologically exhausting to be surrounded by it for extended periods of time – Ken Ralston

   

   Challenges in this movie

   Creating a world in Wonderland, where Alice (who was human) and other curious inhabitants, such as the Red Queen, the Tweedles, the Mad Hatter, and the various environments could co-exist believably, was one of the many challenges.

   For the Red Queen, the first challenge was to nearly double the size of her head for the entire film. To do this, the Red Queen was photographed with a high-resolution 4K camera on a green screen. The 4K image was then reduced to HD for her body, allowing the full 4K image of her head to be composited onto her HD body.

   The environment of the final battle is completely computer generated (CG). It was challenging to shoot Alice battling a monster that was not on the set, and this scene was choreographed many times before it was captured perfectly.

   

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   VFX Breakdown Video

   This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they do that and some scenes of compositing.

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   Avatar (2009)

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   VFX Team

   • Stephen Rosembaun
   • Joe Letteri
   • Richard Baneham
   • Andrew R. Jones

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   Development of the Visual Effects

   Creating the Na’vi

   The Characters were created as realistically as possible. To do this, several key departments needed to be firing on all cylinders, from facial and body rigging, to animation and motion capture, to rendering; all these departments worked well as a team to bring these performances to the screen.

   A lot of photographs and scans of the actors were used in order to incorporate their details into the digital characters, for both the Na’vi and humans.

   There are some characters, such as Jake, where there’s both an Avatar double and a digital double. There was a huge amount of data captured through digital scanning and light-stage capture. Also, a lot of extra texture and shade work was done in order to make sure that all the details went into the final renders.

   

   Facial Capture and Motion Capture

   For the Na’vi to be believable, realistic animation was really important. The team used a variety of techniques to get the facial animation to higher level of realism. The most important of these was facial motion capture. With the use of a high-definition video camera attached to the faces of the actors and markers all over their faces, the software was able to map out which muscles in the face were firing, and bring all this information into the digital characters.

   The facial rigs are by far the most advanced I have ever worked with – Andy Jones

   

   Stereo 3D

   The environments were enhanced by one of the other major features of the film—the fact that it was conceived from the very beginning to be shown in stereoscopic 3D. The live action for the movie was filmed using the Fusion 3D camera system created by James Cameron and Vance Pace, and the stereo shots were composited with a customized version of Shake.

   The 3D nature of the movie compromised the used of 2D elements. Matte paintings were a subject of a lot of discussion about finding the most efficient and most realistic ways of creating the environments.

   Realistic environments

   The world of Pandora is a jungle, and many of the visual effects shots feature the jungle in some way. The team built many of the plants using procedural foliage software of their own, but some of them were modeled by hand. Most of them were built at an extremely high resolution; the biggest trees had up to 1.2 million polygons. Any single frame might have had hundreds of thousands of plants rendered in the scene. Efficiency was really important, so the team also built less detailed versions of the plants. This way, the highly detailed plants were close to the camera, and the less detailed ones further away.

   James Cameron and his team spent a lot of time designing the horticulture of the environment – Dan Lemmo

   

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   VFX Breakdown Video

   This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they do that and some scenes of compositing.

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   The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

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   VFX Team

   • Jym Rygiel
   • Joe Letteri
   • Randall William Cook
   • Alex Funke

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   Development of the Visual Effects

   Miniature Models

   Most of the sets used for The Return of the King were constructed from composite models and matte paintings, which were then combined with CG Imagery. The crew had to use different kinds of computer graphics techniques and computer-controlled cameras to perfectly mesh the miniature model photography with live actors and scenes.

   

   Creatures Animation

   Lots of creatures, such as the Trolls, the Shelob, the Mûmakil and others, were created entirely within a computer. The creators spent months on the designs of sketches, and the sculpting and painting of five-foot maquettes that were scanned into a computer. The animators would then rig skeletons and muscles before animation began. The team also created realistic digital doubles from scans of the actors, and then animated them with motion-capture suites. Making Gollum into a perfectly believable creature, and using sub-surface scattering for skin lighting in order to achieve the proper realism, turned out to be really tricky.

   

   Like as if you were there

   The camera movements in various shots were used for different effects. The objective was to provide two kinds of realism. If you’re in the a battle, you want to feel like you’re in there. The way to do that is to make you feel like you’re on a horse; so you want to give the camera a little bit of that movement as if you’re moving forward with it. The other movement effect was used for the Mûmakil. The idea was to shake the camera so as to feel the weight of each of their stomps. Whenever the Mûmakil touched the ground, there would be a camera shake—the closer they were to the camera, the bigger the shake would be.

   

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   VFX Breakdown Video

   This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they do that and some scenes of compositing.

   Sources of the videos:

   Alice in Wonderland 1
   Alice in Wonderland 2

   2012 1
   2012 2

   Avatar

   The Lord of the Rings

   
   

   

   
7. 

   Rich Young | September 26, 2011

   Here’s some recent After Effects tutorials, plug-ins, scripts and other news from around the web. You never know when you’ll need more examples, so don’t forget to scan the varied AEtuts+ tutorials as well.

   Video Copilot released free stock footage and some tutorials for creating practical particle effects with ordinary flour; see Flour Fusion: Real Particles, Snow Particles, and Free Particle Stock Footage & Tutorial. In all it is “very exciting.” Perhaps VCP took inspiration from India’s Festival of Colors (pictures). Here’s the intro:

   Also giving away footage is Jake & Dan with over 20 inkdrop-cloud chamber files in Giveaway: Ink Chamber Footage.

   Video Copilot also released The Portal, a new tutorial based their Demon Cam video, which features a portal effect. The tutorial shares techniques like Chroma Keying, Screen equalizing, Spill Suppression, Building the Portal using included Smoke Clip, Color Correction, Glow Effects & Optical Flares, Accurate depth revealing effect using ZPass from a 3D program, and some droll monologue.

   Todd Kopriva has detailed resources (and much of it is his work) for optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

   RenderMon by Digieffects (currently in beta) is an innovative new web-based application that enables digital media artists to remotely monitor and manage the video rendering process, as well as securely upload, view and share the rendered video from Vimeo:

   David Powers discusses Opening help in a browser or PDF instead of the Community Help application (an app that serves little purpose). It sure seems like development money could be saved by sticking with the HTML/PDF version.

   Eran Stern has another tutorial at Artbeats, Rock The Street, which “takes you through the steps of distorting footage to match your source, in this case a city scene shot with a fisheye lens. Then follow along as Eran creates a title which appears to burst from an explosion, ending with the individuals letters burning out.”

   Mark Christiansen continued his ‘After Effects Script of the Week’ series at PVC:

   • After Effects Script of the Week: Change Render Locations
   • After Effects Script of the Week: pt ExpressEdit
   • After Effects Script of the Week: MochaImport

    
   Chris and Trish Meyer posted more articles on “hidden gems” in AE:

   • CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 38 – Import and Interpret
   • After Effects Apprentice Free Video: Multiple Playback Speeds
   • CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 37 – Expressions
   • CMG Hidden Gems: Chapter 37B and 37C – Expressions and Scripting Bonus Chapters
   • see the intro After Effects Apprentice: Expressions:

   Todd Kopriva and Jeff Almasol detail scripting changes in After Effects CS5.5.

   In Getting Started with Magic Bullet LUT Buddy, Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to use Magic Bullet LUT Buddy, a free plug-in from Red Giant that allows you to communicate color changes between After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro, and to share those color corrections with higher end systems, like Davinci Resolve.

   Whip Pan & Transporter tutorials for AE rounded up some tutorial and filters for whip pans in AE and NLEs.
    

    
   Adam Everett Miller shared Simple Principles To Make Rotoscoping Less Crappy. There’s much more in Rotoscoping tips and a mess of posts tagged roto at AE Portal archive.

   Mikael Lubtchansky released a conform tool called foolcut_AE to export any project from Final Cut Pro X directly into After Effects. It supports all the main features of FCPX and will also relink any RED camera clip to the original raw R3D files, etc. Rumor has it that Stephen Hawking did the voiceover for the intro video.

   Red Giant TV Live – Episode 1: Exploring Form 2′s OBJ Import Features shows the new OBJ loader in Trapcode Form and how to integrate OBJs with After Effects 3D space andCinema 4D. Harry Frank showcases how particles can be manipulated with the new Quick Map Offset controls. See also RGTV Episode 60: Creating Light Effects with Trapcode 3D Stroke, in which Owain Street shows you how he created light effects from a series of commercials for using Trapcode 3D Stroke. Also, here’s a ball of fractal loop made by Aharon Rabinowitz using a Trapcode Form preset by Harry Frank from Red Giant People:

   Michael Jones has a variety of tutorials for AE and C4D; here’s his http://rendertimeblog.com/index/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=181:beam-effect-quick-tip&catid=43:tutorials&Itemid=202” target=”_blank”>Beam Effect Quick Tip for creating animated lines between objects:

   In Camera Mapping in After Effects, Andrew Devis shows how to create parallax with a single item. There’s much more on camera mapping in posts tagged camera mapping at AE Portal archive.

   PixelCloud from BlurryPixel is a relighting plug-in for After Effects that’s still in beta. It will allow changing the perceived shading of a rendered 3D image. If you’re curious, there are several videos up that introduce features.

    

   Premiere, Photoshop, and Audition

   Preparing and importing Photoshop files from AE Help is useful if you’ve experienced the pain of reusing assets from old projects. Organization is key because there is no Dynamic Link between AE and Photoshop, and layered PS files imported as sequences don’t relink after being moved around.

    
   In Photoshop and AE: Content Aware Scale, Richard Harrington demonstrates how to combine Photoshop and After Effects to use Content Aware Scale: “In Photoshop, you can detect skin tones or choose to protect a selected area from transform, but be able to completely re-scale an image while leaving the selected area unchanged.” Harrington has a few other new tutorials too, Photoshop and AE: Animating the Lens Blur Filter and Photoshop and AE: Color Grading Video.

   Eran Stern has an overview of the options available for creating accurate cuts, dissolves and wipes. He looks at the limitations and gotchas of Premiere Pro, and how you can improve your inventory of effects and transitions by using third-party plug-in’s from the Sapphire family of effects from GenArts.

   Todd Kopriva details free sample chapters and videos from An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro, a newish book by Robbie Carman, Jeff Greenberg, and Richard Harrington. Here’s a sample:

    

   Miscellaneous

   Adobe acquired cinema tech, staff from Iridas. Peter Salvia of Proactively says adobe + iridas = fcp dead, while Adobe’s Todd Kopriva explains What the Adobe acquisition of IRIDAS technology means for our professional video applications. Here are peeks at IRIDAS SpeedGrade with an NVIDIA GPU and a 3D workflow:

    

   
   

   

   
8. 

   Matthew Butler | September 26, 2011

   In this tutorial you will get an in-depth look into the plug-in called “Write-on“. You also will learn a few tricks when you are using the Write-on plug-in to write text onto the screen.

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   Quick Tip

   Download Quick Tip .mp4

   File size: 96.5 MB

   
   

   

   
9. 

   Toby Fitzpatrick | September 26, 2011

   In this tutorial I will show you how to create a cool looking glass/window break. I’ll be talking through some basic compositing with Action Movie Essentials 2 and cover a little time remapping. There are a handful of other Harry Potter-themed tutorials here on Aetuts+. Check them out below the tutorial.

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   Tutorial

   Download Tutorial .mp4

   File size: 443.6 MB

   Additional Harry Potter Resources

   • Aetuts+ Hollywood Movie Title Series – Harry Potter V2
   • Aetuts+ Hollywood Movie Titles Series: Harry Potter
   • Engage In A Harry Potter “Priori Incantatem” Duel
   • Fairytale Lighting in After Effects
   • Film Riot Video Special Effects Tutorial: Harry Potter & Lightsaber Effects
   • RGTV Episode 33: Creating a Death Eater Apparition Effect

   
   

   

   
10. 

    Tibor Miklos | September 26, 2011

    Hey everyone! In this tutorial we’re gonna show you how you can create a simple logo reveal using the Textured Polygon option in Trapcode Particular.

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    Tutorial

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    Step 1

    I create composition by clicking Menu-> Composition->New Composition. Make it 1280*720 square pixels 10 seconds long, name it as ‘Main’.

    

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    Step 2

    Create new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. Change the color to Black. Make it comp size (1280*720) and name it as ‘BG’.

    

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    Step 3

    Let’s add the Ramp effect (Effect->Generate->Ramp) and set the start color to #262929 and the end color to #000000 + change the Ramp Shape to Radial Ramp.

    

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    Step 4

    Let’s create a new composition for the custom particles by clicking Menu-> Composition->New Composition. Make it 288×288 square pixels 6 seconds long, name it as ‘Icons’.

    

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    Step 5

    We need to import the icons and drag and drop them into this composition.You can select them and right click on the layers and select Transform->Fit to Comp to resize the icons.When you done you should sequence the layers. You can do it manualy as I did or you can select all off the layers and then right click on them and Keyframe assistant-> Sequence layer.In my case this method didn’t work unfortunately.By the way I didn’t use all of them I just select some common stuff, but you can use only one if you like.

    

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    Step 6

    Now let’s go back to the main composition and drag and drop the Icons composition and turn it off.

    

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    Step 7

    Create new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. Change the color to Black . Make it comp size (1280*720) and name it as ‘Trapcode Particular’.

    

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    Step 8

    Before we’re add particular to the particular layer we need to create a new Light(Layer->New->Light). Change the Light Type to point and change the color to #F7F3E5

    

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    Step 9

    Before we move on we have to create a new camera as well so go to Layer-New->Camera.

    

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    Step 10

    Now select the Trapcode particular layer and apply particular to it (Effect-Trapcode->Particular).In particular under the Emitter tab after you change the following properties then we have to create a simple from left to right accros the screen animation.So let’s go to the first frame and click on the a position xy and z stopwatch to add a keyframe.Go forward 5 seconds and change the Position XY -222 propertie to 1940.

    

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    Step 11

    Under the particle section I changed the following properties. This part is a little bit optional because you can use your own settings for example you can mess around with the Rotation properties to get a different result.

    

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    Step 12

    Under the Shading properties(Particular 2.0 feature) we can achive a much more reallistic looking 3D look with lights.You can skip this part if you are using an earlier version+ you don’t need to create a new light in this case.

    

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    Step 13

    Under the Physics properties I jus add a little Gravity. Of course you can still playing around with the properties if you want a different look.

    

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    Step 14

    We have to inport the aetuts+ logo and set the following porperties under the Material Options.

    

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    Step 15

    Don’t forget to turn on the 3D layer switch.

    

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    Step 16

    We have to animate the opacity of the aetuts logo so I just select it hit the "t" key to reveal the opacity properties and I just made a new keyframe and changed the opacity to 0 then moved forward few frames and changed it to 100.Because the logo is stayed behind the moving particles this will hide the transition.You can create a much more difficult logo transition if you want. Maybe you can duplicate the particular layer and add a fill effect with a white color and use this layer as a matte to reveal the logo but I think this is a simple quick and elegant way.

    

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    Step 17

    In this step I just animated the Focus distance to achieve a dynamic depth of field look.

    

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    Step 18

    I skipped this trick in my final video but you can animate the position of the light so you can achive much more dramatic looking animations.For example select the position properties and alt+ left click on the stopwathc and add a wiggle expression.

    

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    Step 19

    If you have Optical Flares then you can extend this idea. You can use the animated or static light to create a flying orb animation which is illuminating the moving particle wave or something like that. It’s up to you!

    

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    Conclusion

    So that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If you get stuck or do you have a tutorial request or a simple question then you can contact with me email: sir.tibor.miklos@gmail.com. If you like my tutorials and if you want to support my work then you can follow me on youtube . Thanks a lot for your attention : ) .