Tag: plug-ins

  • 3D fire in After Effects

    3D fire in After Effects

    Creating 3D fire in After Effects

    3D Fire in After Effects

    If your budget doesn’t stretch to pricey plug-in filters you can use the native effects to create fantastic 3D fire in After Effects. Read my article in Digital Arts about how to achieve this. The tutorial features a step-by-step guide that’s easy to follow.

    After Effects includes built-in particle filters you can use in your projects. Although they are not as powerful as some of the specialist 3D particle filters (like Trapcode’s amazing Particular plug-in), you can use them to achieve fairly convincing animations of natural phenomena such as fire, smoke, rain and dust.

    All you need is patience and a natural affinity for tweaking sliders. In this tutorial, Angie Taylor shows you how to create fire, smoke effects and 3D rocks, all using After Effects’ built-in 3D particle filters, to create part of the title sequence for animation, Hellwoman, a spoof of the movie Hellboy.

    Visit the Digital Arts website to get free access to this tutorial.

  • Red Giant Sale

    rgsuites

    Red Giant are having their biggest sale ever. Grab a bargain now and get up to 52% off all products for a limited time. Coupon code: Summer40

     

  • Free After Effects Preset Collection

    Free After Effects Preset Collection

    “Wacky Backy” is my free After Effects preset collection for Sapphire V6. It is now freely available to download from Genarts FX Central. These animated backgrounds have a slightly wacky quality and can be used freely in your own creative projects.

    Use them as they come or as a starting point for your own presets – you could try using the Brainstorm tool on properties to come up your own variations – it’s addictive! Subscribers to my video training can watch a movie on Brainstorming in After Effects free here. If you’re not already subscribed, here’s a link to join us. For as little as $12.99 per month you can have free access to all of the training on my website plus all the other training by other authors at video2brain.

    If you’re not already a member of FX Central it’s free and easy to join. Then you can download as many presets as you like. If you want to try out my presets on Sapphire for After Effects you can download a trial version of the software here. Find out more about the amazing software that Genarts has to offer and customer stories here on their website

    These dynamic presets can be used for backgrounds, displacement maps or organic elements in your project.

  • Bargains & “Free Stuff” for Designers

    There are bargains & “free stuff” for designers and VFX artists right now in the Holiday sales.

    I know that may of my readers are students and professionals who are just starting out in their career. Many of you may not be able to afford the full cost of commercial software so these sales give you a chance to make big savings.

    For those who are really finding the financial crisis too much there are also some freebies here! I found this article about some of the free plug-ins for After Effects here at Filmmakeriq.com. It lists many of the free AE plug-ins you can download to make yourself feel like you’re getting a holiday treat! AE Tuts also have a list of free plug-ins here.

    My friends at Artbeats have a massive 50% off all of their HD footage through to December 30th. Some collections are selling for as little as $100 so it’s worth a browse to see if there’s any footage you need to keep your library up to date. Their footage is Royalty Free so once you’ve bought it you are free to use it as many times as you wish.

    If you’ve ever wanted to get up to date on third party plug-ins for After Effects and other software applications, now is the time to “get legal” as there are deals out there that will be hard to beat. Red Giant has a secret “one day sale” which they announced yesterday. Sadly the secret nature of the sale meant I wasn’t aware it was happening in time to include it in a blog till today but there are still 5 hours to go, it runs till 4pm GMT on December 14th. It includes must-have plug-in packs for every motion graphic designer and visual effects artist as well as individual plug-ins from the Magic Bullet Suite, Trapcode Suite and Red Giant’s own great suite of tools.

    Toolfarm are also running a sale right now in tandem with the Red Gaint sale so if you have an account there, or would like to set up an account with the number one reseller of all things After Effects, now is a good time to set up that profile! They also have some freebies for the holidays so it’s definitely worth signing up.

    Digieffects also have a sale on with plug-ins selling for as little as $49 in their winter sale.

    Of course if you want something completely free there’s my “Style Eyes” Collection for Genarts Sapphire which is still available.

    Happy Holidays people! 🙂