Aetuts+

Aetuts+ Workshop #1 – “Chasing The Monster”

Adam Everett Miller — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:00:05 +0000

We’re going to start a new weekly community project where we’ll be posting a video created by one of our wonderful readers, then ask you all to offer constructive feedback on the work. It’s a great way to learn more about video, express your viewpoint, and have your own content critiqued!

Quick Ground Rules

Play nice! We’ve deliberately chosen videos that aren’t perfect, so please be constructive with any criticism.
Feel free to offer any type of advice – movement, lighting, color, pacing, etc.
You can also link to videos that you feel offer a great example of this type of content done exceptionally well.

Without further ado, here is this week’s candidate for critique!

“Chasing The Monster”

Story Behind the Project

Last summer I began working with brand manager Kevin Kaiser in developing various media concepts for one of his clients, NYT bestseller Ted Dekker. As it turned out, Ted was hosting an exclusive writer’s conference in August called “The Ragged Edge”, where he and four other authors would discuss the down and dirty details about writing full time.

It was a week before the conference, and their plans for some media content had fallen through. They needed something fast. Here’s the brief I received:

This video is for a morning session of The Ragged Edge titled “Chasing the Monster: Finding the Story Within”…… Overall aesthetic: I would like the images to look like a grungy, scratched film reel that’s playing on the screen. Key texts appear rhythmically on the hard beats of the soundtrack.

Kevin then listed out the words you see at the beginning “Pain, peace, hope, love, hate…”; he wanted a mix of emotive images as well as other words such as “bleeding, seeking, diving, deeper”. He told me to use this as a basic outline, but to feel free and experiment as needed.

I got all this on a Friday… and it would be shown the Friday following. I would be leaving for a short trip that Wednesday morning, so I knew I had to get rough cut in on Monday night so that I’d have time for revisions on Tuesday. It would be close.

I had done the whole tutorial thing, and knew *how* to make a graphics video, but had never actually done it.

To make it even more interesting, I had never made a motion graphics piece before – I’m a film production student. I had done the whole tutorial thing, and knew *how* to make a graphics video, but had never actually done it. Trial by fire had been the motto of my artistic life so far, so I just put my head down and did the work over one crazy weekend.

Thankfully Kevin had sent along a perfect piece of music to accompany the visuals; I brought it into Premiere and placed markers at all the key beats. I saved it as a premiere project, then imported that into After Effects. This gave me a composition, audio track, and beat markers all in one – a very time saving maneuver, as I hate working with audio in AE.

Then I went through the whole project, figuring out which words would appear at which beats, and began matching images to said words (which was fun but difficult)…. figuring out the how the whole thing would flow.

I sent my first version in on Monday night, and Kevin forwarded it to Dekker who responded with an enthusiastic “PERFECT!”

Please let us know what you think in the comments – how would you have approached this project or done things differently?

The most constructive and helpful comments will be featured on the site. Interested in submitting your own video? You can do so here!

3D Transforming Text With ShapeShifter AE

VinhSon Nguyen — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:33 +0000

In this tutorial, we will be taking a look at how to build this 3D transforming text animation using Mettle’s ShapeShifter AE plug-in. We will also be enhancing some of the elements using 3rd party plug-ins such as Trapcode Shine (CC Light Burst alternative), Frischluft’s Out of Focus (Lens Blur alternative), and RE:Vision RSMB (CC Force Motion Blur alternative).

We will first take a look at how to setup the base animation, work with lights and setup a simple camera rig, then finish it off with some minor enhancements and color correction.

For letterboxing, you can use Video Copilot’s Aspect Ratio preset

If you guys have any further questions, leave comments down below and I’ll be sure to get to them.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 332 MB

Matchmove A Bloody Severed Leg – Tutsplus Premium

James Whiffin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:00:32 +0000

In today’s tutorial we’ll matchmove the footage and use basic 3D geometry to create a severed leg, which can then be used as a matte to remove the original leg. The camera data can also be used to create a floor plane with some ground texture to clean up the original leg shadow. This plane will also be used to add ambient occlusion and fake blood. Be it a war zone or a zombie apocalypse, you never know when you might need to take off a leg.

Get the Full Tutorial!

Didn’t hear about Ae Premium? It’s an additional, in-depth tutorial, published each week just for our Premium subscribers (on top of all our regular free content!)

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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. 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!

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!

Create An Awesome Array Of Shattering Strings

Kevin Snyder — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00:03 +0000

We’ll be starting in Cinema 4d to create text fragments and use XPresso to export the Mograph positional data to After Effects. From there, we’ll jump over into After Effects and use expressions to connect 3d nulls to 2d data points… We’ll also be using a macro in Microsoft Word to edit multiple lines of expressions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Cinema 4d user or strictly an After Effects user, today’s tutorial should be something helpful for everyone!

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 77.3 MB

Living in “Toytown” – Recreating The Tilt-Shift Effect in AE

Richard Bird — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:38 +0000

Until recently this effect has been created in-camera using specialized lenses. In this tutorial, Richard Bird gives an overview of how the “Tilt-Shift Effect” can be quickly recreated in post-production without the use of 3rd party plug-ins by remapping the depth of field, use of simple color correction and altering the frame rate.

September of 2009

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .flv

File size: 74 MB

Funky Animations With CC Circle And Radio Waves

Tibor Miklos — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Hello everyone! In this tutorial we’re gonna show you how you can create 3 awesome circle animations with a few simple steps and default plug-ins such as CC Circle and Radio Waves.

Step 1

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Circles”, change the resolution to 200×200 and set the duration to 7 seconds.

Step 2

We don’t need a background solid so we can skip that part and click on the Toggle Transparency Grid button.

Step 3

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 200×200 and name it “Circle”.

Step 4

With the “Circle” solid layer selected, go to Effect->Generate->Circle. Under the effect properties we have to set the color to #302B2F and click on the Radius stopwatch to add a new keyframe. Move forward 2 seconds and change the Radius property to 93.

Step 5

Let’s duplicate the “Circle” solid layers, offset them and change the circle effect colors on each layer.

Step 6

Let’s duplicate the top “Circle” layer once again. Offset it and right click on it and go to Time-Reverse Layer or you can use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+alt+R). Now we have a looped circle animation. We can use this animation in Trapcode Particular as a custom particle for example, but because in this tutorial we’re dealing with default plug-ins, I will use Foam.

Step 7

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Abstract circles”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 7 seconds.

Step 8

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “BG”.

Step 9

With the “BG” layer selected, let’s go to Effect->Generate->Ramp. Change the Start Color to #9BB58F and the End color to #FFA601 and set the Ramp shape to Radial Ramp.

Step 10

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “Foam”.

Step 11

With the “Foam” layer selected go to Effect->Simulation->Foam. Before we move, on let’s drop the “Circles” composition inside of this composition and turn it off. In “Foam” I didn’t change too much. I changed the Bubble Texture Layer to the “Circles” composition and changed the view option to rendered and that’s it.

Step 12

Finaly I just add this crunched paper image and changed it to multiply. It’s an optional step but it just gives a little more depth to the animation.

Step 13

Now you should see something similar to this… Let’s go to the 2nd animation : ).

Step 14

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Radio waves fun”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 10 seconds.

Step 15

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “BG”.

Step 16

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “Radio waves”.

Step 17

Go to Effect->Generate->Radio Waves and set the following properties. I used #FA0047 as the stroke color.

Step 18

Go to Effect->Time->Echo and set the following properties.

Step 19

Here’s what you should see now…. Now, let’s finish the 3rd and final animation.

Step 20

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Circle text Animation”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 12 seconds.

Step 21

The method is almost exactly the same as what we did before. The only difference is that now we have to choose different solid layer colors.

Step 22

With the “Circle 1″ solid layer selected go to Effect->Generate-> Circle and apply it. We need to animate the radius just like we did before, but in this case I need to change the Blending mode to Stencil Alpha.

Step 23

Let’s duplicate the Green solid layer couple times, change the colors on every duplicated layer and offset them.

Step 24

Finally, I just put a text layer on top of all the duplicated layers.

Step 25

Let’s select the Ellipse Tool to create a circular mask on the text. Hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift while dragging to create a perfect circle mask.

Step 26

Let’s change the mask to Add mode and we’ll need to animate the Mask Path as well.

Step 27

I am just trying to create a simple growing circular mask path animation as you can see here. You can add the previous paper texture to the top and change the blending mode to Multiply to create a more dramatic or realistic look and here’s an another trick that I used..

Step 28

We can add a simple point light and then turn the 3D layer option on for all of the duplicated solid layers.

Conclusion

So this is it! I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and learned some new things. Try your own variations or customize the free project file that you can download at the top. My name is Tibor Miklos, thanks a lot for your attention and I’ll see ya next time! If you have any questions or just get stuck, just shoot me an e-mail. sir.tibor.miklos@gmail.com

Final Image

A Look At Hollywood’s Biggest VFX – Part 2

Daniel Reinoso — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:45 +0000

This is a brief introduction to some of the most unbelievable Visual Effects in Hollywood’s biggest movies. This “Part 2” will describe the making of movies: King Kong, Harry Potter, X-Men First Class and Pirates of the Caribbean.

King Kong (2005)

VFX Team

Development of the Visual Effects

Working with proxies

For this movie, the VFX team of Weta Digital had to improve their working system with regards to hardware, networking and infrastructure. Now, they have a big philosophical change in their pipeline: so they are more geared toward pulling information together at render time rather than carrying it through individual scenes. This means that technical directors now use low resolution proxies rather than high detailed geometry whether they’re looking for complex scenes or complex characters..

With a creature like Kong, you don’t want to open a scene and have all of the fur in it, and you can’t open up a scene with all of New York in it – Joe Letteri

Source: http://www.universalstudiosentertainment.com/king-kong/

Development of new tools

The team had to create new tools that could satisfy their needs, so they created a new fur simulation software and new fur shaders to animate Kong’s five million hairs when he moves, ruffle his hair on the plane’s wing, manage the collision with other objects and allow it to become dirty. The crew also wrote a fluid dynamic’s solver, which they use to create the ocean for Kong’s voyage to New York.

You really need your own software so in the case of something not looking right, you are able to open it up and figure out what’s going on – Joe Letteri

Source: http://tiempodelarevelacion.blogspot.com/2011/02/los-huevos-de-king-kong.html

Creating Kong

Of course, one of the biggest challenges in the film was the creation of its star. The modelers created him and the doubles which he interacts with in Maya with the help of Mudbox. To breathe life into Kong, rather than rely solely on keyframe animation for the CG gorilla, the crew motion captured the actor who gave life to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Andy Serkis. New software made it possible for animators to drive the CG gorilla with either the mocap data or key frame animation, and a new system interpreted Serkis’s facial expressions before mapping data onto the 3D model.

The software looks at the dots on Andy’s face, figures out what his expression says that he’s sad, for example and then applies that to Kong. – Joe Letteri

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andy_Serkis_-_King_Kong.jpg

VFX Breakdown Video

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

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (2010)

VFX Team

Development of the Visual Effects

CG Set Design

For many of the scenes in these movies, partial sets and then digital sets were created. This film wanted to show more destruction shots and extensive battle sequences so they decided not to use any more miniatures because with CG Imagery they were able to create more rigid body dynamics and destruction work. The castle in the earlier movies was actually a miniature and so they had rebuilt the entire castle and were able to handle new concepts and ideas. They also rebuilt the set for Godric’s Hallow in CG and almost the entire scene is full of CG environments and CG snow.

Multiple Harrys

For this scene the actors were shot on the set acting out the transformation, sometimes adjusting their height to be the same as Harry. A second set of plates involved Harry acting out every character and he had to dress like all of the other actors. All of these actors except for Harry were shot only for their facial performance. To capture the facial expressions volumetrically they used The Mova Countour Capture rig that is designed to hold 28 cameras around the actors. A phosphorescent make-up was applied to the actors which was then picked up by a series of cameras and produced a tracked surface and mesh. The data was then processed at MPC in conjunction with a facial rig built for each actor and finally, it was animated building skulls inside the heads to keep the facial mechanics of each character as realistic as possible.

Source: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_the_Seven_Potters

Flight Attack

The flight attack takes place in a phrenetic sequence flying over London to escape the Death Eaters. MPC created GG thestrals “a winged horse with a skeletal body”, extended Privet Drive’s set and combined the green screen riders with the CG thestrals and digital doubles. To create the clouds, they used Maya Fluids and then joined the far and near clouds, using different techniques to render it. The spells were created to look like a lightning inside the cloud and also used were some lens flares. The duel between Voldemort and Harry when their wands get connected and then Voldemort’s wand broke up was created using full CG Smoke and using both a digital double and the real actor.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mObK5XD8udk

VFX Breakdown Video

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

X-Men First Class (2011)

VFX Team

Development of the Visual Effects

Making of the Mutants Effects

The VFX team designed the way mutants exhibited their powers as if there were no film history to deal with. They began with a range of ideas for each mutant and started considering how they related to the mutants in previous films, both visually and in the X-Men comic world. Where there was a character that had already been seen before like Mystique, they tried to relate the effects to earlier visuals. Where there was a family tie in comic book genealogy they tried to relate their characters power to a family similarity, such as the fact that Havok is Cyclop’s brother. In some cases the team didn’t use any real visual reference so they simply chose the visual that they liked the best.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrbHykKUfTM

Creating the Diamond Body

The team started by creating simple still illustrations of how Emma Frost’s diamond body would look. The character went through multiple reviews until the team found a look that worked. They then translated those still images into an animation. To get the movement as precise as possible they rotoscoped, frame by frame, the actress’s performance. Finally, VFX artists digitally removed her from the frame and put the animated one in her place. To really look like a diamond, Frost needed to sparkle, so they had a lot of work to make sure she refracted and reflected light correctly. They finally managed to get the right look by taking pictures of a faceted cubic zirconium and using them as a reference.

She had to be both crystal and fluid, because she had to move when she was in her diamond form – John Dykstra

Source: http://all-things-x.blogspot.com/2011/07/vfx-making-of-x-men-first-class.html

Making of Azazel

Azazel is a devilish-looking mutant who is able to transport between dimensions. For its making, the VFX team began with the development of the digital fire and smoke simulation that appears when he teleports. They roto-mated Azazel, so whatever movement he was doing at the time would then in turn affect the smoke simulation. Then, they also had to create the tail, which was built and animated in CG and some transparency and textures were added in for a real-world feel.

We went through a lot of development of trying to create a digital fire and smoke sim because he was more closely aligned with the devil – Matt Johnson

Source: http://bigother.com/2011/07/11/a-d-jeremy-talk-about-movies-x-men-first-class/azazel-with-tail-x-men-first-class/

VFX Breakdown Video

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

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s Ends (2007)

VFX Team

Development of the Visual Effects

Creating Davy Jones and his Crew

Davy Jones and seventeen of his transmogrified crew were digital creations that had to match seamlessly with the real actors. The team used ZBrush for the creation of the 3D models for the characters. For the animation the team used motion capture but not in traditional methods; instead of recording performances in a mo-cap studio and then inserting the CGI character into a blank space on the plates post-production, they decided to shoot the actors and record their movement on the same plate, and then replace them digitally with the CGI character. The team used Pixar’s RenderMan for the renders, but they were taking so long that they decided to discuss with Pixar how to implement a new technique inside their software. This way, renders that were taking twelve or thirteen hours went down by to just three or four hours and they started to produce the same or even better results in a quarter of the time.

Source: http://rgh.cc/displayimagetempo.php?pos=-813

Creating a Maelstrom

To create this scene, ILM hired Frank Lossaso-Petterson who helped to build the Stanford’s fluid simulation engine, which is an hybrid of a PhysBAM engine and a Zeno interface. It’s something like Maya except that it is more customizable. To create the Maelstrom the team used a technique which consists in simulating it as though it were flat and gravity pointing inward instead of sloping down, and then transforming the surface into the whirlpool shape. This scene required a lot of computational fluid dynamic, huge resolutions and computational power and memory.

Source: http://pirates.wikia.com/wiki/File:Calypsosmaelstrom.jpg

Environments and Compositing

This movie has more than 1000 VFX shots including waterfall sequences, icebergs, ship destruction, CG Creatures, and so on. Many of these shots have live action elements combined with CGI, except for the Maelstrom whirlpool which is a total 3D Environment. The ships were live action boats extended and sometimes full CG Ships so they had both live water action and CG water simulations. There is a scene where the ship is descending below the water; for this scene water passes were filmed and tracked and then were combined with CGI elements and the motion captured crew.

My goal is to always start from some live action so we got a grounded reality that we can build from- John Knoll

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWdCRJEkH5I

VFX Breakdown Video

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

Best of Tuts+ in January 2012

David Appleyard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:00:10 +0000

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

HDR: Love it or Leave It?

There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.

Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.

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PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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Venetian Blinds Transition Effect – Tutsplus Premium

David Bode — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:18 +0000

In this tutorial we will be making a network tv style Venetian Blinds Transition Effect. This tutorial includes several expressions used to automate the movement of layers, control dozens of adjustment layers, and control rotation from a gradient layer!

Part 1 explains the concept and builds the bulk of the shapes used to create the effect. We also start to get into using gradients to control the layers. Part 2 finishes the gradient control layers and begins fine tuning the look with motion. Part 3 finishes the tutorial with lights, adjustment layers, expressions, camera animation, and final tweaks.

Once you build the out the project, you can use it for anything just by modifying a few layers. Check it out!

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Aetuts+ Hollywood Movie Title Series – The Three Musketeers

Antonio Cerri — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:45 +0000

This entry is part 24 of 24 in the series Hollywood Movie Titles

Continuing our Aetuts+ Hollywood Movie Title Series, today’s tutorial will explain how to make the The Three Musketeers flying logo. We will make the whole animation within After Effects, but first starting in Photoshop to break down each of the elements into layers to animate. We’ll be using two different particle systems and some custom lens flares to bring this simple animation to life. All for one… and one for all!

Tutorial

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File size: 54.3 MB