a collection of all our creations and experimentsThis is our new blog concerning the wide spread of graphic artistry: design, programming, 3D & post-production, and (maybe not as colorful as the others, but quite as important) the personal workflow. Read the rest of this entry »
featured articles
Create a blizzard scene out of a summer photo with these bad ass techniques!
Read more »
Free Ink Chamber Footage!
Read more »
Create an ink and paper effect like in Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Read more »
07.01.2012
Giveaway: Waterlook
Preset for After Effects
30.12.2011
Giveaway: Expression-Driven
Captions in AE
As abiding readers you might have noticed that we’re all about reducing repetitive tasks to a minimum. While we’re still working on a solution to administer coffee intravenously, we put together expressions to facilitate the creation of captions inside After Effects.
The concept is easy: you create markers where you want a fade-in or fade-out of the caption. Every odd marker determines a fade-in and will hold a comment with the caption’s text, and every even marker will create a fade-out. Read the rest of this entry »
03.12.2011
Giveaway: Grungy Elements
Old, grungy elements for matte-paintings, texture plates, and whatnot.
Grab them here.
11.11.2011
For-Each Script for Nuke
Similar to the forEach node in Houdini, our Python script for Nuke makes it possible to apply a set of nodes to an unlimited number of inputs, e.g. Read nodes.
The ForEach node acts as group containing the actions to be repeated and comes with controls to change visual and functional settings. Read the rest of this entry »
26.10.2011
Download Area
We just finished our new download area, where you can find a list of our creations and experiments. Under the featured article box on your right-hand side there sits a button waiting to be clicked. Do it.
Jake & Dan
31.08.2011
Giveaway: Ink Chamber Footage
After a lot of response to the ink drop footage we released last year (read here), we dug out our ink bottle and shot new hi-res footage. Here is a preview:
30.06.2011
Delaunay Image Triangulation Brush
for Illustrator with Scriptographer
Our plagiarized script from Jonathan Puckey’s artwork uses Delaunay Triangulation to create triangulated imagery. Alike the process demonstrated on Puckey’s site, this Scriptographer brush for Adobe Illustrator enables you to sample colors from an underlying image and transfer them to the corners of newly created Delaunay triangles.
As courtesy to Jonathan Puckey, the original inventor of Delaunay triangulated imagery in Illustrator with Scriptographer, the JD Delaunay Image Triangulation brush is no longer available for public download. As sorry as we are (and we are!) to discontinue the free distribution, we still offer (some only open to donators) similar scripts in our download area.
Jake & Dan
30.05.2011
CurveOffset SOP Asset for Houdini
This OTL for Side Effects Houdini works similar to the Extrude node: it takes a NURBS- or poly-curve as input and offsets it to get either a growing or shrinking effect. The big difference to extruding with a thickness offset is that it uses elimination of intersections rather than position-clamping.
This can come in handy when creating thick walls on narrow buildings or when working with organic shapes. Read the rest of this entry »
02.05.2011
Smart Baker for After Effects
When using expressions to drive our animations in After Effects, we often need to go back to hand-animation. There are all kinds of ways to switch from expressions back to keyframe animations using parenting, scripts and so forth, but mostly you’ll end up baking the expressions into keyframes. Unfortunately, AE bakes the values every single frame – resulting in a vast quantity of keyframes, even when the layer in question didn’t move. To make the baking process more useful, we wrote a little script called JD Smart Baker, to detect straight linear interpolation and motionless gaps – but let the image speak for itself:
.
the script here and put it in your Support Files/Scripts/
ScriptUI Panels folder
The Detection threshold is a value between 0 and 15 relating to the gap and linear interpolation detection as follows:
rounded keyframevalue = keyframevalue / (10 ^ (10 – threshold))
Jake & Dan
10.04.2011
Spices Poster
13.03.2011
Run PHP functions via GET
Working on a side-project we needed PHP functions to be called using the URL query – or, technically speaking, the first key of the $_GET variable.
Simply put, we created a tiny script that would look for a function named after your request within script and run it. Example:
http://www.creatogether.com/example_exec.php?askSomeone(“jake”)
would run the function askSomeone of example_exec.php.
// EDIT: We changed the script to support parentheses (, ) and equal signs = inside the call
. the script!
Read the rest of this entry »
27.02.2011
2.5D Summer-to-Winter
Mattepainting
Some of you might remember our Summer to Winter tutorial. We dusted off the files and turned it from a still frame into a Matte-Painting with subtle camera-movement. This quick walkthrough shall give you an overview of how we did it.
27.11.2010
5 Best iPhone Apps
for the VFX Set
We ultimately entered the era in which mobile phones come close to being capable of even making your breakfast. Hence we’d like to take the time to present to you five apps we believe will relieve a Visual Effect artist’s equipment case from a few pounds.
17.11.2010
Giveaway: AE Comp-Fan
Template for VFX Demo Reels
In their demo reels, compositors and matte-painters basically have to demonstrate their ability to build up different layers to create the illusion of a realistic environment, depth and perspective. The easiest way to do this is what we call a Comp-Fan or “Sliced Breakdown”. We are giving away the template we’ve created in After Effects for that purpose. Here is what it looks like:
20.10.2010
Automated Folder Structures for PC
jdStructure for the PC is here! The application watches your designated BIN folder for specific file extensions to automatically sort them accordingly into their proper directories. Read the rest of this entry »
10.10.2010
Automated Folder Structures for OS X
Everyone who has been working on larger projects knows how essential a tidy folder structure is. But even with a good system files often get lost in the hustle of last-second tasks or fast paced projects. To spare the time of sorting the files every single time we looked for a way to automate the process and came up with an easy-to-customize solution. Looking for specific file types the script takes files from a specified BIN folder and moves them to their designated subfolder. Read the rest of this entry »