a collection of all our creations and experimentsThis little giveaway transforms any matte into photo-realistic water.
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Create a blizzard scene out of a summer photo with these bad ass techniques!
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Free Ink Chamber Footage!
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Create an ink and paper effect like in Sherlock Holmes (2009)
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07.01.2012
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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 »
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 »
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:
30.05.2011
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:
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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
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.
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:
04.09.2010
Giveaway: Vibrance-Gizmo for Nuke
Since Adobe brought the Vibrance adjustment known from Lightroom in Photoshop, we wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. Briefly said it is dropping down the saturation of an image, only addressing the low saturated areas and trying to preserve skin tones.
To have the same ability inside the Foundry’s Nuke, we created this Vibrance Gizmo to plug your images in. Read the rest of this entry »
22.08.2010
Giveaway: 3D Policelight
Today is your lucky day! We are giving away a policelight – as a fully functionable, animated, lightened and textured 3d scene for Cinema 4D.
In our 26 MB package we also enclosed an export of the 3D model in the three most common exchange formats: obj, 3ds and fbx.
If you are using Maya, we recommend importing the FBX and assigning new shaders to the separate parts before adding the light sources.
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We thank our dear friends Peter Palka and Lorens Jankovic for this great contribution!
Jake & Dan
04.08.2010
Freeze Effect Part 4/4:
The Snow and The Ice
It is finally coming to an end: this is the forth part of our “Howto” tutorial going through the steps of creating the effect of a person freezing in an instant. We’ll start with the creation of the ice texture covering up our actor, move on to the transition matte to make the spread of ice grow and end up with the snow particles and the final comping. This is our final result:
In order to get ice moving along with the actor’s body-parts you’ll first have to get yourself a nice looking lockup to bring back into Nuke. Export a still frame from somewhere towards the end and bring it into Photoshop. Read the rest of this entry »
08.07.2010
Freeze Effect Part 3/4:
Integrating The Elements
This is the third part of our freezing tutorial. We talk about integrating our elements in the scene and comping all together in theFoundry’s Nuke. If you haven’t seen it yet – this is our final result:
So far what we have is a virtual backdrop moving along with the keyed footage. Before adding new elements, we have to make sure to color correct and alter our elements (foreground element and backdrop) so they match up beautifully. Let us take you on an adventurous quest when approaching the grand finale of the final freeze effect.
26.05.2010
Freeze Effect Part 2/4:
The Backdrop
Part 2 of our four-part tutorial covers the creation of our background and basic camera projection mapping.
The background we are going to be creating is the one used in our final shot:
To justify the dramatic lighting we were looking for a background where we could easily mix tungsten- and sunlight. Read the rest of this entry »
25.05.2010
Freeze Effect Part 1/4:
Shooting and Keying
This is the first part of our four-part series on how to freeze a person.
Going from pre-production to keying, 3D camera projection to tracking and to finally comping the parts together, we will guide you through the creation of the following effect:
We could dive right into the process of keying in Nuke (the Foundry), but – wait! Stop it! Let’s take some time to talk about the preliminary stuff. The greenscreen footage is the most crucial part, so good planning is everything. Read the rest of this entry »
26.04.2010
Quicktip: Loop Expressions in AE
In this quick-tip we show you how to work with loops inside After Effects. By following our explanation you should be able to replicate the following animation in under 2 minutes.
10.04.2010
Flip-Book Effect in After Effects
During the weekend, we sat over the question of how to fake a good old flip book effect and ended up with quite an interesting solution. See the results of our stresses and strains:
We thank our reader Eduardo for this suggestion – sending us a video he challenged us to find a way to copy this effect. Hence we put our heads together and came up with a pretty easy-to-use solution. Let us guide you through the single steps of the process. Read the rest of this entry »